The first time I really became aware of the New Yorker magazine was back in 2007, when many things in our lives were still analogue. I was staying in a cabin amid the humid jungle at Palenque in Mexico, where there are famous Mayan ruins. The cabin next to mine was occupied by a retired couple of academics who drove from Boston to Mexico each year, and wintered there, while working with a local NGO to help provide some basic engineering training.
I met Tess first, in the pool. She was then 80, and swam 100 laps in the pool each day, one long silver braid trailing after the rest of her, like some hirsute water snake. I could not keep pace with her. She stopped long enough from her laps to invite me to join her and her husband Rick for tequila at their cabin that evening.
At the cabin, while we talked, I noticed a pile of magazines in one corner. They were New Yorkers, a magazine then unfamiliar to me. I picked one up. “We get it sent to us here every week,” Tess said. “It’s the one thing from home we can’t be without.”
On return from that extended period of travelling, influenced by Tess and Rick, I started a subscription to the New Yorker myself; one I have to this day.
Some 18 years later the post that comes through all our letterboxes has become less personal than ever. There are the few remaining bills that haven’t gone paperless, and various bits and pieces, with only occasional intermittent cards to incite joy.
But to my door also comes the New Yorker, flopping to the hall floor, with its fabulous cargo of reportage, fiction, memoir, graphic art, poetry and some eclectic pieces that defy categorisation. Part of the many joys of opening the magazine is that you never know what you’re going to get in this lucky bag of intellect.
The Condé Nast-owned New Yorker celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, which is a remarkable achievement in 2025 for any kind of legacy media organisation. It endures for the simple reason that lots of people want to read it: the magazine has a staggering 1.2 million subscribers. Its evidently large budget means that reporters can spend weeks, or sometimes months, researching stories, thus creating outstanding original reporting.
Within the last year alone the New Yorker carried two lengthy stories that made headlines around the world. One was Rachel Aviv’s deep-dive analysis of alleged serious shortcomings in the Lucy Letby trial: the British nurse found guilty of murdering several newborn babies at the Countess of Chester Hospital in England.
The article was not carried on the magazine’s website in the British jurisdiction due to legal reasons. It ignited a heated public debate on Letby’s case, and as to whether grave mistakes were made while gathering evidence in her trial; a debate which remains ongoing and has raised questions in the British parliament of a possible miscarriage of justice.
The other story that went around the world was also by Rachel Aviv. Aviv reported on a story of sexual abuse carried out by the deceased partner Gerald Fremlin of the 2013 recipient for the Nobel Prize for Literature Alice Munro. The abuse was directed at Munro’s youngest daughter with her ex-husband, Andrea Skinner, starting when Skinner was nine.
In time Skinner told her mother what had happened. But Munro chose to support Fremlin, and Skinner became estranged from most of her family as a result. Meanwhile, Munro continued to write fiction, some of it about women in traumatic circumstances such as that in which her own daughter had found herself. Munro is now also dead, and her legacy has transmogrified into a troubled and ugly one, with both loyal readers and cultural institutions publicly distancing themselves from her.
[ The most reliable New Yorker you'll ever encounterOpens in new window ]
Long before I ever started reading the magazine – or was even born – it published pieces whose impact continues today. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 told of the environmental disaster that DDT and other pesticides were facilitating. In 1965 the entirety of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote about the murders of the Clutter family was serialised in four parts; often described as the “first true crime novel”.
There was a five-part series by Hannah Arendt in 1962 about the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem the previous year; a series which I read via a link to the archives only earlier this year. As I did I finally realised where the chilling phrase “the banality of evil” had come from: it was Arendt’s description of the man under trial.
It’s not just the words that are exceptional in the New Yorker. The cover art work by a rotating cast of illustrators is frequently funny, grim, or thought-provoking, depicting as it does either the global story of the week or some small, beautiful vignette of life in the city after which the magazine is named. Some of these covers have become much-reproduced classics.
Following the attacks of 9/11 the cover was entirely black, with two barely distinct grey towers, a collaboration between Art Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly, the magazine’s art editor; a masterclass in a study of absence.
To mark the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011, Christoph Niemann came up with a surrealist cover that at first glance looks beautiful. Is this the famous Japanese pink cherry blossom flowering on a dark tree? No, it is not. Entitled Nuclear Flowers, the cerise petals reveal themselves to be the trefoil blades of the ionising radiation symbol.
After the murder of eight journalists and four members of the public at Charlie Hebdo in 2015, the Eiffel Tower was depicted, the top of the famous structure a sharpened pencil, the tower itself pooled in blood at its base. Ana Juan created that image.
To compress historic events into such haunting images transforms them into something much more than art.
In 2015 I sat in my kitchen one evening and forgot about making dinner as I read all of Kathryn Schultz’s essay called the Really Big One. This was a compelling, terrifying, riveting piece of reportage on why a huge earthquake and tsunami was overdue in California, and what was predicted to happen when it did occur. Moreover, it explained the complex science of seismology in a way that even I, who does not have a scientific brain, could easily understand. Schulz won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for this essay, as she deserved to. We are 10 years on from her publication of that piece and the Really Big One is more overdue than ever now.
There are themed editions of the magazine from time to time, on politics, tech, the economy, style, food, travel. I have saved all the food, travel and tech specials; each one containing a surprising new topic to me.
It was in the New Yorker I first read about poutine, a bizarre (to me) Canadian favourite of French fries, gravy and cheese curds. I read about the crazy people who compete to grow the world’s hottest chilli on the Scoville scale. I read about Soylent; a revolting-sounding kind of powdered meal-replacement drink that was particularly beloved by tech workers, who could remain at their computers without being bothered to go out and forage for actual food. It was easily the most joyless-sounding type of eating experience I’ve ever come across.
I’ve never myself consumed poutine, or a crazy hot chilli, or Soylent, but I feel as if I have, which is a curiosity win on all three counts.
Not long after I started reading the magazine I happened to be in New York with a friend, a fellow journalist for an American paper. We were on the bus back to Boston when she pointed out a tall square building to me. It had “New Yorker” emblazoned on it in red neon across the upper two floors. We looked at the building entranced, and agreed we would both love to work there. The image remained in my head for years. Whenever I read the magazine I pictured the reporters working away under its roof, the New Yorker red neon sign blazing out into the New York night.
Last year I read a jaw-dropping story in the New York Times in 2024 called The Hotel Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave. It was about a man named Mickey Barreto, who had checked into the New Yorker Hotel in 2018, and then remained there for five years, while paying for only one night of his stay at Room 2565. There was a photograph with the piece.
It was only then that I realised this building in which Baretto had blagged a five-year stay was in fact not the storied workplace of the New Yorker magazine, which I had for years populated in my imagination with reporters and illustrators and fact-checkers and editors, but a hotel. Maybe I’ll stay there one day.
