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…