FROM THE OUTSIDE | A tribute to The New Yorker

Por

José Carreño Figueras

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Publicado: 17/2/2025 · 4:08 p.m. MX | Actualizado: 17/2/2025 · 4:08 p.m. MX

Many people consider The New Yorker, known as the best magazine in the world, to have celebrated its hundredth anniversary on Monday. As usual, it presented a blend of irony, liberalism, and imagination on its iconic cover, or more accurately, its iconic covers.

Originally created as a humorous parody of the solemnity of the century-old weekly Time, The New Yorker officially became “serious” during World War II.

But by then, it already had a reputation for its solid command of language, formidable editors, liberalism, and depth of reporting, literature, and cultural criticism, which made it an elite magazine without abandoning its openness.

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In that sense, it is represented by its cartoon mascot, a “dandy” wearing a top hat and monocle, who has been named from the start as “Eustace Tilley.”

Its topics have ranged from a concert by Los Tigres del Norte in New York’s Central Park, which led to a deeper examination of Mexican culture’s impact, to the Mona Lisa’s visit to the United States in the early 1960s or the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001.

However, it also led to the television series that became the Addams Family movie, based on the cartoons by Charles Addams. At one point, it published stories or narratives that later transformed into novels and films such as In Cold Blood by Truman Capote; Boys Don’t Cry by Annie Proulx; Brokeback Mountain (Secreto en la Montaña); The Hours; The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber; and many others.

It is a publication with over a million copies in circulation and, since 2010, employs a dozen fact-checkers, although it has been doing so since 1940.

The names of writers involved, whether as editors, occasional contributors, or regulars, would delight any 20th-century American literature professor.

John Updike, Roald Dahl, Vladimir Nabokov, Hannah Arendt, Ken Auletta, Ray Bradbury, Italo Calvino, Truman Capote, Edna Ferber, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, John Le Carré, Ursula K. Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, V.S. Naipaul, Dorothy Parker, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Calvin Trillin, John Updike...

Mexican writer Alma Guillermo-Prieto is a member of its team of contributors.

The list is extensive and should also include painters, photographers, and cartoonists who have contributed to the publication’s cultural, social, political, and even iconic character.

“Many of the finest English-language writers of the last century interned with The New Yorker’s editors. The magazine changed American literature forever, and remarkably," Jill Lepore reflected in an essay about those first hundred years.

American journalism boasts many icons, and The New Yorker stands out as one of the greatest.

José Carreño Figueras