A BEACON ON THE SHORE OF A STORMY SEA

The New Yorker's obsession with fact-checking sets a global standard. As the magazine celebrates its centenary, its transformation is also instructive. The lives of 3 Indians bring the experience closer ashore

- SUGATA SRINIVASARAJU

THE New Yorker, one of the anglophone world's most respected weekly news magazines, died the same year it was born in 1925. However, it was resurrected the same day before the world could even realise that it was briefly dead. Despite the uncertainty of its early months and years, the magazine has survived, and now celebrates its centenary year of existence.

James Thurber in his classic 1957 memoir, The Years With Ross, on Harold Wallace Ross, the founder-editor of The New Yorker, wrote with characteristic humour that the magazine was an "outstanding flop of 1925" when there was so much of success around in literature, music, and entertainment: "Its continued existence may be accurately called life after death... the weekly was declared dead at an executive luncheon in New York, presided over by its chief backer, Raoul Fleischmann. Then a miracle, in the form of a chance encounter, resurrected the deceased. Several hours after the coroner's verdict, Ross ran into Fleischmann at the wedding of Franklin Pierce Adams, and, in that atmosphere of hope, beginning, and champagne, they decided to have another go at it."

In what seems to have come a full circle, the magazine celebrates its 100 years at a time when all the talk is about the demise of the print media, especially the magazine format. The New Yorker itself has spread its wings and vision in recent years to become a multimedia brand. The magazine did not merely survive in the city of its making, but over the decades became a gentle obsession of a distinct class of readers across the globe.

For a magazine that saw so much of history unfold, from world wars to cold wars to culture wars, the refinement of reason it cultivated was miles away from being an ideological smithy. It did not impatiently try to proselytise anybody or propel a social and political movement, but was still a movement that gently, humanely, shaped the worldview of its readers.