In January of this year [2000], Simon & Schuster published my book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker. I had been at The New Yorker since 1963—with an’ absence of about fourteen months, during which I was Bosley Crowther’s successor as the film critic of the New York Times. Although I had written for other publications, I thought I knew the magazine pretty well. The New Yorker, I wrote, is dead. I did not expect everyone to agree or to welcome my account of what happened to the magazine. Perhaps not surprisingly, the colleagues whom I…
How one obscure sentence upset the New York Times