Brain Food #396
The New Yorker
Daily Brain Food.
Thoughts of the day
Happy Friday.
Today is the publishing anniversary of The New Yorker, the iconic magazine which began in 1925 and managed to survive through history thanks to its exquisite, instantly recognisable covers, intelligent and often humorous writing, and its delightful comic strips.
Essentially, The New Yorker was a publication that offered a taster of everything, and though its initial goal was to bring quality, fact-checked writing to the people who lived in New York, its readership has expanded beyond the Big Apple, showing that when you have found your North Star, you may still light up a larger portion of the sky.
It contained content that challenged the reader, an act described by Kurt Vonnegut as “[…] teaching an audience how to play this kind of music in their heads. It's a learning process, and The New Yorker has been a very good institution of the sort needed.”
It is easy to conform and hard to challenge. But it is those who both disrupt and adapt that stand a better chance. And, put more simply, people do not want to be treated as if they are stupid.
The source of the expression “Back to the drawing board”. Peter Arno cartoon of The New Yorker of March 1, 1941, depicting an engineer walking away from a crashed plane.
