On the decline of The New Yorker: case in point, Doreen St. Félix
I subscribed to The New Yorker from around 1975 to 2005. I loved the magazine for most of those years and if I recall correctly it was the only magazine to which I subscribed. Many weeks I read it cover to cover. The fiction was usually pretty good, as were the nonfiction and the reviews. For years it featured the best dance critic in the US, Arlene Croce. And then of course there were the cartoons, often funny and sometimes very funny. It was an event to get my copy in the mail every week.
Those days were gone by 2002 or so. I don’t remember the exact date, but I noticed that the subject matter seemed to become more political and more partisan; to the left, of course. I believe I noticed this even before my own political change, but I’m not sure and there’s nobody else to consult on the matter. What I do know is that I finally stopped my subscription around 2005 or so. I did it with a heavy heart. The divorce was painful but necessary, because it had gotten to the point where I was writing little messages in the margins of each article, and my copies were filled with those scribblings, which were far from love notes. The relationship had become toxic.
I’ve read random articles in the magazine in the years since. Therefore I’m aware of how DEI has taken over, and seems to reign. But I was unfamiliar with staff New Yorker writer Doreen St. Félix until now, when Ed Driscoll wrote this post about her writing, particularly her comments on X which are straight up anti-white and anti-Jewish. St. Félix was born in Brooklyn but is of Haitian parentage, and her X output (now shuttered) features pearls of wisdom such as these (see the Driscoll post):
Of course white people don’t bathe. It’s in their blood. Their lack of hygiene literally started the bubonic plague, lice, syphillis [sic] etc.
ALSO “all humans” are not the reason the earth is in peril. white capitalism is. we lived in perfect harmony w/ the earth pre whiteness.
And then there’s this gem:
it’s tricknological, when white people invoke the holocaust, allows them to step out of their whiteness and slip on fake oppression.
Needless to say, if she wrote anything of the sort about anyone other than white people in general (and Jews in particular, who are the implied though unstated subjects of that last quote), Félix wouldn’t be on the New Yorker’s payroll.
I see that most of these tweets seem to have been written in 2014 (or starting in 2014), three years before she was hired by The New Yorker. She is now thirty-three years old, so she was either twenty-two or twenty-three at the time; no child. As far as I can tell, neither she nor the magazine have made statements in response to the highlighting of these tweets, except that she has now deleted her X account.
A. She’s an asswipe and B. She’s never in her 33 years received any sanction for uttering such sentiments. You can thank her mother and father, the educational apparat, and the professional-managerial class of American journalism for that (as well as her co-workers).
On the broader comment of publications, I had a similar experience with the WSJ. I started reading it college and read it daily for decades, my morning coffee ritual. Then the newsroom became steadily left wing, and the editorial section mired in either fake conservatism (1950s thinking in the modern world, like pro open borders) or Karen leftists (Peggy Noonan). I finally cancelled my subscription with their rabid anti-Trump stance in his first administration. When I occasionally pick up a copy at my bank’s waiting room or airport lounge it has gotten only worse, and I just shake my head totally appalled.
I occasionally pick up New Yorker issues at the free magazines rack at the local public library branch. One issue had a review of a book I had begun but hadn’t finished: Javier Cercas’s Lord of the Dead. Reading the review prompted me to finish it. The book is an investigation of his great-uncle, who had died in the Spanish Civil War fighting on the side of the Nationalists.
I didn’t necessarily agree with the reviewer’s take on the book—but I have lost the copy. Nor did I necessarily agree with with the author’s take, which devoted some dialogue with the author and a friend about how the Nationalists were mistaken. While his family—and most of the village—sided with the Nationalists, the author’s interviews of those who had lived through the Spanish Civil War were nearly all from the Republican/Loyalist side.
Look at the females of Haitian origin who have achieved prominence: Claudine Gay, the plagiarizing ex-Pres of Harvard; Biden’s press secretary (St.Pierre?); and now this New Yorker racist. Not an appetizing bunch.
I also used to read the New Yorker, although I don’t believe I had a subscription – just read it regularly, along with the Atlantic and Harpers Magazine… both of which also I dropped, when they descended into unthinking proggie madness. About a year or so after 9-11, IIRC. Sad. I had grown up reading both, from my Mom’s subscription, and later my own, all the time I was stationed overseas.
What a nasty, ignorant little bigot MS Felix is — her employers at NY must be so proud of their little prize pet of color.
According to Wikipedia D St F has written the “definitive” article on Rihanna, so I think we non-New-Yorker-writers ought to consider whether we are really qualified to judge her work. :-/
I read TNY pretty regularly for several years in the early ’70s, when some friends who subscribed passed the back issues to me. I liked it quite a lot and considered it the height of something or other that I would have loved to be part of. Book reviews by W.H. Auden! But various changes made that feed unavailable to me, and I was too poor to subscribe and too busy to read it at the library, so I lost touch until many years later the internet brought occasional pieces to me. It was enough for me to see the change that Neo describes. Sad! Some of the brightest lights in American letters wrote for it in its better days. It’s a long way down to this very unpleasant and unimpressive person.
Maybe worst of all, the cartoons, which used to be the gold standard, have *really* declined. They show up regularly on Facebook, and I’d say something like two out of three, or four out of five, are not only utterly unfunny but without visual character. Though Roz Chast is still there.
She went to brown then worked for lena dunham (automatic disqualifier) and mtv (when they gave up on videos)
Then the newsroom became steadily left wing, and the editorial section mired in either fake conservatism (1950s thinking in the modern world, like pro open borders) or Karen leftists (Peggy Noonan)
==
Robert Bartley was a libertarian of a common type. There’s a reason Mr. Sailer refers to libertarianism as ‘applied autism’. As for Noonan, she has no politics, but she’s quite capable of being a twee fool.
When I was growing up, the New Yorker was a tiny flag on coffee tables celebrating, “We aspire to culture here.”
It wasn’t a bad thing then and the New Yorker wasn’t a bad magazine either.
1. She’s a Brown alum.
2. I too subscribed to The New Yorker. I quit sometime during Barack’s first term. I well remember article about the campaign; very early on. In it, it was very pro Obama. I knew right then, Hillary was finished.
@neo: …except that she has now deleted her X account.
Following neo’s links, I learned the precipitating event was Christopher Rufo retweeting Doreen St. Félix’s toxic tweets.
Rufo is one of our great crusaders against Critical Race Theory, now on the board of New College an experimental college (my alma mater) in the U Florida system, and helped inspire Trump’s efforts against DEI.
Good man.
New Yorker is blah blah smugness. Maybe it’ll endorse Mamdani.
Is it noticed that closing a tweet account is almost always by a lefty.
As with jane mayer who started making things up when she worked for the la times then trawled up every slander she could find about clarence thomas taking up the cause of terrorists after 9-11 etc they have a method to their madness from one of the sources i talked to from a profile she wrote they will excise everything except one paragraph or phrase
and the russia hoaxers worst fantasists like christopher steele
I joke the new republic which atarted leftist under croly then stalinist under
Michael atraight then eventually became sensible under marty peretz since then it has gone to the dogs even better management under steinhardt has had no effect
It’s the “perfect harmony with the earth pre whiteness” which is always the sign of complete ignorance of human history, old world or new world.
It was editor David Remnick (1998-present) who pushed the New Yorker over the edge into full-blown leftism.
He was responsible for those fawning articles/interviews with Obama and an entire bio on Obama.
I recall rolling my eyes at the interview where Obama said that he didn’t need a George Kennan for foreign policy advice, as Obama described the brilliance of his strategy for making Iran the hegemon of the Middle East.
Thank God for President Trump putting paid to that disaster.
For damn sure a long way from Thurber and White.
I read the New Yorker beginning in the late 1980s, because we had moved back to Texas and I was near enough to a sister to get her back issues. Ditto other readers: the fiction was great, the articles interesting, and the cartoons hilarious (I have bought a couple of books collecting the best ones from the Good Days).
Somewhere shortly after 1998 I stopped reading them regularly, due in part to an increase in frankly salacious content as well as the political bias, and finally threw away my boxes of unread issues. I never saw the hagiographies of St. Obama.
Sounds like I didn’t miss anything.
American Heritage and Scientific American were also “must read” subscriptions, but we cancelled them around the same time.
The content seemed to me to be not only leaning overly left, but also dumbed down.
Psychology Today and Popular Mechanics joined the drifting, and possibly others that I didn’t read regularly.
Are there any print magazines worth taking anymore?
What in the heck? I don’t read the New Yorker and never have, but seriously — white people don’t bathe? Where did that gem come from? I’m white, and a day doesn’t go by (with the extremely rare exception of hospitalization or illness that keeps me in bed) that I don’t shower! Sometimes twice a day, depending on the TX humidity level.
it’s probably more true in her native haiti, which has been cursed by bad leadership, going back to around the time of the first intervention in 1915, which happened because of the annoying detail the President at the time, had been dispatched on the front steps, (i’ll spare you the details) perhaps the marines stayed too long, fdr as assistant navy secretary wrote the constitution he closed out the intervention in 1934, among the rebel leaders that arose were Duvailier, who rallied the black against the mulatto population, who was a doctor and anthropologist who became an ally of Washington almost in spite of himself, we know what would happen for the next 30 years but even his ouster in 1987, was not a solution,
she sounds much like t’ nesi coates and hank rogers, ibrahim kendi, the wannabe james baldwin and other such figures, who might have had reason for their sentiments, half a century,now one might say well she said stupid things back a dozen years ago, but she doesn’t seem any smarter now, one of the more recent offerings was a lament about sean combs, a more authentic figure you can’t find by her own standards, Tom Wolfe reference this sort in his last Roman a Clef, Back to Blood, the clash between very bourgeois professional and their pampered sons who have absorbed urban culture, I had a little experience with the latter in the public schools
it was around that time 2005 or so when
this once venerable publication, lionized aaron mcgruder, who illustrated this grievance culture in animated form, the mau mau pose in aspic
the New Yorker might as well be in house publication at the Gaza healthministry, as they bought every lie they have offered,
At some point — I don’t recall very much at which point — I chose to subscribe to The New Republic. I was pretty right-of-center, but I honestly wanted to sample what the left side was thinking, because I (naïvely) wanted to be willing to hear out the other side.
I unsubscribed with some annoyance, not because I grew tired of them insulting my intelligence (which they sometimes did), but because I grew tired of them insulting my *integrity*. Why should I pay them (or anyone) to insult my character and worth?
(At this point, I know pretty d#mn well what the other side thinks. It’s part and parcel of the zeitgeist. It’s what I and (for example) other “neo”philes here fend off when we respond to the latest idiocies coming from the left side. I figure that as long as I’m getting uninterrupted YouTube videos from representative left-leaning spokespeople that are reasonably substantive, i.e. more than mere sound bites, I’m getting all I need. Sigh — at this point, it’s all that my stomach and my blood pressure can tolerate.)
” . . . Obama described the brilliance of his strategy for making Iran the hegemon of the Middle East.”
Is Obama an antisemite? I don’t know his heart. But this is what an antisemite would want to do. Then and now.
He’s chummy with Rev. Wright, Ali Abunimeh (founder of electronic intifada) and Rashid Khalidi, among others. Birds, feather, etc
Question to AI: Who is dumb enough to take the concept of “whiteness” seriously?
Answer: The concept of “whiteness” is taken seriously by various scholars and activists who study its implications in society, particularly in relation to race, privilege, and systemic inequality. However, opinions on its validity and usefulness vary widely, with some critics dismissing it as overly simplistic or misguided.
Taking race seriously is simply dumb, which (therefore) makes the topic interesting to talking heads on CNN, MSNBC, and regrettably, The New Yorker. One hoped that the last of those might have avoided falling into the dumb bin. Alas…
Is Obama an antisemite? I don’t know his heart.
MollyG:
I don’t either but I would say he is functionally an antisemite. In addition to sdferr’s mention of Rashid Khalidi as well as other Palestinians in genera, there was his apology tour of Arab states early in his administration, and his repeated friction with Netanyahu.
I’m not sure why he settled on Iran for special advocacy. Iran is Shi’a Muslim, but Palestinians and Arabs are almost entirely Sunni, as well as those in Indonesia, where he went to school under his stepfather.
Valerie Jarrett, his main advisor in the White House, was born in Iran and lived there until she was five. She spoke Persian. I’ve wondered if Jarrett had something to do with it.
I’ll tell you, my grandmother had a subscription way back when, and as a small boy I started reading the New Yorker probably in the mid 60s, strictly for the cartoons. She passed away when I was young, so I had to continue with it whenever I came across a copy, as I got older. The fiction was great, the movie reviews too, and I would even occasionally read ‘Goings on About Town’.
Alas, the capture of the institutions. I stopped caring about the New Yorker probably sometime in the 90s. They deserve to be put down, critically and probably also literally. It’s NPR syndrome, filling every story with pre-programmed bias for the delectation of the already-deranged. We’ve reached a point where the only cure is rebirth, as something else. Too bad. Progressive Leftists never learn to coexist, it’s all about domination of every single facet of every single person, and your ideas and opinions be damned.
“ALSO “all humans” are not the reason the earth is in peril. white capitalism is. we lived in perfect harmony w/ the earth pre whiteness.” Doreen St. Félix
Rather than historical ignorance, it’s deceitful historical revisionism in pursuit of a political agenda with the goal of power.
Long before the white man discovered Hawaii, King Kamehameha slaughtered 4000 Maui defenders after they’d surrendered. The Comanche drove the Apache out of Texas all the way to greater Arizona. West Africans conquered, enslaved and sold their ‘brothers and sisters’ to Arab slavers long before the Atlantic slave trade began. The Arabs castrated the males to prevent them from breeding. So they needed a continual resupply of strong males. The Mongols needed no help from whites with their genocidal tactics.
Oops! There I go again, confusing the issue with facts…
AesopFan: “Are there any print magazines worth taking anymore?”
Claremont Review of Books (CRB), now $30/year for 4 issues. Still a pretty good deal.
I read City Journal on-line, but pitch the printed copy they send me as too much to bother with.
I subscribe to NR on-line (@ 60% off) and declined the print version, but find myself not drawn to them anymore, given other more enticing titles, etc. Their current “Trump lite” stance is probably not fooling anyone.
And it seems over the last two or so years several on-line pubs changed up their format or something and I have not liked those changes, after mastering how to review their prior form.
It would be nice (given all the cookie traffic back and forth) if they could provide a tag indicating that I have already read a given item based on my IP address or whatever, so I could more easily see what might still deserve reading (or skipping).
I’ll always remember the New Yorker for the cartoons more than anything else. I suppose it might have resonated with my mother, she being a Columbia alumna and all that, but my intellectual development hasn’t leaned as heavily on the New York scene, I think.
One exception to this is – and here I’d add to Aesop and R2L’s discussion – The New Criterion is one journal I’ve often found stimulating in a secular intellectual kind of way. I wasn’t a subscriber for very long, but I have a good stack of their physical issues accumulated. I second the recommendations of CRB and City Journal as well.
The successor to commentary
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/black-book-russian-jews
You can get a PhD in Tricknology from Northwestern.
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This chap is a public defender in Brooklyn. Your tax dollars at work.
==
https://gellerreport.com/2025/08/public-defender-at-taxpayer-funded-brooklyn-defender-services-calls-for-firing-squads-for-millions-of-jews.html/
I second Philip Sells’s recommendation of The New Criterion. I’ve subscribed for many years. It’s a good all-around cultural journal with a conservative orientation. Some politics but not too much, usually a big picture view. A sample:
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-clash-within-civilizations/
Is Obama an antisemite?
Alternatively, is he a Muslim?
If he was confirmed to be either or both, would he act any differently?
Is there any reason for Miss Doreen, or whoever publishes her, to think anybody cares? In the least bit?
Her stuff isn’t worth a snort of bored derision. Not worth taking on as if an argument.
Half a century ago, my folks subscribed to the New Yorker. I liked the cartoons and my parents, being from New England, had friends and relations who would occasionally talk about what was happening NY-wise. My parents were musical, my mother could sing and play the piano and my father had a good baritone. They were fans of Broadway musicals or at least the signature numbers. So there was a slight connection, I suppose.
From time to time there would be a serious piece about something outside the City. I recall one about the “battleship war”,; the race by various nations to get the bigger and better ones prior to WW I. Appeared that those purchased by such Latin American nations as could afford them had the main function of bombarding the presidential palace.
But I’m not sure my parents or I would b served by the current menu.
I have bought several copies (one for myself, the others for gifts) of “The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker,” published in 2004. Some truly great stuff, and an interesting insight into American humor through the decades.
Cappy on August 17, 2025 at 8:47 am:
“You can get a PhD in Tricknology from Northwestern.”
With a minor in magical thinking?
@ Mac: thank you for that link to Heather MacDonald’s speech/essay. She is one of my favorite authors/ thinkers, so I will review it later on. I heard her give a similar [but shorter] “optimism is now acceptable” speech at a Manhattan Institute event in Palm Beach. The honors and attention she is receiving are well deserved.
But some of the articles in these “culture” and “meaty” publications really are too long, provide a lot of extraneous content, and might not even really come to a decent conclusion. Good essays were supposed to have an introduction (tell me what you are going to tell me), a body (tell be what you have to say), and a conclusion (tell me what you told me). Too many fail at that simple organization.
Perhaps my patience has been much reduced with an excess of internet surfing. Any advice on how to fix that?
I subscribed to “Spy” magazine for years and read every issue, cover to cover, the instant it arrived. Wikipedia says it was published from 1986 to 1998, and I think I subscribed very early on, but I don’t think my subscription lasted 12 years. I vaguely remember it stopping at some point and maybe I got a form letter that annual subscriptions were no longer honored?
Wikipedia says it suspended publication in 1994, but then another buyer was found after a few months and they published through 1998. So, maybe I subscribed from ’87 to ’94? I think I remember seeing an issue or two later and it was quite different. Anyway, it was hilarious stuff, often very inside New York, and much of that went over my head, but it was a clever magazine.
I subscribed to “Vanity Fair” from around 1995 to 2005. They had some great, long form reporting, even series that spanned issues. Dominick Dunne’s coverage of the O.J. Trial was outstanding, and there was a lot of other, great Hollywood true crime.
It was often a challenge finding the articles among the ads. The table of contents would often be 70, 80 pages in, there were so many ads at the front.
Some of Obama’s best friends are secular Jews but he wouldn’t want his daughter to marry an Orthodox Jew.
@ R2L – thanks for the suggestions, I already read most of them online and agree with your commendations. I also haven’t seen much point in getting the print versions repeating the same articles.
In retrospect, I think my question was somewhat facetious, as we are at the point of throwing out back issues of old favorites rather than importing new ones. We don’t even take our church’s magazine in print anymore; it is all on-line.
@ Phillip @ Mac – I sometimes see links to New Criterion posts and always check them out.
Heather Mac Donald is outstanding; I will read anything she writes wherever I find it.
@ R2L > “Perhaps my patience has been much reduced with an excess of internet surfing. Any advice on how to fix that?”
Read more books.
I think you are right about the effect of the easy accessibility of the internet’s offerings (the Reader’s Digest Condensed News, perhaps?), but the only antidote is plowing through a long-form publication, exercising the intellect as it were.
I see far too many articles these days lamenting that even college students are no longer able (even if willing!) to read an entire book for their classes. Fortunately, there are still some young people, especially home-schooled ones, who still like to read.
@ R2L > “It would be nice (given all the cookie traffic back and forth) if they could provide a tag indicating that I have already read a given item based on my IP address or whatever, so I could more easily see what might still deserve reading (or skipping).”
Agreed. I spend enough time (far too much) reading on-line, I don’t want to re-read posts, especially those that came out in the relatively-distant past, whose titles I’ve forgotten.
My work-around is to simply bookmark everything, and then when I click on the URL for a post my “indicator” shows I’ve already read them (all my browsers handle their bookmarks/favorites differently, but there is a visual “tag” in them all).
In re The New Yorker, I didn’t know this little factoid about these two writers.
Maybe this kind of tribal entwining is a partial explanation of its decline.
https://www.sashastone.com/p/the-democrats-are-trapped-in-a-hell
“I sometimes wonder what it must be like at bedtime for the New York Times’ Peter Baker and his wife, The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser. Do they worry that the Gestapo will kick down their door and haul them off to Alligator Alcatraz for writing negatively about Trump?”
Mac Donald’s speech could have been written to address several of Neo’s recent posts (not a great surprise, really, they being like-minded observers of the zeitgeist).
Repeating Mac’s link:
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-clash-within-civilizations/
A reflection of Imagology in this excerpt that clearly applies to St Felix; I don’t think she is the only one with this ahistorical opinion.
This is what drives the Left crazy about President Trump and his allies in the administration (as contrasted with the roster of own-side opponents in his previous term).
The sad thing is that many of the Democrat minions will never see the truth being declared. One of our close relatives recently posted a screed on Facebook that contained all the now-requisite “events” in the “history” of Donald Trump, even though they have been debunked over and over again.
Not a bug but a feature:
I think Heather would approve of Trump’s newest Executive Order to the Smithsonian, another venerable institution infected with Wokery.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/03/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-restores-truth-and-sanity-to-american-history/
NOTE: Every other “hit” on the first five pages of my search is a leftwing publication, including Al Jazeera on page 1, whereas I know I’ve read several posts from the right. (Bookmarks for the win.)
Sabine Hossenfelder often promotes the magazine Nautilus, which offers a glossy print edition. Anyone have any experience with it?
I gave up Scientific American years ago… I remember when I discovered it in the library in middle school, I thought about someday having a home, with a smart wife, and a subscription to SciAm we could enjoy together. Well, one out of three ain’t bad.
More of this tripe
https://instapundit.com/739070/
Im not impressed
https://nautil.us/
She’ll figure it out eventually
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/08/18/activists-run-to-federal-court-to-try-to-ban-official-us-government-report-that-blows-holes-in-settled-climate-science-claims/
Looks like they just renamed SciAm to Nautilus.
@huxley
I listened to the audiobook of Christopher Rufo’s “America’s Cultural Revolution” and was very impressed with it. He’s doing yeoman’s work.
She’s as ardently racist as Joy Reid or Jamele Hill and that’s sayin’ something.
It’s my belief that it’s a hair thing.
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