David Remnick
David Remnick
David Remnickis an American journalist, writer, and magazine editor. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire. Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998. He was named Editor of the Year by Advertising Age in 2000. Before joining The New Yorker, Remnick was a reporter and the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. He has also served on the New York Public Library's board of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth29 October 1958
CountryUnited States of America
100% of the people who get the magazine say they read the cartoons first - and the other 2% are lying.100
The future is itself a story, and predictions are stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent.
I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since.
I got in journalism for any number of reasons, not least because it's so much fun. Journalism should be in the business of putting pressure on power, finding out the truth, of shining a light on injustice, of, when appropriate, being amusing and entertaining - it's a complicated and varied beast, journalism.
The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.
The Communist Party apparatus was the most gigantic mafia the world has ever known.
He's an important writer for The New Yorker, in the same way Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman were important.
You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.
Journalism, some huge percentage of it, should be devoted to putting pressure on power, on nonsense, on chicanery of all kinds and if that's going to invite a lawsuit, well, bring it on.
Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism,
I'm not the slowest writer that you know.
What about our refusal to look squarely at the degradation of the planet we inhabit? In the last election cycle many candidates refused even to acknowledge the hard science, irrefutable science, of climate change. The president, while readily accepting the facts, has done far too little to alter them. How long are we, are you, prepared to wait?
I actually have great hopes for the future.
I left Gorbachev's office thinking that everything about him was outsized: his achievements, his mistakes, and, now, his vanity and bitterness.