The Entire New Yorker Archive Is Now Fully Digitized
In the introduction to “The New Yorker Index 1992,” a twenty-page catalog of everything the magazine published that year, editor John McPhee recognized a ritual familiar to many people. New Yorkers readers: tackling a pile of unread issues. Instead of catching up at home, he would haul his copies up to New Hampshire and read in the middle of a lake while lying in a canoe. Once these problems were resolved, he would call the New Yorkers desk and ask the librarian to help him locate other stories he wanted to read: “Hello, Helen, in what issue did he [the staff writer Thomas] Whiteside launches the American tomato in latex? Who owned the Wimbledon grass? (The thing was McPhee’s, of course.)
Explore the past New Yorkers parts are now much easier (and more portable). As of this week, our complete archives are available to read on newyorker.com. In addition to what was previously accessible, we’ve added over a hundred thousand items from over four thousand issues, a pile heavy enough to sink your canoe. Not only is everything from the 1992 index included – Susan Orlean on the inner workings of a supermarket, Talk of the Town’s stories about “urinals (art)” and “urinals (not art)” – but also John Updike’s 1961 short story “A & P” and Calvin Tomkins’s Profile of Marcel Duchamp. There are works by Jorge Luis Borges and Susan Sontag, Ralph Ellison and Louise Glück. There are articles about Frank Sinatra and Michael Jordan, royals and rock stars, cowboys and clowns. In total, there are over thirty-one thousand Talk of the Town stories; twenty four hundred pieces of Reporter at Large; more than thirteen thousand works of fiction and fourteen thousand poems; three thousand letters from everywhere, from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe; and one thousand five hundred “Annals of” everything from “haberdashery” to “veterinary medicine.”
While the complete digital archive may not have the same charm as magazines stacked on the nightstand, there is now a single place for each issue: a place to flip through the covers, scan the tables of contents, and choose what to read next. Better yet, if you don’t have our librarian’s phone number, enhanced search capabilities allow you to hunt down “Whiteside” or “Wimbledon,” “vaping” or “vampires” and sort the results by publication date. We also used AI to add short summaries where they didn’t appear before, making it easier to understand what an article is about. (This is, after all, a magazine in which the title “Measure for Measure” might lead to an essay not on Shakespeare’s comedy but on the rise of the metric system.)
The magazine’s centenary celebrations, which began in February, are a great opportunity to reconnect with our rich history. Whether you’re looking for something specific, going down a rabbit hole, or just catching up, the newly expanded archives are designed to make one hundred years of writing more accessible than ever. Subscribers benefit from unlimited access; If you’re not yet a subscriber, become one today.
We’ll continue to highlight some of our past favorites in the Classics newsletter, on our homepage, and elsewhere, but consider this an open invitation to delve into the archives for yourself. If you choose to read on the water, be careful: an iPad thrown overboard won’t hold up as well as a copy of the printed magazine. ♦
