Actually, though, he’s the real thing: a great, omnivorous editor. He takes The New Yorker’s history seriously — he’s edited a series of anthologies of themed New Yorker pieces from earlier eras — but he is just as determined that, in the era of iPads and bloggery, he won’t be the last of the magazine’s masters of ceremonies. One of his biggest hits came in 2004: Seymour Hersh’s reporting on abuse in Abu Ghraib. He also brought Ian Frazier, a comic genius, back into the fold — Frazier had been on strike, more or less, during Tina’s tumultuous tenure — and he found and encouraged some good new writers, among them Ben McGrath, who can write deftly about anything, including football concussions and theorists of dystopian collapse.
After 9/11 Remnick had an odd (to me) burst of militancy, as so many did, writing with approval on the attack on Afghanistan, and, in a famous comment piece in “Talk of the Town,” endorsing the invasion of Iraq. “I was wrong,” he told me, about Iraq. He wants his magazine to get truths out. I asked him what he would have done if Julian Assange had offered him a basketful of WikiLeaks documents. Of course he would publish them, he said — he’d let the courts sort it out later. “I think the world is better off knowing than not knowing.”
Last year he published an enormous book about the civil rights movement and the rise of Barack Obama. He wrote it early in the morning, before leaving for work, and late at night. “Sitting next to him, if I hadn’t known he was writing a book, I wouldn’t have been able to tell,” Pam McCarthy told me. “I don’t mean to sound hagiographic, but actually he really is quite amazing. And exhausting.”
Remnick left me in his office while he did an afternoon circle of the twentieth floor. I took some pictures of his bookshelves — hundreds of works by New Yorker contributors past and present, books in Russian, a well-thumbed copy of the poems of Walt Whitman, and a recent run of the magazine bound in black and gold. Then I looked out of the window at a sign that said “Toshiba” in big letters, and another sign for Thomson Reuters. Down the street was the tarnished green roofline of the old New York Times building, one of the seemingly few structures in the neighborhood that was there when the magazine began. I looked at a snapshot of Remnick’s wife and children, at a small plastic windup radio, at a framed photograph of Updike, at another of Ornette Coleman, at hundreds of CDs, and at a nesting doll of Vladimir Putin, whose profile Remnick wrote in 2003. On his desk was “the long”—the single big piece of paper with all the stories on it that were in the hopper, ready to go into future New Yorkers. I felt like a trespasser, like a spy, too high up in the Manhattan skyline for my own good. I heard the discreet bong of a ringing phone. Remnick walked me to the elevators. “Remember what Barbara Walters said at the end of the Jimmy Carter interview?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Be kind to us, Mr. President.”
(2011)
Libraries and Newspapers
Truckin’ for the Future
I got a call from the Rochester Public Library, the library I used most as a child. They were getting rid of their card catalog; I had written about card catalogs at some length in The New Yorker. Did I want it? If I paid for shipping, they would mail it from Rochester to Berkeley — minus the cabinets, which had resale value. I said no, I didn’t want it, I wanted them to keep it. So they threw it out.
About a year later, I got some unhappy e-mails from librarians at the San Francisco Public Library. The SFPL had just moved to a new building, and the press was responding with prolonged, ecstatic coverage. Robert Hass, U.S. poet laureate, wrote that “the interior of the library is a marvel, so deeply delicious you forget your previous ideas of what a library is”; Allan Temko, architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, likened its several inner bridges to “the visionary architecture of Piranesi.” The old card catalog, however, was, according to the librarians who wrote me, going to be destroyed — the cards recycled, the cabinets auctioned off. For now it still sat intact in the old building: an ornately carved summation of the contents of a great urban public library, “frozen” (i.e., not filed into or updated) as of 1991. “You are the only one who can save it now,” a librarian wrote me.
Because I felt I had shirked my duty as a preservationist in my hometown, I agreed to try to keep it intact. On May 21, 1996, I made a formal request under the Public Records Act to inspect the card catalog. (The Public Records Act is California’s version of the federal Freedom of Information Act.) This legalistic demarche would, I hoped, define the catalog as a public document, and temporarily prevent the administration from treating it as surplus property. The request was not unreasonable: the database conversion project wasn’t finished, and there were thousands of cards in the card catalog for books held in closed-stack areas of the library that had no match yet in the online system. (More than half the library’s collection was in closed, unbrowsable stacks.) The request was, however, denied, in a letter from the city librarian, Kenneth E. Dowlin: “We are unable to allow this at this time.”
So, inspired by the library’s own letterhead, which reads: “Access, Discover, Empower,” I sued for legal access. On June 26, 1996, eighteen drawers from the old card catalog were brought over to the new building, where I was allowed to use them. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors proposed and passed a nonbinding resolution “urging the Library Commission to preserve the card catalog at the Main Library and make it available to the public.” On September 3, 1996, after hours of public testimony, the Library Commission voted to find a way to keep it.
But by the time I was successfully looking up names like Walter Benjamin, John Milton, and J. K. Huysmans on paper cards — and noticing that there were substantially fewer books in the online catalog by these writers than there were in the card catalog — I had spent over a month talking to members of the library staff. I knew the real story, which is only incidentally about catalogs.
The real story is about what happens — what to a greater or lesser degree is happening in a number of cities around the country — when telecommunications enthusiasts take over big old research libraries and attempt to remake them, with corporate help, as high-traffic showplaces for information technology. Such transformations consume unforecastably large sums of money, which is why the SFPL found itself, just then — despite receiving a goodly percentage of the city budget every year as part of Proposition E’s “Preserving Libraries Fund”—essentially broke, with a one-million-dollar deficit in its operating budget, its new building annotated and beflagged with the names of major benefactors who enabled it, just barely, to open its doors in April.
One of these benefactors is the Pacific Telesis Group (parent to Pacific Bell, the phone company), a corporation that wants to become a “content provider” in the growing fee-for-service information business. Steven Coulter, a vice president at Pacific Telesis, is the president of the Library Commission; he is a proponent of the virtues of informational connectivity and public-private partnerships, and he is a masterful fund-raiser for the library. Kenneth Dowlin, the city librarian — hired away from Colorado Springs, where, as the head of the Pikes Peak Library District, he developed an early dial-up-access catalog called Maggie’s Place — also wants SFPL to become a sort of telecommunications utility: he told members of the American Library Association in 1992 that he envisions the library offering “electronic access to each home, school, and office by the year 2000,” and added, “We intend to generate revenue off of this pipeline.” He also said, “I will let the planning department ship documents for building permits over my system, but I get my five percent.”