PLAGUE JOURNAL July 2020: What Happened to the New Yorker?
A once-great magazine follows the crowd.
[Note: All Plague Journal entries were written as events unfolded. I have edited the drafts for clarity, but the tone and content are original, reflecting what we could see at the time.]
I often wonder what happened to the New Yorker. I’d subscribed avidly for decades. In the early 1990s, when I was beginning a career (not that I knew where I was headed), I lived in the Chicago suburbs. I had Tuesdays and Wednesdays off. The New Yorker arrived on Wednesdays (they used to do everything in an organized way), a highlight of my week. I often took it to a Chinese restaurant in a nearby strip mall for lunch. Once in a while I drove my 1987 Chevy Nova into Chicago, where I would have an Italian dinner on State Street—a splurge for me on my salary of about $18,000 a year. The New Yorker was important, not because of the news it delivered but because of the quality of its writing. I remember the excitement of waiting for the serialized excerpts of John Cheever’s journals, which I read on an outdoor bench at the Oak Brook Center Mall.
When I express dismay at what has become of the New Yorker, a media-savvy friend tells me there is no money in journalism anymore. But that can’t be it. Although I understand that publications don’t write the blank checks they gave to a handful of new journalists in the late 1960s, I don’t believe E.B. White needed a lot of money to write “The Ring of Time” or that J.D. Salinger got rich from “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor.” In any case, current editor David Remnick has made more than a million dollars a year since he took over as editor in 1998. He flies first class and rides in private cars, perks of the Conde Nast organization. Money neither creates nor solves problems of quality.
But, one may argue, Remnick is not a journalist. He’s the editor, the face of the organization, the one who invites mildly controversial guests to glitzy events before disinviting them to appease his angry staff (as he did with Steve Bannon). Curious what the New Yorker pays, I looked up Jia Tolentino (of the angry staff). I found little personal information but I learned that she may have a net worth of between one and five million dollars and that she’s a Scorpio.
I suspect that Tolentino is paid quite well. She (though not she alone) serves the role at the New Yorker that deans of diversity and inclusion serve at universities and tech companies—making employees uncomfortable and less productive while accruing virtue points for executives. It’s common for such deans to make hundreds of thousands a year, often multiples of what professors make, without any job qualifications or performance expectations. They are simply shields for scared executives. Tolentino is probably paid more than the old guard at the New Yorker, people with talent, many of whom are still around if artistically fallow under Remnick.
As I read and listened to longtime New Yorker writer Jane Mayer complain of Trump (what else?) and the evils of capitalism in her reporting about COVID in meat plants, I wondered again at the extreme conformity of the modern New Yorker. Why is it that those who champion the victims of capitalism seem never to have known real work or real workers themselves? Although people can understand the experiences of others without having lived them (contrary to trendy ideas around lived experience), the crusaders of labor seem remarkably unfamiliar with the lives of workers.
Mayer, not surprisingly, comes from comfort, maybe even substantial wealth. (The web tells me her net worth is between one million and five million, so I’m seeing a pattern). Her great-great-grandfather, Emanuel Lehman, was a Lehman Brothers founder. She attended private school in New York and England before attending Yale and Oxford. There’s nothing wrong with coming from money, although it seems that living such a cloistered life may make it difficult to understand the world.
In Mayer’s writing about workers in meat plants, she doesn’t seem to see them as anything but token “black and brown” people who stand in contrast to Trump and the Koch brothers, her nemeses—not that black and brown or Trump or the Koch brothers have anything to do with a tiny piece of RNA virus that probably came from a bat in Yunnan. A story about meat plants during COVID should have been interesting and revelatory given their wildly outsized representation among spreader environments, but Mayer doesn’t see any of that. For her, as for everyone at the modern New Yorker, we live in a world of victims and victimizers.
Her story has nothing to do with the virus. It is about unions and contracts and pay and working conditions. She doesn’t even consider why meat plants have been hit harder by the coronavirus than other working environments with similarly crowded conditions and dangerous machinery. A meat saw doesn’t spread the virus. But she lacks curiosity. She tells the same story she’s told in the New Yorker for 25 years. In a typical paragraph, she writes, about a union official:
Hill, who is Black and from a working-class family on the Delmarva Peninsula—a scrubby stretch of farmland that includes parts of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia—was used to the area’s heat and humidity. But, as he spoke to the crowd, behind dark glasses, his face glistened with anger. “It’s greed, that’s what it is,” he said. “It’s a damn shame.”
She sounds more like Hamlin Garlin writing about dusty farms in the 1890s than like a modern reporter writing about a health issue. When I think of all my friends, some of whom are sympathetic to the worker-victim narrative and others who scoff at it, I realize that we’ve all done awful jobs—but not really, just unpleasant or difficult jobs, now behind us. I worked summers in hot, Indiana cornfields from the time I was 13 until I graduated from college. In the early years, when thousands of kids did similar work across the Midwest, we would hear of a few deaths each summer on the hottest days.
I worked in an ice plant (we didn’t know if it was a factory or a plant or something else, and we made jokes about the word “plant” to describe the production of frozen water). Usually I drove the ice around in a 16-speed split-axle truck (a dangerous enough job), but on Tuesdays I worked in the guts of the plant, pushing chunks of ice down a chute toward an industrial auger and then bagging the cubes. If I’d got too close to the auger I could have lost a hand or arm, as occasionally happened to a local kid who got too close to farm equipment.
I worked on roofs in Florida heat. In high school I bicycled six miles each way to wash dishes at a pizza restaurant, once cycling home past a car crash that killed a schoolmate the night before his graduation. During summers, before and after the four-to-six-week chunks spent in the Indiana fields, I did odd jobs around the company plant, which was bought by Pfizer partway through my tenure. One summer my work consisted of painting the building and large pieces of agricultural equipment green and yellow (from red and white), to reflect the new ownership, which meant spending a considerable amount of time twenty feet up an extension ladder (tired, bored, short on sleep, in hot, humid weather). Each year, ladder falls send 164,000 Americans to emergency rooms and kill 300. When I wasn’t on the ladder, I painted bean dryers in a vast barn-like building. To pass the time, long before podcasts and audiobooks and iPhones, I listened to AM talk radio out of Chicago and dipped tobacco, aiming my spit at the rats below. Once, after sweeping a warehouse floor, I asked my adult supervisor what was next and he said, “We’ll dick around here another 15 minutes and then clock out for lunch,” which we did.
My friends, from then and those I’ve met since, baled hay, painted houses, worked construction, mowed lawns, landscaped, drove tractors and trucks, worked in auto-parts stores, helped their dads with whatever, generally hustled for money. Sometimes an older person at church needed help, resulting in a day spent moving rocks or digging holes. The girls often worked in restaurants, coffee shops, clothing stores, the local movie theater, or as camp counselors, and many of them worked in the cornfields. None of us felt victimized or put-upon or resentful or poor, although we were poor. None of us pursued a career writing about faceless victims and the scrooges who exploit them. Somewhere along the way, the New Yorker lost the understanding that humans are interesting, and coalesced around an idea that rage and resentment should carry us through.