Before It Was Everywhere, It Was In The New Yorker
For the past few months, The New Yorker has opened up its archive, sharing some of the magazine's most memorable pieces, on topics ranging from comedians to the Supreme Court, books and writers, business, food and U.S. Presidents. Through January, as a holiday gift to readers, The New Yorker will make available additional pieces from its vast catalogue, highlighting some iconic reported articles, essays, short stories, and cartoons. We decided to go deep into the archive to find everyday phrases and ideas that first appeared on the pages of the venerable publication. Feel free to use any and all of these as fun facts at your holiday parties.
1. "Well, Back To The Drawing Board"
Peter Arno
March 1, 1941
On March 1, 1941, The New Yorker ran a cartoon that depicted an engineer walking away from the site of a plane crash with what we presume are plans rolled up under his arm. The caption reads, "Well, back to the old drawing board." Apart from being what cartoonist Paul Karasik calls "the perfect cartoon," it also marked the birth of a phrase we've all said with a mixture of deflation and persistence. Hang the cartoon next to your desk and be comforted in knowing that whatever drawing board you've got to return to probably isn't going to affect the lives of hundreds. And if it is, what the hell are you doing messing around on the Internet?
It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness has taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
Hannah Arendt in "Eichmann In Jerusalem"
February 16 – March 16, 1963
In 1963, Hannah Arendt wrote a series of five dispatches from Jerusalem covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, generally known as the architect of the Nazis' "final solution." Though controversial, the articles introduced readers to a new way of understanding how an otherwise "civilized" society could perpetrate some of the worst atrocities in human history. Arendt came up with a phrase that summed up the moral complexities of her larger piece: "the banality of evil." The phrase became shorthand for the terrifying ability of ordinary people to commit acts of extraordinary evil.
Charles Addams
August 6, 1938
Before it was a television show, and way before the beloved movies of the '90s, the Addams Family appeared as a series of cartoons in The New Yorker. Created by Charles Addams in 1938, the cartoons showed familiar domestic scenes through the macabre lens we still can't get enough of. Though Addams never named any of the family members in the approximately two dozen drawings that appeared in the magazine, the gang's (nearly) all there from the beginning. In the world's very first introduction to the dark clan, a vacuum salesman pitches his goods to the matriarch we know as Morticia, while an unshaven yet still Lurch-like version of the family butler looks on.
Truman Capote
September 25 – October 9, 1965
In some ways, the success of the podcast Serial shouldn't surprise anyone. Serialized accounts of true crime have been popular for about as long as there have been stories about criminals, and Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" is one of the standard bearers of the genre. Written in four installments, Capote's story detailed the case of the murder of a Kansas family and of the two men accused of the crime. The story has been told many times since Capote's original reporting in the fall of '65, including in three movies, a miniseries, and, first and foremost, the book that took six years for him to complete. Many critics point to it as the first "non-fiction novel," paving the way for writers like Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe. If you're mourning the end of Serial, you'd probably do well to read the grandfather of the true-crime narrative.
We know that the minerals necessary for all these forms of life are extracted from the water and passed from link to link of the food chains. Can we assume that the poisons we introduce to the waters will not follow the same course?
Rachel Carson
June 16 – 30, 1962
If you care about the environment, you should care about Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." The EPA, in its official history, describes the book this way: "'Silent Spring' played in the history of environmentalism roughly the same role that Uncle Tom's Cabin played in the abolitionist movement." In other words, it was a pretty big deal. Before the book, however, The New Yorker published Carson's seminal series of three articles that detailed the role of pesticides and herbicides in contributing to pollution and identified the use of DDT as a toxic agent in the world's water supply. In the '80s, professional wrestler Jake Roberts named one of his new moves "DDT" — a testament to the place the toxin held in the public imagination two decades later.
6. "I Wish I Knew How To Quit You."
Annie Proulx in "Brokeback Mountain"
October 13, 1997
"I wish I knew how to quit you." Before Jake Gyllenhaal uttered the eight words that would become a meme in their own right, Annie Proulx wrote them in a short story for The New Yorker. The piece went on to win the magazine a National Magazine Award for Fiction and Proulx an O'Henry Award in 1998. Trust us when we say that all the other sentences in the piece are as good as the one line everyone knows.
This piece is a sponsored collaboration between The New Yorker and Digg.