Readers and Writers: Magazine's talk of the town

Writer Judith Thurman told the Auckland audience of the joy of the unknown as she undertakes her escapist features.

Once a writer has reached the hallowed halls of The New Yorker, the only thing left to look forward to is death, quipped the panel members at New Yorker Night on Saturday.

"There's no other job a journalist could possibly want," fashion, arts and culture writer Judith Thurman told a captivated ASB Theatre during the Writers Festival's most awaited event.

Fellow panelist political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg, the "moral voice" of the magazine, did make an exception, however, when he left temporarily for the White House and a lowly job as Jimmy Carter's speechwriter.

Financial writer James Surowiecki, who started the magazine's first business column in the month the Nasdaq bubble burst, couldn't imagine working anywhere else, either.

He had much to say on how the magazine has adapted to modern times, his hiring indicative of that, and the magazine's leaner approach.

After a selection of the magazine's funniest cartoons displayed on the big screen, chairwoman Rhonda Sherman led a stimulating conversation on how The New Yorker's old-fashioned journalistic values - authority over subject matter, stylistic perfectionism, an army of fact-checkers - have helped the magazine survive to the grand old age of 85.

From the days when small-town man Harold W. Ross moved to the big city and started the magazine in the prohibition years, to its launching of the literary careers of John Updike, J.D. Salinger and Truman Capote to its present glory as Michelle Obama's apparent favourite, the focus has always been on quality and craft.

Thurman spoke of the joy of the unknown as she undertook her escapist features, of travels to film sets in war-torn Nicaragua and caving in the South of France.

Hertzberg spoke of spending three months with John Lennon before he was deported and later, the riskiness of positive political journalism, confessing he lost his critical faculties when he fell in love with Barack Obama.

And Surowiecki, whose page-long column is something of an anomaly in the features-heavy publication, spoke of the satisfaction in keeping readers abreast of business news, even if they're not particularly interested in business.

In an earlier panel, Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a thought-provoking talk on her roots as a writer and a human - and how she brings alive her homeland in novels such as the award-winning Half of A Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus.