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Literate in tone, far-reaching in scope, and witty to its bones, The New Yorker brought a newand much-neededsophistication to American journalism when it launched 100 years ago this month. As I researched the history of U.S. journalism for my book Covering America, I became fascinated by the magazines origin story and the story of its founder, Harold Ross. In a business full of characters, Ross fit right in. He never graduated from high school. With a gap-toothed smile and bristle-brush hair, he was frequently divorced and plagued by ulcers. Ross devoted his adult life to one cause: The New Yorker magazine. For the literati, by the literati Born in 1892 in Aspen, Colorado, Ross worked out west as a reporter while still a teenager. When the U.S. entered World War I, Ross enlisted. He was sent to southern France, where he quickly deserted from his Army regiment and made his way to Paris, carrying his portable Corona typewriter. He joined up with the brand-new newspaper for soldiers, Stars and Stripes, which was so desperate for anybody with training that Ross was taken on with no questions asked, even though the paper was an official Army operation. In Paris, Ross met a number of writers, including Jane Grant, who had been the first woman to work as a news reporter at The New York Times. She eventually became the first of Rosss three wives. Harold Ross and Jane Grant in 1926. [Photo: University of Oregon Libraries] After the armistice, Ross headed to New York City and never really left. There, he started meeting other writers, and he soon joined a clique of critics, dramatists, and wits who gathered at the Round Table in the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street in Manhattan. Over long and liquid lunches, Ross rubbed shoulders and wisecracked with some of the brightest lights in New Yorks literary chandelier. The Round Table also spawned a floating poker game that involved Ross and his eventual financial backer, Raoul Fleischmann, of the famous yeast-making family. In the mid-1920s, Ross decided to launch a weekly metropolitan magazine. He could see that the magazine business was booming, but he had no intention of copying anything that already existed. He wanted to publish a magazine that spoke directly to him and his friendsyoung city dwellers whod spent time in Europe and were bored by the platitudes and predictable features found in most American periodicals. First, though, Ross had to come up with a business plan. The kind of smart-set readers Ross wanted were also desirable to Manhattans high-end retailers, so they got on board and expressed interest in buying ads. On that basis, Rosss poker partner Fleischmann was willing to stake him $25,000 to startroughly $450,000 in todays dollars. Ross goes all in In the fall of 1924, using an office owned by Fleischmanns family at 25 West 45th St., Ross got to work on the prospectus for his magazine: The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit, and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk. The magazine, he famously added, is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. In other words, The New Yorker was not going to respond to the news cycle, and it was not going to pander to middle America. Rosss only criterion would be whether a story was interestingwith Ross the arbiter of what counted as interesting. He was putting all his chips on the long-shot idea that there were enough people who shared his interestsor could discover that they didto support a glossy, cheeky, witty weekly. Ross almost failed. The cover of the first issue of The New Yorker, dated Feb. 21, 1925, carried no portraits of potentates or tycoons, no headlines, no come-ons. Instead, it featured a watercolor by Rosss artist friend Rea Irvin of a dandified figure staring intently through a monocle atof all things!a butterfly. That image, nicknamed Eustace Tilly, became the magazines unofficial emblem. #OTD in 1925Eustace Tilley on the very first issueCover of The New Yorker, February 21, 1925Rea Irvin#TheNewYorkerCover #ReaIrvin #EustaceTilley pic.twitter.com/SaeEZvBILO— Ron Lacy (@LRonLacy) February 21, 2024 A magazine finds its footing Inside that first edition, a reader would find a buffet of jokes and short poems. There was a profile, reviews of plays and books, lots of gossip, and a few ads. It was not terribly impressive, feeling quite patched together, and at first the magazine struggled. When The New Yorker was just a few months old, Ross almost even lost it entirely one night in a drunken poker game at the home of Pulitzer Prize winner and Round Table regular Herbert Bayard Swope. Ross didnt make it home until noon the next day and, when he woke, his wife found IOUs in his pockets amounting to nearly $30,000. Fleischmann, who had been at the card game but left at a decent hour, was furious. Somehow, Ross persuaded Fleischmann to pay off some of his debt and let Ross work off the rest. Just in time, The New Yorker began gaining readers, and more advertisers soon followed. Ross eventually settled up with his financial angel. A big part of the magazines success was Rosss genius for spotting talent and encouraging them to develop their own voices. One of the founding editors key early finds was Katharine S. Angell, who became the magazines first fiction editor and a reliable reservoir of good sense. In 1926, Ross brought James Thurber and E.B. White aboard, and they performed a variety of chores: writing casuals, which were short satirical essays, cartooning, creating captions for others drawings, reporting Talk of the Town pieces, and offering commentary. Portrait of E.B. White at work for The New Yorker Magazine circa 1955. [Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images] As The New Yorker found its footing, the writers and editors began perfecting some of its trademark features: the deep profile, ideally written about someone who was not strictly in the news but who deserved to be better known; long, deeply reported, nonfiction narratives; short stories and poetry; and, of course, the single-panel cartoons and the humor sketches. Intensely curious and obsessively correct in matters grammatical, Ross would go to any length to ensure accuracy. Writers got their drafts back from Ross covered in penciled queries demanding dates, sources, and endless fact-checking. One trademark Ross query was Who he? During the 1930s, while the country was suffering through a relentless economic depression, The New Yorker was sometimes faulted for blithely ignoring the seriousness of the nations problems. In the pages of The New Yorker, life was almost always amusing, attractive, and fun. The New Yorker really came into its own, both financially and editorially, during World War II. It finally found its voice, one that was curious, international, searching and, ultimately, quite serious. Ross also discovered still more writers, such as A.J. Liebling, Mollie Panter-Downes, and John Hersey, who was raided from Henry Luces Time magazine. Together, they produced some of the best writing of the war, most notably Herseys landmark reporting on the use of the first atomic bomb in warfare. A crown jewel of journalism Over the past century, The New Yorker had a profound impact on American journalism. For one thing, Ross created conditions for distinctive voices to be heard. For another, The New Yorker provided encouragement and an outlet for nonacademic authority to flourish; it was a place where all those serious amateurs could write about the Dead Sea Scrolls or geology or medicine or nuclear war with no credentials other than their own ability to observe closely, think clearly and put together a good sentence. Finally, Ross must be credited with expanding the scope of journalism far beyond standard categories of crime and courts, politics, and sports. In the pages of The New Yorker, readers almost never found the same content that theyd come across in other newspapers and magazines. Instead, readers of The New Yorker might find just about anything else. Christopher B. Daly is a professor emeritus of journalism at Boston University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
Bowling Green, Kentucky, is known for being the city from which Corvettes roll off the production lines, and for Fruit of the Loom underwear, which is headquartered there. But the city of 76,000 could soon be known for something else: its AI-powered mass civic engagement project that is using public surveys to chart the future of the city. In the next 25 years, the county within which Bowling Green sits is set to double in size, thanks largely to the growth of nearby Nashville. Figuring out what to do about that vexes the public officials in Bowling Green and the greater Warren County. The What Could BG Be? project is an open consultation open to all residents in the area to share their hopes, dreams, and fears for the future of the area. The tech-driven consultation opens today, and runs through March 17. The insights provided by citizens will be gathered by Google’s Jigsaw team, alongside Polis, a statistical analysis company, and synthesized to try and come up with concrete conclusions the local council can pursue for the future. Bowling Green is going through this incredible transformation, Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green tells Fast Company. Theyre doubling in size over the next 20 years. It sounds fantastic on the surface, but theres a mixed bag of emotions about whether thats going to be good or not. The data will be parsed by Jigsaws Sensemaking tools, which utilize large language models to make sense of large-scale online conversations. In an attempt to foster transparency through the whole process, all the comments, and any votes made by the public on potential options that stem from them, will be available on a website devoted to the project. The website also provides a public square for the general populace to chip in with any comments. The publishing of the comments is very important so that people can check it, says Green. A summary by definition is a lossy act. That transparency is particularly important because of the intricacies of Bowling Green, a purple city with a Republican mayor and a diverse population. City planners and public figures say there are more things that unite city folk than divide thembut it can sometimes be difficult to discern those areas of uncommon agreement in this age of partisanship. Bowling Green is kind of a microcosm of what happens around the world, says Green. You feel so much change. Theres technological disruption, immigration, the changing nature of jobs, and the economy. They are going through this change. The ultimate goal is to try and help encourage participation with civic engagement processesand to glean any ideas that could help the local community head into the future in a stronger position to address the challenges of rapid population growth and changing economic and social circumstances. I think if we can get a proof point in Bowling Green, that could be inspiring for a lot of other places to pick up, says Green.
Category:
E-Commerce
U.S. retail sales dropped sharply last month, in part because cold weather kept more Americans indoors, denting sales at car dealers and most other stores. Retail sales fell 0.9% in January from the previous month, the Commerce Department said, after two months of healthy gains. It was a much bigger drop than economists expected and the biggest decline in a year. The average temperature in January was the lowest since 1988, according to Pantheon Macroeconomics, and was particularly disruptive in the more temperate South. Devastating fires in Los Angeles may have also impacted spending. The data does not show that Americans rushed to buy goods in January to get ahead of President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs, as some analysts had expected. However, sales were revised higher for December. Many consumers may have just cut back in January after splurging during the holiday season. The tail-off in sales may provide some measure of reassurance for the Federal Reserve, after a very hot read on inflation for January, that the economy may not be overheating. And he decline in retail sales indicates that the economy, while still expanding, will grow more slowly in the first three months of this year. It grew at a 2.3% annual rate in last year’s final quarter. Sales plummeted 2.8% last month at auto dealers and slumped at furniture stores, home and garden centers. Even in the usually strong online retail sector saw a 1.9% decline. Sales rose at general merchandise stores, a category that includes big retailers like Walmart and Target, and at restaurants and bars. In addition to cold weather, the sales decline could in part point to fading consumer confidence as was reflected in a pair of recent surveys by the Conference Board and University of Michigan. Still, hiring and wage growth have been steady, suggesting the economy is still expanding. Last week the government reported that the unemployment rate fell for the second straight month to a low 4%. Inflation did tick higher last month despite the Federal Reserve’s efforts to cool prices through higher interest rates. The cost of groceries jumped in January from the previous month, pushed higher by soaring egg prices. Rising costs at the grocery store is exacting a toll on Americans. At the same time Trump is also stepping up tariff threats, which could lead to higher prices. Trump said Thursday he would soon impose reciprocal tariffs on countries that levy large duties on U.S. goods exports. Trump has already added 10% import taxes on goods from China, and has said he will place 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports. David French, executive vice president of the National Retail Federation, warned the import taxes could raise prices for consumers. While we support the presidents efforts to reduce trade barriers and imbalances, this scale of undertaking is massive and will be extremely disruptive to our supply chains,” French said Thursday. It will likely result in higher prices for hardworking American families and will erode household spending power. Retail executives say that its hard to plan given the fluidity of the tariff policies under the Trump administration. Kim Tobman, CEO of Bouqs, a floral retailer based in Marina del Ray, California, said most of her vases come from China, and that the 10% increase wasnt as bad as she expected. She doesnt expect to raise prices, but she is considering Vietnam, Indonesia and other areas to source vases. We feel at this moment we can absorb it, Tobman said. She experienced the turbulence that comes with Trumps shifting tariff plans last month during his showdown with Colombia, a massive exporter of flowers, after that nation initially refused to accept flights of deported migrants. Trump swiftly announced a series of retaliatory measures, including a 25% tariff on Colombia exports to the U.S., with a threat it could escalate. Colombia is the largest flower exporter to the U.S and represents a big chunk of sourcing for Bouqs floral arrangement, Tobman said. The Colombian government eventually agreed to Trumps demands, and the tariffs never materialized. By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER and ANNE D’INNOCENZIO AP Business Writers
Category:
E-Commerce
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