Who’s In And Who’s Out at the New Yorker?

It might be tougher to get in than you think

Woman focuses on work, leaning head on hand while sitting in a cafe and working with a laptop.

An archivist for the New Yorker magazine dropped a bombshell on the publishing world.

Erin Overbey is that archivist.

She is responsible for nifty newsletters that use the New Yorker’s deep pockets of world-class writing to create excellent new narratives.

Her tweet was about something even more salient.

Overbey revealed data on who did and did not get published by the magazine over the last thirty years.

However, the response was predictable.

Woke seldom wakes anyone up

She compared the magazine to an old country club before listing statistics.

I’ll show the kind of information she revealed. Then I’ll explain why it tends not to work.

In its 96 years of existence, the New Yorker has published only four book reviews by black women. That’s less than 0.1%.

In the last 30 years, 3.6% of the book reviews posted were by Black critics or writers.

In the last 30 years, all cinema reviews were by white critics, and in that time, only 2/5% were by women.