Happy Century, The New Yorker. What is keeping you alive?

The irony of David Remnick, the magazine’s 65-year-old editor, is that his ultimate goal is still sharper: not numbers, but a magazine that should always be “noble and humane.”

In a time of rampant misinformation, disinformation and unverified news, good investigative journalism is needed more than ever – and The New Yorker remains one of its trusted – and distinctive – purveyors. (In The New Yorker it’s never “naive”; it’s “naive” with a diaeresis.)

intensive, time-consuming reporting; author’s impression; high art; Comedy and caricature with a dark twist; Literary fiction; and a system of intensive fact-checking that’s often compared to a colonoscopy — the work that goes into creating a weekly magazine is enormous, and forms the subject of a new documentary, The New Yorker at 100.

In it, director Marshall Curry follows Remnick and the editorial team as they bring out the hundredth anniversary issue (it came out in February; the film was shot earlier this year), as if trying to ask the singular question that’s so important to all of us who read: Why is The New Yorker still alive?

After all, the magazine’s digital subscribers (468,100) still lag behind that of magazine giants like The New York Times, and other popular magazines like Newsweek and Life that ceased printing in 2012 and 2000, respectively. It seems like magazine culture, everyone agrees, is dying. And, perhaps, therein lies the New Yorker’s superpower: the ability to reinvent himself again and again, making technology work in his favor. The OTT platform is not a challenger; Instagram is not the enemy of attention.

In the 1990s, British-American editor Tina Brown killed The New Yorker as we knew it, and introduced her new philosophy, making “sexy serious, and serious sexy.” This disruption of old rules still defines much of the work in the magazine. Under his leadership, the magazine hosted attractive parties. Brown eliminated the cumbersome approach to everything at the magazine and hired young writers such as Malcolm Gladwell, Hilton Als, and David Remnick, a young foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, who succeeded him as editor in 1998, when he was 40.

In 2016, under Remnick, The New Yorker began to go digital and built a strong presence that has remained stable and loyal. Remnik seems good-natured but strict and difficult to please.

He said, “I want The New Yorker to be at the highest level of literary, journalistic and artistic achievement, whether it’s John Hershey writing about Hiroshima in 1946, or James Baldwin writing about race in the 1960s, or the investigations of Seymour Hershey and Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer in our time. At the same time, I want the magazine to speak to the spirit of humanity as well as the rigor.” The hardest thing, he said, is “to still stick to your principles while you’re adopting new technologies and making them work for you.” He admits this is easier said than done.

Like any prestigious organization, The New Yorker has had its share of famous writers and editors who shaped journalistic practices in the 20th century.

Founded by Harold Ross during New York’s Jazz Age, the idea was to create a fizzy humor magazine for “Manhattan sophisticates”. As a team, they had under-employed writers and humorists who found creative outlet over liquid lunches. They published cartoons about society and culture and created a mascot, Eustace Tilly, who mocked the magazine’s own sophisticated style. American critic and author Louis Menand, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his book The Metaphysical Club, once wrote, “The New Yorker began as a busy book of gossip, cartoons, and asides.”

Over time, it became much more interesting and successful. It included more well-written profiles, non-fiction long-form articles, and genre-defining pieces that re-established journalism in post-war society.

For example, a February 29, 1936 profile of Adolf Hitler by Janet Flanner began this way: “Dictator of a nation devoted to sumptuous sausages, cigars, beer, and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, a non-drinker, a non-smoker, and a celibate.”

Physicist Albert Einstein once requested a reprint of 1,000 copies of the August 31, 1946 edition, to be sent to leading scientists of the time. Here’s why: He wanted more people to read John Hersey’s 30,000-word opus, titled “Hiroshima: I – A Noiseless Flash,” which was about six men who were on the ground the day the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan.

The note written in the preface to the edition:

“To our readers:

This week the New Yorker devoted its entire editorial space to an article on the almost total destruction of a city by an atomic bomb and what happened to the people of that city. This is done in the belief that very few of us have yet understood the incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that it may take time for everyone to consider the terrible effects of its use.

– Editor.”

Hersey visited Japan after the bombing, at a time when the US government banned publishing photographs showing civilian suffering. No doubt, this piece changed the way many people viewed nuclear weapons.

In 1958, the magazine published “Silent Spring”, written in three parts by biologist and author Rachel Carson, about the toxicity of DDT, a common disinfectant in use at the time. Carson was attacked by powerful chemical companies. He had to defend his work before the US Congress and the press, and his work is instrumental in giving birth to the modern environmental movement. The piece also created a genre in its own right, turning science into literature – a genre that for many years included well-known practitioners including Dr. Atul Gawande (whose New Yorker articles on expensive care informed former US President Barack Obama’s push for the Affordable Care Act).

By 2016, Remnick faced a major challenge: reimagining The New Yorker for a digital-first world. On its 90th birthday, the magazine got its own weekly online radio show, produced in conjunction with WNYC. Shortly thereafter, the first installment of the new Amazon Prime TV series, The New Yorker Presents, was released. The anthology was a success, bringing the magazine’s pages and personalities to life across six half-hour episodes. A story titled “A Valuable Reputation” (2014) by author Rachel Aviv took the video team to the heart of South Carolina, the childhood home of activist-biologist Tyrone Hayes, where Hayes, as a child, was obsessed with frogs and other amphibians and reptiles. Hayes, who studied the effects of the herbicide atrazine and concluded that it altered the reproductive organs of frogs, drew the ire and response of the company that made atrazine. In another story, comedian and actor John Turturro played “Last Session”, in which a comic attempts to end his sessions with his therapist of 20 years.

Remnick said, “The New Yorker was, for decades, a brilliant weekly. And it took us time to figure out how, one at a time, to continue to do pieces that required a lot of time, but also add a sense of metabolism to more daily offerings into the picture, whether it was about politics or the arts.”

“Harold Ross’s original idea for the magazine remains fantastical, doesn’t it? And yet it works as well as it evolves. Print will last as long as readers, or some readers, want it that way, but we’re a digital operation with audio and video as well.”

After introducing digital products and hiring teams dedicated to them, Remnick was quoted in the British daily Independent: “We do small things online, we do small things in print, but we’re also publishing 6,000 to 15,000-word pieces every single week. When I first started going to meetings with Web people (and I was usually invited as a mainstream-media stegosaurus), the early Web’s One of the Christian beliefs was that no one was going to read anything of any length. And I think our young readers are coming to us to read those pieces.

The new documentary just made available on Netflix ignores the economic adversities that the magazine faces, and instead focuses solely on the characters who populate its newsroom.

“They’re an unusual group – brilliant, funny, quirky, creative. I was nervous when I started the film because writing a magazine isn’t necessarily cinematic. But I was so happy that we were able to find stories and characters that were really popular,” said Curry.

Writers Nick Paumgarten (Talk of the Town), Kelefa Sanneh (Music), John Lee Anderson (War & Conflict), film critic Richard Brody, art critic Hilton Als, contributing writers Ronan Farrow (Power) and Dhruv Khullar (Science, Medicine & Health) describe their work: “I smell it, taste it, feel it,” says Anderson, one of the magazine’s strongest war correspondents ever. And convey it to the reader.”

Farrow, whose investigative reporting on powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein exposed decades of sexual-abuse allegations, sparked the #MeToo movement and earned her a Pulitzer Prize, is shown hard at work with sources for a follow-up to her 2023 article, “Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule” (how the US government came to trust the tech billionaire and then struggled to rein it in) in the magazine. He says, “Right now, in the current political climate, there is a lack of respect for press freedom. And a willingness to attack journalists for reporting.”

We also see old-timer Bruce Dyons, the magazine’s office manager for 46 years (who cheerfully directs the camera toward an immaculately preserved Buick typewriter used by some of its earliest writers).

Curry’s camera captures 30-year-old arts editor Francois Mouly who shows us why a piece of art in a magazine speaks to the moment and is also timeless. We see staff cartoonist Rose Chast sitting in her apartment, showing how she translates darkness into funny, or why she draws in the first place: “To make herself feel less alone.”

Remnick is front and center with his writers and artists. The New Yorker 100 zooms in on Remnick’s personal history, the author of books ranging from the post-communist history of Russia to the life of boxer Muhammad Ali. He describes his brushes with “incredible strokes of luck and incredible strokes of bad luck”, looking longingly across the Hudson to New York while describing his childhood in New Jersey, living with parents with premature neurological disorders, and then living with their “profoundly autistic” daughter. He answers a question from me about his experience with illness and disability around him: “I hope it’s made me more empathetic, but that’s for others to decide.”