Remnick, who was hired by Brown, has never been critical of her tenure, and is inviolably modest about his own contribution. Equally, Remnick's non-partying ethic and commitment to world affairs might be thought the only appropriate way forward for a post-9/11 magazine. It could be said that Brown's methods were not eccentric but merely attuned to the demands of Eighties and Nineties culture. In more recent memory, Tina Brown hired big-name writers at vast expense, threw celebrity-strewn bashes to promote the magazine (all of which resulted in a rumoured loss of up to $20m annually) and was supposed to have rejected any story that couldn't hold her attention on the StairMaster. It is widely known that his successor, William Shawn, was neurotic, nuanced, almost pathologically shy, and that Robert Gottlieb, a gifted interloper, possessed a museum-worthy collection of plastic purses. So many memoirs have now been written about the distinguished publication that Harold Ross, its founder and first editor, has gone down in history as a maddening, well-connected workaholic who sacrificed three marriages to his literary invention. He is the fifth editor in the New Yorker's 81-year history and, by reputation - as his thumbnail self-portrait implies - its least eccentric. Remnick, who was for many years the New Yorker's star reporter, covering - in the tradition of AJ Liebling - an almost alarming range of subjects with grace and dexterity, has edited the magazine for the past eight years and quietly, seriously, changed its fortunes.
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