Under the round, silent shadow of William Shawn, editor in chief for 35 years, the New Yorker was urbane, literate and indifferent to the philistines. In short, it was intelligent. But by the time Shawn stepped down in 1987, two years after the magazine was purchased by media billionaire S.I. Newhouse, a good many of its pages were also subdued to the point of immobile. It was an atmosphere that Shawn's successor, Robert Gottlieb, did not do much to relieve. When Newhouse moved Tina Brown into the editor's job in 1992, it was for the plain purpose of making noise in...
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