David Remnick

Lunch with the FT: David Remnick

By Trevor Butterworth



“We can’t live without the goose prosciutto,” says David Remnick, with all the avidity of a malnourished gourmand. He is 6ft 1in, approaching 50 and lean for a journalist known to be something of a foodie. He has suggested we meet at Esca, an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, whose name means “bait” and whose allure, it seems, is not just its food. Its fish-obsessed chef David Pasternack was the subject of a profile in 2005 in The New Yorker, the magazine where Remnick will this week celebrate his 10th anniversary as editor.

Goose or death might not seem much of a choice but, after hearing that the meat is merely shaved into a salad, Remnick decides his path to salvation is through the verdura mista , followed by soft shell crab done two ways and an iced tea. I keep faith with the goose and also order black cod along with a glass of Prosecco.

Remnick has much to celebrate after 10 years: circulation of The New Yorker has risen by 32 per cent, to more than 1m copies a week; re-subscription rates, at 85 per cent, are the highest in the industry; and despite the conventional wisdom that young readers don’t have the attention span to do more than blog, text and twitter, the magazine has seen its 18-to-24 readership grow by 24 per cent and its 25-to-34 readership rise 52 per cent. Twenty-four of its 47 National Magazine Awards were awarded under Remnick’s tenure. Perhaps most reassuring of all, The New Yorker’s balance sheet has moved from red to black – although its private ownership precludes him from revealing how much profit it makes.

It is hard to recall how desperate things seemed a decade ago when, after six years as the magazine’s editor, Tina Brown abruptly left to start the ill-fated Talk magazine. If it had infuriated many in Manhattan that Brown, who is British, had been brought in to rebrand The New Yorker and make it more advertiser-friendly, then her departure was also greeted as an augury of doom. Fortune magazine estimated that by 1998 losses at the magazine amounted to $175m, making The New Yorker “one of the greatest money pits in American magazine history”.

Remnick came to the task with no editorial experience. After graduating summa cum laude in Comparative Literature from Princeton in 1981, he joined The Washington Post, working his way from the late-night police beat through the sports desk to the paper’s Moscow bureau in 1988, where history – “dumb luck”, as he puts it – gave him the opportunity to shine and, ultimately, win a Pulitzer in 1994 for Lenin’s Tomb, his book on the fall of the Soviet Union. Even before that accolade, his reputation had made him one of Brown’s first hires after she joined the magazine in 1992.

Greatest hits: Remnick on Tyson
Tyson was everyone’s freak show, a grotesque and guilty entertainment at once violent, unpredictable, haunted, thrilling – but truly dangerous only to himself, to his opponent, and to those who, like Desiree Washington, the beauty queen, ended up testifying in court. People paid to see Mike Tyson, one ex-wife suggested, in the same spirit in which they went to horror movies or rode the roller coaster.

And yet Tyson also provided his audiences and chroniclers with a kind of three-penny Raskolnikov and Bigger Thomas. He asked to be pitied, adored, and despised; above all, he pitied, adored, and despised himself. He reeked authenticity. John McEnroe was outrageous to the extent that the son of a partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison can be outrageous. He never bit Bjorn Borg, never threatened to eat the spawn of Jimmy Connors. Tyson was unschooled in the niceties. He didn’t know his father or who he might have been. His mother, Tyson once said, died in a cardboard box, and he was sure he would end up the same way. As a kid, he was a thug, following old ladies into elevators and beating them up and stealing their groceries. When he became champion, his renunciation of poverty was absolute. During one 33-month period in the mid-90s, he spent $4,477,498 on cars and motorcycles. (Over the years, he owned a red Lamborghini Countach, a Bentley with a bumper sticker reading “I Love Allah” and a Lamborghini “jeep” that had been built for the Saudi king.) He spent $95,000 a month on jewellery and clothing, $411,777 on pigeons and cats, and an untold amount on pet lions, tigers, and “royal blood” Shar Peis. When he was not training, he redirected his energies. For one erotic marathon, a satrap lined up 24 women for the night. His cultural influences were various. When all the tattooing was complete, his face was that of a Maori warrior; Mao smiled murderously from one biceps, and the pacific tennis ace Arthur Ashe was portrayed on the other. Ashe’s widow, Jeanne, once said, “If I could sue a body part, I would.”

Extracted from ‘Tyson’s Corner’ (2005), reprinted in ‘Reporting: Writings from the New Yorker‘

www.newyorker.com/archive
Getting the job seems so long ago, he says. “I never thought about being an editor. I was never happier than when I was in Moscow for The Washington Post or running around the world for The New Yorker. I honestly never thought about it – and I don’t mean that in the way a machiavel would say that.” Indeed, he wasn’t the frontrunner for the post. After first offering the job to Michael Kinsley, then editor of the online magazine Slate, SI Newhouse Jr, owner of Condé Nast, had second thoughts, retracted the offer and picked Remnick instead. It all happened over a few days. One moment Brown was there; one moment, Kinsley appeared to be there; and the next Remnick was experiencing the freefall of unanticipated success, best captured, he says, by Robert Redford in The Candidate, who, after an improbable election victory, ends the movie by asking, “What do we do now?”

Though there are more venerable magazines in the US, it’s doubtful whether any other publication has quite the hold on the American imagination of The New Yorker. Born of the literary energies of the early 1920s – Dorothy Parker was the magazine’s first must-read critic – and powered by a kind of provincial awe about living in Manhattan, the magazine has become a byword for upper-middlebrow sophistication.

Asked what he did to reinvigorate the magazine, Remnick says there was no one thing, just a matter of paying attention to expenses, focusing on building real circulation instead of giving away copies, subtracting some writers, adding others. “You find the players to put on the field,” he says, citing the New York Yankees’ legendary former manager Joe Torre, “and you put them there and let them do what they do best. Many of the players had, in fact, been hired by Brown, among them front-cover names such as Malcolm Gladwell and Anthony Lane, as well as a core editorial team that Remnick is equally determined to name-check: Dorothy Wickenden (executive editor), Pam McCarthy (deputy editor) and Henry Finder (editorial director). Much of the credit for the magazine’s success, he stresses, belongs to them.

We pause to consider some crisp golden fingerling trout that arrive at our table, courtesy of the chef. Disturbingly, they look as if they have been fried in motion. But they are delicious.

Another contributory factor in The New Yorker’s success, explains Remnick, is that magazines have escaped the internet-induced “existential crisis” bedevilling American newspapers. “I’ve had dinner with newspaper editors of all ranks, and the conversations sometimes feel like a suicide watch.” He says the best way to read a magazine is still on paper, but, “for those for whom it is second nature to read online, I want to be there. I’m unwilling to make idiotic predictions about what’s going to be in print and what’s not going to be in print, I just don’t know. But I’m damned if I’m not going to be there.”

He is, as a consequence, “deeply engaged” in developing The New Yorker’s website; not that he is an easy touch for techno-evangelism. In fact, blogging doesn’t do much for him as a writer – “I have nothing to say if I can’t get outside the house,” he says, “and I would make a terrible, terrible critic.” And until sites like the Huffington Post start spending $3m a year reporting on the Iraq war, he says, newspapers that do are far more important to the future of the country.

We have almost finished our respective entrées and I ask what he thought of the crab. He pauses for a moment and then says in mock gourmandise, “The crabs of David Pasternack are ... as the poetry of Boris.” I cannot supply my cod with an equivalently literary simile, but it is delicate and piquant.

Given that the website has also opened the door to a potentially huge international audience and that the magazine, under his watch, has developed a stronger focus on current affairs, I ask whether he has been tempted to extend The New Yorker brand overseas? “Yes,” he says quickly and emphatically. “The question is to what degree is The New Yorker so sui generis and American that it won’t translate into a successful foreign product. I don’t know but it’s something I want to find out.”

The waiter arrives with dessert menus. “We should do this, right? It seems like our duty,” Remnick says, asking for sorbet and a double espresso. I order espresso and a pineapple and almond tart.

His life outside the magazine is ordinary: he likes to watch television, and listen to jazz, to go to movies with his wife Esther Fein (jokingly, he scolds the magazine’s film critic Anthony Lane for not saying nearly enough bad things about Sex and the City, even though Lane’s review was caustic), and to hang out with his three children, sons Alex, 17, Noah, 15, and daughter Natasha, nine.

Though his children might be amused by the comparison, it’s tempting to see Remnick as the George Clooney of American journalism: his affability has the resilience and polish of armour and his sotto voce, off-the-record comments are conspiratorial and disarming. He exudes bonhomie. At the recent New Yorker conference – a Davos-like summit for creative visionaries, which took place in May – he was available to anyone who wished to talk to him, and seemed not just comfortable but actually to enjoy hanging out with the staff running the event.

The cheerful temper and instinctive ability to shift between leading and following are probably the secrets of Remnick’s success. And as such they are qualities that can only be refined, not learnt. As staff writer and humorist Calvin Trillin observed when Remnick was announced editor (to much applause in the office): “It never occurred to me that anything this sensible would happen.”

Remnick is not interested in moving on to anything else. He uses short breaks from the magazine to “get out of the house” and renew his vocation as a reporter. “We all have cartoons of who we are and mine is that I still report,” he says.

Throughout our meal (we arrived at an empty restaurant and we are still going long after the lunchtime crowd has left), he repeats how grateful and lucky he is to be where he is. I remind him he once said in an interview that editing The New Yorker wasn’t his dream job. “That’s only because I never dreamt it,” he shoots back. “But what could be better?”

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Esca
402 West 43rd Street
New York, NY10011

1 x Iced tea $4.50
1 x Goose prosciutto $11.00
1 x Spring vegetables with ricotta $17.00
1 x Black cod $25.00
1 x Soft shelled crabs $24.00
1 x Trout, Complimentary
1 x Sorbet $9.00
1 x Pineapple tart $9.00
1 x Double espresso $5.00
1 x Espresso $3.50
2 x Glasses Prosecco $18.00
Tax $10.56
Tip $26.56

Total $163.12

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008