In the introduction to “The New Yorker Index 1992,” a twenty-page catalogue of everything the magazine published that year, the staff writer John McPhee acknowledged a ritual familiar to many New Yorker readers: tackling a stack of unread issues. Instead of catching up at home, he’d schlep his copies up to New Hampshire and read in the middle of a lake, while lying in a canoe. With those issues dispatched, he’d call the New Yorker office and ask the librarian for help locating other stories he wanted to read: “Hello, Helen, in what issue did [the staff writer Thomas] Whiteside tee up the American latex tomato? Whose was the thing about the grass at Wimbledon?” (The thing was McPhee’s, of course.)
Exploring past New Yorker pieces is now a lot easier (and more portable). As of this week, our full archive is available to read at newyorker.com. On top of what was previously accessible, we’ve added more than a hundred thousand articles from more than four thousand issues, a stack hefty enough to sink your canoe. Not only is everything from the 1992 index accounted for—Susan Orlean on the inner workings of a supermarket, Talk of the Town 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’s work 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. All in all, there are more than thirty-one thousand Talk of the Town stories; twenty-four hundred Reporter at Large pieces; more than thirteen thousand works of fiction and fourteen thousand poems; three thousand Letters from everywhere, from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe; and fifteen hundred “Annals of” everything, from “haberdashery” to “veterinary medicine.”
While the complete digital archive may not have the same charm as magazines piled on the nightstand, there is now a single home for every issue—a place to peruse covers, scan tables of contents, and choose what to read next. Better still, if you don’t happen to have the phone number of our librarian, upgraded search capabilities allow you to hunt down “Whiteside” or “Wimbledon,” “vaping” or “vampires,” and sort results by date of publication. We’ve also made use of A.I. to add short summaries where they didn’t previously appear, making it easier to discern what an article is about. (This is, after all, a magazine in which the headline “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 kicked off in February, provide a wonderful occasion to get reacquainted with our rich history. Whether you are looking for something specific, going down a rabbit hole, or simply catching up, the newly expanded archive is designed to make a hundred years of writing more accessible than ever. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access; if you aren’t a subscriber yet, become one today.
We’ll continue to highlight some of our past favorites in the Classics newsletter, on our home page, and elsewhere, but consider this an open invitation to dive into the archive on your own. If you do choose to read on the water, please be careful—an iPad dropped overboard won’t hold up quite as well as a copy of the print magazine. ♦
