• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 10, 2025

If I were to choose one article that most typified The New Yorker at a moment in its history, it would be the 20,000-word study of the mailing list business authored by Calvin Trillin in 1966.  

Trillin took a bemused attitude toward the business backwater that preceeded today’s information economy. The highlight was when an old list compiler named Herb Ozda advised Trillin on how to obtain the UJA mailing list, which wasn’t available for rental: you simply bribed the waiters at the hotels where UJA held its fundraising dinners for the guest lists. 

Of course, you couldn't call it the UJA list--you had to call it something else. 

This article was well in line with New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling’s assertion, almost amounting to a mission statement: “I like to think of all the city’s microcosms so nicely synchronized though unaware of one another; the worlds of the weight-lifters, yodelers, tugboat captains and sideshow barkers, of the book-dutchers, sparring partners, song pluggers, sporting girls and religious painters, of the dealers in rhesus monkeys and the bishops of churches that they establish themselves under the religious corporations law.” 

What brings this to mind is The New Yorker is celebrating its centennial. The 100^th anniversary issue is now out. 

At the start in 1925, The New Yorker was intended as an irreverent magazine featuring writers like Dorothy Parker. Harold Ross, the founding editor, saw it as a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life.  

That has changed somewhat. As current Editor David Remnick writes, “we persist in our commitment to the joys of what Ross first envisaged as a comic weekly. But we are particularly committed to the far richer publication that emerged over time: a journal of record and imagination, reportage and poetry, words and art, commentary on the moment and reflections on the age.” 

That evolution was clear even only a few months before Trilling’s mailing list article came out, when in 1965 The New Yorker published Truman Capote’s staggering "In Cold Blood" in a four-part series (before being published as a book in early 1966 by Random House). 

The centenary issue features six covers that “reimagine The New Yorker’s monocle-wearing mascot, Eustace Tilley,” The New Yorker states. “Each copy of the magazine will sport the original cover, drawn by art editor Rea Irvin in 1925, as well as a post-human techno-Tilley for the new century by Kerry James Marshall.”  

Want to savor the 100^th anniversary package of this ongoing cultural treasure? It is available online right here.