Remnick '81 discusses life and work from Old Nassau to New Yorker

"This year's recipient is the keen-eyed judge of talking dog cartoons."

David Remnick '81, editor of The New Yorker and winner of this year's Woodrow Wilson award, stood before a crowd of alumni in Richardson Auditorium on Saturday and compared himself to last year's recipient Eric Lander, one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project.

As exhibited by his speech "Life at The New Yorker," Remnick's job involves more than sifting through drawings of animals in top hats.

As part of the University's Alumni Day program, Remnick spoke for an hour about The New Yorker's growth as a magazine and particularly as to how it was affected by the Sept. 11 attacks.

The speech captured the essence of his magazine — serious subjects tastefully sprinkled with humor to entertain and inform his audience.

Remnick began by poking fun at his alma mater.

Of the many things he missed about his Princeton days, he said: "Orange was not one of them." Glancing disdainfully down at his orange tie, he said he had bought the "hideous" accessory several weeks before to be dressed for the occasion.

"Orange is the navy blue of Princeton," he said. "This is not a good thing."

The humor soon gave way to a more serious discussion about the weighty decisions Remnick faces as editor.

Sept. 11 presented The New Yorker with a unique dilemma, Remnick said. "The New Yorker's role in all this was less precisely defined" than that of newspapers and news magazines, he said.

Remnick said his limited experience as an editor — he had last held the job for his high school newspaper — made deciding how to cover such an emotionally wrenching event even more difficult.

He added that his predecessors had left him with minimal guidance. Having searched New Yorker archives to see how former editors had handled tragedies like Pearl Harbor, he found surprisingly sparse coverage immediately after the event.

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Because television was not widely used, "the distance from New York to Pearl Harbor was greater than it is today," he explained.

But World War II was a turning point for the magazine.

"We grew up," Remnick said. Inspired by the "unique, vivid and lasting coverage of World War II" that the magazine eventually produced, Remnick rose to the challenge of covering the Sept. 11 attacks.

The week after the tragedy changed the tone of the magazine.

"I couldn't bare the thought of talking dog cartoons then," Remnick said. Instead, he chose a black cover with subtle silhouettes of the towers and on the inside ran one classic New Yorker cartoon of a bereft woman.

Slowly, he felt comfortable reintegrating humor into The New Yorker, Remnick said. Amid so much sadness and confusion, he was "proud of those moments of relief."

Remnick said he considers his magazine's post-Sept. 11 coverage its greatest achievement.

"I think the total work since September 11 has been remarkable," he said in an interview before the speech.

In many ways, Remnick's Princeton career was as "utterly eccentric" as he describes his magazine. Like many students, Remnick began his freshman year intending to become a doctor, but soon discovered it was not his niche and declared comparative literature as his major.

"I told him, 'David, you're going to starve to death!' " his mother teased as she waited outside the auditorium before her son's speech.

For a time, her words may have seemed prophetic.

Frustrated with his struggles with both Russian and French, he took a year off from school. During that time he "busked," played music, in the subways of New York.

"[It was] the best thing that ever happened to me," Remnick said.

He still credits Princeton with teaching him "how to read more deeply" and giving him the opportunity to "learn how to write from real writers."

When he's not at the office, Remnick spends time with his wife, Esther Fein, and their three children. Despite the ups and downs that come with a job of such prominence and public attention, his vision for the magazine remains clear:

"To come across, once in a blue moon, real lasting genius," he said. "You can't count on that every week."