David Remnick

Henry Finder

A collection of the New Yorker's groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of climate change--including writing from Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, Ian Frazier, Kathryn Schulz, and more Just one year after climatologist James Hansen first came before a Senate committee and testified that the Earth was now warmer than it had ever been in recorded history, thanks to humankind's heedless consumption of fossil fuels, New Yorker writer Bill McKibben published a deeply reported and considered piece on climate change and what it could mean for the planet. At the time, the piece was to some speculative to the point of alarmist; read now, McKibben's work is heroically prescient. Since then, the New Yorker has devoted enormous attention to climate change, describing the causes of the crisis, the political and ecological conditions we now find ourselves in, and the scenarios and solutions we face. The Fragile Earth tells the story of climate change--its past, present, and future--taking readers from Greenland to the Great Plains, and into both laboratories and rain forests. It features some of the best writing on global warming from the last three decades, including Bill McKibben's seminal essay "The End of Nature," the first piece to popularize both the science and politics of climate change for a general audience, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning work of Elizabeth Kolbert, as well as Kathryn Schulz, Dexter Filkins, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Eric Klinenberg, and others. The result, in its range, depth, and passion, promises to bring light, and sometimes heat, to the great emergency of our age.

Writing from the New Yorker on Climate Change

The Fragile Earth

Giles Harvey

A cultural and political history of a watershed decade as reflected in the pages of New Yorker magazine covers such topics as the Nuremberg Trials, the statehood of Israel, and the bombing of Hiroshima.

The Story of a Decade

The 40s

Introduction / David Remnick -- Part I. Reckonings -- Part II. American scenes -- Part III. New arrivals -- Part IV. Youth in revolt -- Part V. Civil rights -- Part VI. Shots were fired -- Part VII. Farther shores -- Part VIII. Artists & athletes -- Part IX. Comic turns -- Part X. Critics -- Part XI. Fiction

The 60s

Gathers the funniest work of more than seventy "New Yorker" contributors, with parodists taking on writers like Hemingway and Kerouac, as well as TV documentaries, Italian cinema, etiquette books, and the depths of social embarrassment.

An Anthology of Humor Writing from the New Yorker

Fierce Pajamas

W. H. Auden

Elizabeth Bishop

The New Yorker Magazine

A look back at the 1950s chronicles the tensions and innovations that lay behind the decade's more placid surface during a time of prosperity and contradiction.

the story of a decade

The 50s

A classic collection of the New Yorker’s most urgent and groundbreaking reporting from the front lines of the climate emergency

The Fragile Earth: Writing from the New Yorker on Climate Change

The next instalment in the acclaimed New Yorker 'decades' series featuring an all-star line-up of historical pieces from the 1960s alongside new pieces by current New Yorker staffers. The 1960s, the most tumultuous decade of the twentieth century, were a time of tectonic shifts in all aspects of society - from the March on Washington and the Second Vatican Council to the Summer of Love and Woodstock. No magazine chronicled the immense changes of the period better than The New Yorker. This capacious volume includes historic pieces from the magazine's pages that brilliantly capture the sixties, set alongside new assessments by some of today's finest writers. Here are real-time accounts of these years of turmoil: Calvin Trillin reports on the integration of Southern universities, E. B. White and John Updike wrestle with the enormity of the Kennedy assassination and Jonathan Schell travels with American troops into the jungles of Vietnam. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the fallout of the 1968 Democratic Convention, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Six-Day War: all are brought to immediate and profound life in these pages. The New Yorker of the 1960s was also the wellspring of some of the truly timeless works of American journalism. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time all first appeared in The New Yorker and are featured here. The magazine also published such indelible short story masterpieces as John Cheever's 'The Swimmer' and John Updike's 'A & P', alongside poems by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. The arts underwent an extraordinary transformation during the decade, one mirrored by the emergence in The New Yorker of critical voices as arresting as Pauline Kael and Kenneth Tynan. Among the crucial cultural figures profiled here are Simon & Garfunkel, Tom Stoppard, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Cassius Clay (before he was Muhammad Ali), and Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The assembled pieces are given fascinating contemporary context by current New Yorker writers, including Jill Lepore, Malcolm Gladwell and David Remnick. The result is an incomparable collective portrait of a truly galvanising era. With contributions from: Truman Capote, John Updike, E.B. White, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Jonathan Schell, Dwight Macdonald, Renata Adler, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, AJ Liebling, Nat Hentoff, Calvin Trillin, Xavuer Rynne, John McPhee, Anthony Hiss and more.

Story of a Decade

The New Yorker Book of The 60s

The New Yorker is, of course, a bastion of superb essays, influential investigative journalism, and insightful arts criticism. But for eighty years, it’s also been a hoot. In fact, when Harold Ross founded the legendary magazine in 1925, he called it “a comic weekly,” and while it has grown into much more, it has also remained true to its original mission. Now an uproarious sampling of its funny writings can be found in a hilarious new collection, one as satirical and witty, misanthropic and menacing, as the first, Fierce Pajamas. From the 1920s onward–but with a special focus on the latest generation–here are the humorists who set the pace and stirred the pot, pulled the leg and pinched the behind of America. S. J. Perelman unearths the furious letters of a foreign correspondent in India to the laundry he insists on using in Paris (“Who charges six francs to wash a cummerbund?!”). Woody Allen recalls the “Whore of Mensa,” who excites her customers by reading Proust (or, if you want, two girls will explain Noam Chomsky). Steve Martin’s pill bottle warns us of side effects ranging from hair that smells of burning tires to teeth receiving radio broadcasts. Andy Borowitz provides his version of theater-lobby notices (“In Act III, there is full frontal nudity, but not involving the actor you would like to see naked”). David Owen’s rules for dating his ex-wife start out magnanimous and swiftly disintegrate into sarcasm, self-loathing, and rage, and Noah Baumbach unfolds a history of his last relationship in the form of Zagat reviews. Meanwhile, off in a remote “willage” in Normandy, David Sedaris is drowning a mouse (“This was for the best, whether the mouse realized it or not”). Plus asides, fancies, rebukes, and musings from Patty Marx, Calvin Trillin, Bruce McCall, Garrison Keillor, Veronica Geng, Ian Frazier, Roy Blount, Jr., and many others. If laughter is the best medicine, Disquiet, Please is truly a wonder drug.

Henry Finder

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