David Remnick

"I have no plans to leave American Vogue now or in the foreseeable future," said Vogue editor Anna Wintour as she was walking out of the Plaza this morning.

Ms. Wintour was at the Plaza today along with New Yorker editor David Remnick and Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter to participate in a panel discussion sponsored by the Newhouse School of Communication and The New Yorker.

Rumors have been circulating for weeks that Ms. Wintour was coming close to giving up her editor's chair. Earlier this week, Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse dismissed reports was meeting in France with French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld about her replacing Ms. Wintour. "This is the silliest rumor I ever heard," he said. Ms. Wintour, when offered the chance to dismiss the rumor on November 21st, only fueled further speculation when she told a reporter to go away.  read more »

Lyrics: 1964-2008
By Paul Simon
Simon & Schuster, 408 pages, $35

"It was a slow day and the sun was beating on the soldiers by the side of the road. There was a bright light, a shattering of shopwindows; the bomb in the baby carriage was wired to the radio.”

These are the opening lines, the breathtaking opening image, of Graceland, Paul Simon’s biggest-selling solo album. Listening to them stream effortlessly against the song’s insistent bop, it’s easy to lose sight of the bloody, terrorized scene they depict. But read it on the page, in silence, as Lyrics: 1964-2008 permits you to do, and the extent of Mr.  read more »

In his latest 37-second Media Web Minute (are these things getting shorter?), MarketWatch's Jon Friedman turns his attention to Condé Nast's business magazine, Portfolio, which regular readers of Media Mob may know has been having a tough few weeks.

Ever the optimist, Mr. Friedman says, "You know what? It's still a good magazine and it can survive." (This comes via Jim Romenesko.)

How? According to Mr. Friedman (spoiler alert!), "It needs one thing especially: A killer cover that people can talk about at the water coolers." (Laid off workers have water coolers?)

In his accompanying column, he writes:

When Portfolio was launched last year, it was promoted with the hoopla of a major motion picture.  read more »

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John Koblin looks at editors who moonlight as writers, and talks to The New Yorker's David Remnick who says, "As much as I love editing, reporting and writing is a way for me to get out of the house a little bit, metaphorically... Otherwise, it’s just the apartment and the office." Plus: As Economy Quakes, Home Mags Teeter.

Felix Gillette sifts through some recently released Rather v. CBS documents and unearths some interesting nuggets. Plus: Broke as A Peacock!

Leon Neyfakh reports on the Norman Mailer Estate's uneven relationships with Andrew Wylie and Random House. Plus: The Remaking of Ryan Lizza's Big Campaign Book 2008.

Plus: Rahm Poked Me!... Penny Arcade... Raging Belle.

In this week’s giddily Obama-centric edition of The New Yorker—you had the illuminated O in “Yorker”; the “ELECTION SPECIAL” tab on the outside cover flap; and more than 35,000 words inside about the election—the longest story in the magazine was assigned to none other than the magazine’s editor, David Remnick. His 12,000-word opus on race and politics included dispatches from two different trips to Chicago and one to New Orleans.

It was filed in the magazine under: “A Reporter at Large.”

“As much as I love editing, reporting and writing is a way for me to get out of the house a little bit, metaphorically” said Mr.  read more »

New Yorker Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza finalized an agreement Monday with Vanessa Mobley of the Penguin Press to write a book about President-elect Barack Obama’s first year in office. Mr. Lizza’s contract, worth a sum in the mid-six-figures, was negotiated by his D.C.-based literary agent, Gail Ross. It is, to date, his second book deal, and everyone involved is hoping it goes better than the first one, which he cancelled during the summer of 2007 to focus on his day job.

The way he tells it, Mr. Lizza had a contract sitting in his drawer waiting to be signed when a phone call from David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, moved him to tear it up.  read more »

Jeffrey Frank, a senior editor at the New Yorker whose stable of writers includes the likes of Ryan Lizza, Nick Lemann and the magazine's own editor David Remnick (he edited this week's 12,000 word piece on race and Obama), is leaving the magazine at the end of the year to pursue a book.

"It was agonizing to make a decision like this," he told Media Mob in a phone interview. "I'm writing a non-fiction project and you can’t be a full-time editor and write a book at the same time. I gotta travel, research, and do interviews."

Mr. Frank wouldn't tell us what the project would be, but he said it would involve lots of traveling. Mr. Frank, whose novels include Bad Publicity and The Columnist, has been at the New Yorker for 13 years.

 

It's not every Sunday that you pick up The New York Times and find Bill Keller's byline all over the paper. And, according to Mr. Keller, there might be a Sunday someday soon when there won't even be a paper for him to write in.

Stealing a page from the David Remnick playbook, Mr. Keller decided to drop his editor's cap and rewind back to the good old days when he was a senior writer pointing his critical eye to far-off places. In yesterday's Times, Mr. Keller's byline appeared on the cover of Week in Review and Book Review sections for articles about the  read more »

A little after 6 p.m. at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Condé Nast president Richard Beckman was sharing a drink—vodka, olives—with Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend. The two were discussing the same thing everyone in the lobby of Jazz at Lincoln Center at the Time Warner Center was talking about: What the National Magazine Awards can do, or not do, for a magazine.  read more »

Freelance Fizzle!  read more »

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In the next five years in Graydon Carter’s world, you’ll walk onto a plane, or a subway, or a soon-to-be-invented mode of transport, and you’ll tuck a little electronic book under your arm. Inside that little book, which will be very expensive at first but soon will cost $150, there’ll be a series of mylar “pages,” and there will be small buttons off to the side, and once you hit one of them, whoooosh, words and photos from Vanity Fair will suddenly appear.  read more »

New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh is leaving the newspaper to become a staff writer at The New Yorker, according to an internal memo distributed yesterday. (Radar had reported a rumor to this effect.)

Also heading over to 4 Times Square is New York Magazine contributing editor and writer Ariel Levy, who has already posted the news to her personal web site.

David Remnick wrote in an email to Media Mob that they are both expected to "write reported pieces."  read more »

Back in August, New Yorker editor David Remnick assigned writer Nick Paumgarten a profile on Eliot Spitzer’s rocky first year as governor. In late September, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter assigned writer David Margolick a profile on Eliot Spitzer’s rocky first year as governor.

Mr. Paumgarten had his first conversation with Mr. Spitzer two weeks after Labor Day—the first of six conversations they’d have by around the time Mr. Margolick first approached the Spitzer camp. In the end, Mr. Margolick would meet with Mr.  read more »

Speaking of New Yorker editors, it sounds like Tina Brown has some suggestions for her sucessor at the magazine. She recently told an Indian paper: "I would probably redesign it again. I might make a shorter front of the book section."

We're sure David Remnick appreciates the advice.

And on that note: Happy Thanksgiving!  read more »

The way David Remnick became editor of The New Yorker is well-documented. A few weeks after Tina Brown had unexpectedly quit, S.I. Newhouse offered Michael Kinsley the job, then quickly withdrew his offer and gave it to Mr. Remnick.

Recently, Mr. Remnick gave a speech at Princeton and offered a tiny anecdote about how he won perhaps the most coveted job in magazine journalsim. The Daily Princetonian reports:

Recalling his rise to his current post, Remnick said he was "anointed by mistake." One weekend, he volunteered to write a memo on how to improve the magazine, and since the editor-in-chief position was empty at the time, his suggestions launched him into the job.

Maybe S.I. Newhouse saw the memo a day after he offered Mr. Kinsley the job?  read more »

Little Miss Sunshine    read more »

The brilliant 'n bold Tony Judt has again put it all together. In the latest London Review of Books, he demonstrates how the liberal intelligentsia have provided crucial support and cover for Bush's misadventures in Iraq and the "war on terror."

In today's America, neo-conservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them.

Judt traces the malady in part to its obvious source, a liberal "blind spot" about Israel.

Historically, liberals have been unsympathetic to 'wars of choice' when undertaken or proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last resort, not a first option. But the United States now has an Israeli-style foreign policy and America's liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it.

Apart from Judt's intellectual leadership, the piece seems to me remarkable on two points. First, it lists New Yorker editor David Remnick in the ranks of those Judt calls "useful idiots." Which is very gutsy for a writer to do. Second, he describes all of Israel's wars with the exception of the Yom Kippur war as wars "of choice." '67? That, too. Even gutsier.

When Tina Brown turned down a five-year deal to stay on as editor of The New Yorker in 1998, she was  read more »

Last month, The New York Sun celebrated its second anniversary.  read more »

During the war in Afghanistan, magazine editors used to covering celebrity gowns and dot-com Nerf fi  read more »

Trixie Flynn, assistant to thehusky-voiced actress Lauren Bacall, was anxious on  read more »

So the other day I get a call from Munich–a guy from the Sunday magazine of the Süddeutsche Zeitu  read more »

The New Gilded Age: 'The New Yorker' Looks at the Culture of Affluence. Edited by David Remnick.  read more »

It was the magazine debut of the year.  read more »

Veteran New York Times political writer R.W. (Johnny) Apple Jr.  read more »

On July 13, Tina Brown, budding intellectual-property mogul, took time from taking meetings to take  read more »