How would you describe the New Yorker magazine's style?

May 13, 2009 10:42 AM

Fifty years ago, in a note in her journal, Susan Sontag described the New Yorker magazine's style thus: "Upper-middle-class diction laced with colloquialism. Gives the impression of wry gentlemanliness -- of an intelligent amateur -- can't communicate perception or deep feeling." How would you describe the New Yorker's style today?
posted by Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh to Writing & Language (22 answers total)

The best writing - fiction and non-fiction - today. Except for Granta.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:49 AM on May 13, 2009 [2 favorites]

I think Sontag's definition is still relevant as far as the first sentence goes, but I think it does a great job of communicating perception and deep feeling these days.
posted by emilyd22222 at 10:57 AM on May 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

Left-wing college professor who's funny, but not as funny as he thinks he is.
posted by Sidhedevil at 11:03 AM on May 13, 2009 [8 favorites]

I like The New Yorker, but I think The Atlantic's writers have more personality. Aside from Oliver Sachs and one or two others, like David Sedaris, most of TNY's writers tend toward a certain blandness. I am not speaking of content, merely of style.
posted by Guy_Inamonkeysuit at 11:09 AM on May 13, 2009

Intellectually curious, politically smug and self-assured, stylistically old-fashioned, with a refreshing absence of upper class guilt.
posted by BobbyVan at 11:19 AM on May 13, 2009 [3 favorites]

"Stuff White People Like?"

I kid, I kid.

I would describe it as "Intellectual, sometimes to the point of insularity. Skip 95% of the fiction and the poems."
posted by drjimmy11 at 11:21 AM on May 13, 2009 [2 favorites]

Skip all the poems.
posted by kestrel251 at 11:25 AM on May 13, 2009 [2 favorites]

Like most quotes of this kind, Sontag's is half right, half wrong. The New Yorker has long been charged with Cheeverism: middle-brow WASPy dilettantism. Over the years I think it's at mostly shed the twee WASPy side of that equation (that was another era after all), but given that it's still a general magazine (and not a magazine for specialists or academics) the charge of dilettantism will always dodge it. But you know, it's a magazine, and with the exception of a few others (Harper's, NYRB, Atlantic, etc) it still occupies a critical niche in our culture. Sontag was just practicing that favorite past-time of intellectuals: biting the hand that feeds them.
posted by ornate insect at 11:33 AM on May 13, 2009

The New Yorker is the definitive text of middlebrow white American culture.
posted by RajahKing at 11:55 AM on May 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

Based on the sections I used to read most often (the 8 page articles about one topic and Shouts and Murmurs) I think of The New Yorker as a person, basically a college-educated nerd-wannabe that tries too hard.
posted by hellogoodbye at 12:06 PM on May 13, 2009

As a subscriber: A middle to high brow tone with a touch of the sardonic amongst the serious, that comes off as unintentionally hilarious when discussing non middle to highbrow topics.

One article a few years ago on an American born terrorist included a section on Death Metal (oh which I am a fan), that was written with quite the awkward tone.
posted by spinifex23 at 12:14 PM on May 13, 2009 [1 favorite]

Reading the New Yorker is, in best Bourdieu fashion, a marker of distinction. Its style -- right down to the friggin' diaeresis -- is bound up with that social function. (That's not a bad thing per se: the same applies to readers of the Spectator in the 1710s.)

So I'd go with "exquisitely veneered".
posted by holgate at 12:15 PM on May 13, 2009 [2 favorites]

The New Yorker is like your friend that all your other friends find incredibly pretentious, whom you defend by saying "He's a really interesting guy once you get to know him."
posted by hamsterdam at 12:20 PM on May 13, 2009

Like most quotes of this kind, Sontag's is half right, half wrong.

I disagree; I think it was spot-on regarding the 1959 New Yorker, which is what she was writing about.

Sontag was just practicing that favorite past-time of intellectuals: biting the hand that feeds them.

Susan Sontag hadn't written for the New Yorker in 1959; I'm not sure if it was something that was even on her radar, since she was trying to make a career as an academic philosopher at that point in her life.
posted by Sidhedevil at 12:21 PM on May 13, 2009

A vector for advertising high end inpatient mental health services and Greek Fisherman's caps.
posted by ladypants at 12:35 PM on May 13, 2009 [2 favorites]

A well read, insecure, and self-centered upper-class matron with minor mental health issues and the best of intentions who's currently down-at-the-heels and looking for a new situation.
posted by sid at 12:54 PM on May 13, 2009

Folks who used words like 'Establishment' and 'middlebrow' are onto something, I think.

Almost all magazines are aspirational, though. So The New Yorker is aimed not at the upper middle class, but at people who aspire to be members of the upper middle class.
posted by box at 1:54 PM on May 13, 2009

"The only thing worth reading, ever."
posted by Damn That Television at 1:54 PM on May 13, 2009

"And even then, only every other week, usually."
posted by Damn That Television at 1:55 PM on May 13, 2009

Response by poster: Interesting answers so far! Thank you, all.

sidhedevil: Can you explain "college professor"? I don't think this is true on the level of diction -- i.e., those lovable usages of "interrogate," "intervention," "problematize," "terrain," "motivate," and so on that one hears constantly from speakers of the academic sociolect are basically absent from NYer style, and sentence structure is quite different as well -- but I'm guessing you think the NYer's style is college professor-y in a different way from that.

ornate insect: Just to clarify, because of sidhedevil's objection, how do you think Sontag is "half wrong"? Are you saying that her description of the NYer's style as it was 50 years ago is accurate, but the negative or condescending tone you perceive is inappropriate to the point of "wrongness," given the limitations of the general-interest magazine form? (That's how I read you.) Or do you think part of Sontag's description is wrong?

One aspect of the NYer's style I'd be interested to hear all your opinions on is the way it sketches the appearance of the people who star in its articles. I think there's something distinctive about this, about the way its sketches are executed and the perspective from which they're written, but I can't put it into words. I have a hunch that clarifying this might help with an overall description of the style.
posted by Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh at 1:59 PM on May 13, 2009

I don't think this is true on the level of diction -- i.e., those lovable usages of "interrogate," "intervention," "problematize," "terrain," "motivate," and so on that one hears constantly from speakers of the academic sociolect

I should have said "English professor" I suppose. Most of the English professors I know would rather die than say "problematize".
posted by Sidhedevil at 2:29 PM on May 13, 2009

"This is the New Yorker, so you can use any narrative structure you like," he said. "Just know that when I get it, I'm going to take it apart and make it all chronological."

Mummy, you may find some interesting insights in the post Dan Baum's Tour of Journalism's Sausage Factory that Jason Kottke wrote the other day, and of course in the actual source material it references.
posted by bcwinters at 2:40 PM on May 13, 2009