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September132006

David Remnick, In Profile

Filed under: Eds.   Tagged:

Why is nearly everything in the Guardian and the Observer so damn good? Oh, those British, who’ve been practicing the language for a while, they know. From the profile/review by Gaby Wood:
Celebrity culture is far from over; if you wrote a plan for a magazine and said you thought you could make a profit by publishing 8,000-word pieces on the future of various African nations, hefty analyses of the pension system and a three-part series on global warming, hordes of people would laugh in your face. So how has Remnick done it? Before I met him, I asked this of an acclaimed New York journalist, who said: ‘If you can work that out, you will have the scoop of the century. No one knows.’

Remnick is well aware of the apparent mystery, which is why no focus group is ever involved in an editorial decision. As he puts it, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that one hundred per cent of his readers are not going to get home from work, put their keys down and say: You know, honey, what I need to do now is read 10,000 words on Congo. ‘So you throw it out there, and you hope that there are some things that people will immediately read - cartoons, shorter things, Anthony Lane, Talk of the Town. And then, eventually, the next morning on the train, somebody sees this piece, and despite its seeming formidableness, they read it.’

You might say that what looks at first like common sense is David Remnick’s most winning eccentricity.

We meet at the New Yorker offices in Times Square on an obscenely hot day in August. Remnick extends a courtly, ironic offer of rehydration: ‘Coffee? Water? Drip?’ His glass box of an office is decorated with original cover art and scattered photographs - a portrait of AJ Liebling sitting under an apple tree; Dean Rohrer’s wonderful image of Monica Lewinsky as the Mona Lisa. On his desk is a rare book about Jean-Luc Godard, in French.
…
In a profile he wrote many years ago of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, Remnick remarked: ‘Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it’s about inspiring the enlisted.’ It’s a notion Remnick has clearly kept in mind in his own work as General. Asked to illustrate his editorial methods, Remnick reaches for a baseball analogy: Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, ‘gives players the confidence they need to play their best, then he gets the hell out’. He adds: ‘I don’t believe in swagger. I think it’s infantile.’
Thanks to Jesse Thorn, arbiter of all things awesome, for the awesome tip. For lots more Remnick, mosey over here. Has the site in question (Berkeley’s) fixed the misspellings and messy punctuation yet? I suspect not. Again, I volunteer.

Later: Berkeley’s taken down the page. Because of too much traffic after Kottke linked to it? Because of the iffy punctuation that they’re fixing? Either way, please bring it back! It’s a great conversation!

Still later: I was so excited to read the Slate Hackathalon after Remnick mentioned it in the interview, but alas, it seems to be missing as well (maybe because it was in Slate 1.0, or an early incarnation, anyway). Bring that back, too, please!
2 comments

Comments

Emily, I hear you! Check out The Guardian’s Dec 14, 2005 interview with Philip Roth. Fantastic!!

juliaSeptember 13, 2006

A link to the 1997 Hackathlon

http://www.slate.com/id/2738/

RobSeptember 14, 2006

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