Magazine Content

The New Yorker: The outlier in this group of titles is the New Yorker, which isn’t really a news magazine but, as we’ve pointed out previously, has wandered further into the events of the week in recent years. The world as represented in the May 23 issue is both broader and deeper than the one examined in the traditional news weeklies. The articles may not be immediately topical (in a week where there was no dominant story) but the issues they deal with — AIDS, a young sports star, espionage during a war, and art and an artist are familiar in a larger sense. The magazine clearly isn’t aimed at filling in the reader on what’s happened in the last seven days, and the length of its pieces means that inevitably, fewer stories are covered. Still, the depth of the reportage and the broad topics serve to illuminate larger issues. None of the 11 Big Stories we saw on May 11 turned up in this issue of the May 23 New Yorker.

Cover — The cover, a break as always from photo journalism, was a drawing of a New York City cab with Sigmund Freud sitting stoically at the wheel while a passenger lay on the back seat, presumably baring his soul. (The magazine in recent years has used flaps to highlight pieces inside.)

Stories in the issue — Talk of the Town opens with a lengthy Comment article on the victory of Tony Blair and the Labor Party in Britain’s recent Parliamentary elections and on Blair’s close relationship with President Bush. The piece features the magazine’s usual left-of-center take on the elections and the drag Bush may have caused Blair. Beyond that, Talk of the Town is a usual mix of short pieces on scenes from New York and the world of the arts — a look at the United Nations Building renovation, at writer’s “habitats,” a count of trees in New York City, and Robert Goulet.

Following “Talk,” the magazine heads into matters at greater length. The news stories are less about the news of the week than issues and people of familiar gravity, but with an apparent emphasis on telling readers something they don’t know. First there is a seven-page piece on the rising H.I.V. rates in the United States and what’s behind the trend, foremost a return of casual sex among gay men. A seven-page piece on the 15-year-old Major League Soccer player Freddie Adu reports his struggles adjusting to the life of a professional athlete. Following that is an 11-page story on Pham Xuan An, a Time magazine employee in Vietnam during the war there who was also a double agent, and a 10-page profile of the artist Robert Rauschenberg.

The pieces all offer depth not seen elsewhere. The HIV piece opens with a long scene lead that lays the ground for a discussion of the relationship between crystal methamphetamine and unprotected sex, but still has plenty of room to step back and offer a broad picture of the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. It explains how crystal meth works on the brain — what neurotransmitters are affected — and still comes back to talk about sex clubs. The New Yorker gives writers enough space to delve into topics at several levels and draw connections between different points.

The piece on Adu wanders through topics like soccer’s place in America and Adu’s “mental conditioning coach” while discussing the difficulties the boy has had developing as a player. The long article on Pham Xuan An isn’t just a profile of the man, but a history of the war and of how he played both sides. The piece paints a complicated picture. In 1997, it says, An was denied permission to attend a conference in New York . An says it’s because his government wanted to keep him silenced, but the reporter adds, “This is one possible explanation, but as always with An, there could be another figure in the carpet. All we know is that, for at least 27 years after the end of the war, An was still an active member of Vietnam’s military intelligence service.”

Photos do appear. Almost all are black and white and artistic in style. The three-photo montage that ran in the HIV story is pure art — of no one in particular, with images stacked atop one another to suggest the effect of a motion picture. And, of course, there is a certain amount of space devoted to the cartoons that appear every few pages. Over all, though, text dominates the New Yorker in the front of the magazine and the back.

The New Yorker’s editors might chafe at its being considered a news magazine, but today categorizing the magazine is difficult. Describing its approach, whatever the topic, as deeply reported and writer-driven is not.