How The New Yorker Became Irrelevant

As that bon vivant Eustace Tilley might have put it, The New Yorker was recently spotted in an unlikely locale—on Substack. In a jaunty little note, the storied magazine declared, “Yep, we’re on Substack toö. Your favorite hundred year-old magazine is crashing the party.” And the reaction on the platform was… a bit different from what might have been expected. “Oh FUCK OFF please,” wrote one user in a comment that was liked over 100 times. “Who actually reads and enjoys this?” wrote another. “More and more the NYer feels like an artifact, no longer relevant to our time,” wrote The Literarian Gazette. “They’re not even sure what they do anymore,” wrote the essayist Jacob Savage.