Press: Changing the Guard At 60

Its charm has always seemed to lie in its constancy: a neat and fixed formula of short stories, criticism, cartoons and articles, many of them serious, most of them current, all of them finely polished. Over the course of 60 years of independent proprietorship, The New Yorker won an enviably loyal audience along with an honored place on the country's cultural mantel. The magazine proved an accommodating haven for stylish writers as disparate as James Thurber and Isaac Bashevis Singer, E.B. White and J.D. Salinger. To many observers, the elegant weekly seemed not only steeped in tradition but nearly immutable, from...