I’m not a fortune teller. I know it would be interesting if I sat here and told you without a trace of uncertainty that in 10 years all magazines are going to be projected on screens on the side of the Empire State Building and the Prudential Building. Or alternately, they would be projected on the inside of your sunglasses in the summertime. I don’t know. Here’s what my job is, and I share that with other editors, too: We are in this moment of technological uncertainty and transition. The goal for me is to make sure we find a way, willy-nilly, to be healthy so that we can do the thing itself. The thing itself is what I care about most. Given a choice between the survival of the long-form narrative journalism, criticism, cartooning—all the things that we do—and print itself, there is no contest. No contest. I, at the age of 51, may still think, for me, the best technology for reading the New Yorker at this moment is the print version. But that’s just me. If your son, decides otherwise, that he wants to read it on an iPad, kenahorah [so be it].
Nice wide-ranging conversation with David Remnick of The New Yorker, touching on baseball, quid pro quo on magazines/journalism/paywalls etc. today, and some pointed jewels on how this smart white guy has written two HUGE books on two HUGE black dudes (Ali and Obama)…
RB: I see the Ali book as a precursor—well, not a precursor but as a kind of rehearsal. Somehow it got you—
DR:—connected, I think—
RB:—into a culture that—
DR:—I wasn’t born into. (laughs)
RB: And helped you step into conversations with black people and black culture.
