This year marks the 100th anniversary of The New Yorker, a magazine that has captured the heart of a certain segment of the Big Apple—and the United States—for its witty and often irreverent takes on national news, culture, science, and history.
The forthcoming Netflix documentary “The New Yorker at 100” aims to distill that essence into a neat 96-minute runtime that ultimately reveals a publication still very much at odds with its city and the general American public.
Director Marshall Curry (“Street Fight,” “A Night at the Garden”) guides viewers through a series of short historical vignettes, interspersing the paper’s recent journey to its centennial issue with major moments from the history of the notably upper-crust magazine.
Now, to be clear, there is nothing I love more than a movie about journalism, especially a documentary. The visceral activity of editorial deliberation, storycraft, on-the-ground drama, and even the writing itself is, for me, exhilarating.
“The New Yorker at 100,” however, is different from other such films in that it is less interested in journalism than the more indirect elements that make the magazine go. Its frothy demeanor, unapologetic attentiveness to (Marx’s) bourgeoisie, and even its dedication to editorial perfection—perhaps to a fault—take center stage in the movie, which still seems to argue that The New Yorker is ultimately poking fun at elitism rather than exemplifying it in media form.
The song of the screen, however, is that the magazine is, at its core, a White-led, White-staffed enterprise reflecting the imagination of only the most genteel White liberal, in New York or elsewhere. That the documentary would like us to think otherwise renders it a remarkably tone-deaf effort.
The film features but two Black staffers at The New Yorker, writers Kelefa Sanneh and Hilton Als, and both are seemingly championed for their triumph over Blackness, urbanity, and/or poverty—Sanneh speaks of White-adjacent, punk-rock affinities as a Black immigrant, and a quintessentially tokenized Als is presented as the apparent continuation of the legacy of James Baldwin.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian who has written for the magazine sporadically since 2006, is employed in the film to argue for the exigency of The New Yorker’s ironclad commitment to intellectualism, and to defend it against critics who say the publication is too high-flown.
She asks, with an unseen wink, whether criticism of elitism at the magazine means people think it should stop covering art and leaning into deep thought and, perhaps, 7,000 word pieces on the history of rice.
No, but surely must do the work from something other than an impliant, White-centric perspective that rather gleefully pretends not to notice the greater masses. And to be clear, this is less a criticism of a magazine I do not read than of the picture put forth in the film, which was promoted by The New Yorker at its own annual festival.
(Ironically, Baldwin’s brief but bright appearance in The New Yorker in 1962 is presented alongside Als partway through the film as an overarching corrective for the magazine’s long history of anti-Black racism in its coverage, artwork, and staff. No one Black appears on screen for the remainder of the film.)
One notable scene, intended to be playful, depicts a meeting of top New Yorker editors debating changes to the style guide—at which point “The New Yorker at 100” momentarily approaches introspection. Even so, the meeting is apparently all-White, as is a later meeting for the finalization of the centennial issue.
Another moment, featuring hushed tones and a dramatic score surrounding the magazine’s coverage of Kamala Harris’ presidential loss in 2024 was, by that point in the film, a moment of desperation. They need us to see their work as meaningful, timely, and revelatory, but I can only imagine that, a scant 6 miles north or east of the New York premiere of the documentary, Black New Yorkers would be struck by the contradictions at work in the movie.
After credits rolled at the SVA Theatre in Chelsea, Curry, executive producer Judd Apatow, and a Black New Yorker editor in Jelani Cobb—who does not appear in the film—sat down for a panel discussion continuing the film’s own laudatory perspective on the magazine’s history. Curry specifically was asked why the magazine’s troubled Black history (and present) were not better explored in the film. The director's response?
“You could make a movie about that, probably.”
Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.
