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The New Yorker’s Profiles | The New Yorker

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New Yorker Profiles offer a unique mix of intimacy and irony. They have a literary commitment to tiny details, combined with a comedic eye for social …

It’s sometimes said that The New Yorker, or its founding editor, Harold Ross, invented the magazine profile. That’s flattering, but not quite true; as David Remnick writes, in his introduction to “Life Stories,” our collection of Profiles, “if a Profile is a biographical piece—a concise rendering of a life through anecdote, incident, interview, and description (or some ineffable combination thereof)—well, then, it’s a little presumptuous to stick Ross at the front of the queue, ahead of Plutarch, Defoe, Aubrey, Strachey, or even The Saturday Evening Post.” Still, The New Yorker did invent…

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