The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry published by Condé Nast. Starting as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is now published 47 times annually, with five of these issues covering two-week spans.

Although its reviews and events listings often focus on the cultural life of New York City, The New Yorker has a wide audience outside of New York. It is well known for its illustrated and often topical covers; its commentaries on popular culture and eccentric Americana; its attention to modern fiction by the inclusion of short stories and literary reviews; its rigorous fact checking and copyediting; its journalism on politics and social issues; and its single-panel cartoons sprinkled throughout each issue.

History[link]

The New Yorker debuted on February 21, 1925. It was founded by Harold Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, a New York Times reporter. Ross wanted to create a sophisticated humor magazine different from perceivably 'corny' humor publications such as Judge, where he had worked, or Life. Ross partnered with entrepreneur Raoul H. Fleischmann to establish the F-R Publishing Company and established the magazine's first offices at 25 West 45th Street in Manhattan. Ross edited the magazine until his death in 1951. During the early, occasionally precarious years of its existence, the magazine prided itself on its cosmopolitan sophistication. Harold Ross famously declared in a 1925 prospectus for the magazine: "It has announced that it is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque."^[2]

Although the magazine never lost its touches of humor, it soon established itself as a pre-eminent forum for serious fiction literature and journalism. Shortly after the end of World War II, John Hersey's essay Hiroshima filled an entire issue. In subsequent decades the magazine published short stories by many of the most respected writers of the 20th and 21st centuries, including Ann Beattie, John Cheever, Roald Dahl, John McNulty, Alice Munro, Haruki Murakami, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Irwin Shaw, James Thurber, John Updike, Eudora Welty, and E. B. White. Publication of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" drew more mail than any other story in The New Yorker's history.

In its early decades, the magazine sometimes published two or even three short stories a week, but in recent years the pace has remained steady at one story per issue. While some styles and themes recur more often than others in New Yorker fiction, the magazine's stories are marked less by uniformity than by variety, and they have ranged from Updike's introspective domestic narratives to the surrealism of Donald Barthelme, and from parochial accounts of the lives of neurotic New Yorkers to stories set in a wide range of locations and eras and translated from many languages.^{[citation needed]} Writers like Kurt Vonnegut said that The New Yorker has been an effective institution for getting a large audience through the learning process required for appreciating modern literature.^[3]

The non-fiction feature articles (which usually make up the bulk of the magazine's content) cover an eclectic array of topics. Recent subjects have included eccentric evangelist Creflo Dollar, the different ways in which humans perceive the passage of time and Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

The magazine is notable for its editorial traditions. Under the rubric Profiles, it has long published articles about a range of notable people, from Ernest Hemingway, Henry R. Luce and Marlon Brando to Hollywood restaurateur Michael Romanoff, magician Ricky Jay and mathematicians David and Gregory Chudnovsky. Other enduring features have been "Goings on About Town," a listing of cultural and entertainment events in New York, and "The Talk of the Town," a miscellany of brief pieces—frequently humorous, whimsical or eccentric vignettes of life in New York—written in a breezily light style, or feuilleton, although in recent years the section often begins with a serious commentary. For many years, newspaper snippets containing amusing errors, unintended meanings or badly mixed metaphors ("Block That Metaphor") have been used as filler items, accompanied by a witty retort. There is no masthead listing the editors and staff. And despite some changes, the magazine has kept much of its traditional appearance over the decades in typography, layout, covers and artwork. The magazine was acquired by Advance Publications, the media company owned by S.I. Newhouse, in 1985.

Ross was succeeded by William Shawn (1951–1987), followed by Robert Gottlieb (1987–1992) and Tina Brown (1992–1998). Brown's nearly six-year tenure attracted the most controversy, thanks to her high profile (a marked contrast to that of the retiring Shawn) and the changes she made to a magazine that had retained a similar look and feel for the previous half century. She introduced color to the editorial pages (several years before The New York Times also did so) and photography, with less type on each page and a generally more modern layout. More substantively, she increased the coverage of current events and hot topics such as celebrities and business tycoons and placed short pieces throughout "Goings on About Town", including a racy column about nightlife in Manhattan. A new letters-to-the-editor page and the addition of authors’ bylines to their "Talk of the Town" pieces had the effect of making the magazine more personal. The current editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick, who took over in 1998 from Brown.

Wrote Tom Wolfe about the magazine's style: "The New Yorker style was one of leisurely meandering understatement, droll when in the humorous mode, tautological and litotical when in the serious mode, constantly amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and renuanced, until the magazine’s pale-gray pages became High Baroque triumphs of the relative clause and appository modifier."^[4]

As far back as the 1940s the magazine's commitment to fact-checking was already well known.^[5] Yet the magazine played a role in a literary scandal and defamation lawsuit over two articles by Janet Malcolm about Sigmund Freud's legacy, that appeared in the 1990s. Questions were raised about the magazine's fact-checking process.^[6] As of 2010, The New Yorker employs 16 fact checkers.^[7]In July, 2011, the magazine was sued for defamation in United States district court for a July 12, 2010 article written by David Grann.^[8]

Since the late 1990s, The New Yorker has used the Internet to publish current and archived material. It maintains a website with some content from the current issue (plus exclusive web-only content). Subscribers have access to the full current issue online, as well as a complete archive of back issues viewable as they were originally printed. In addition, The New Yorker's cartoons are available for purchase online. A digital archive of back issues from 1925 to April 2008 (representing more than 4,000 issues and half a million pages) has also been issued on DVD-ROMs and on a small portable hard drive. More recently, an iPad version of the current issue of the magazine has been released.

A New Yorker look-alike, Novy Ochevidets (The New Eyewitness), was launched in Russia in 2004. It folded in January 2005 after five months of circulation.

In its November 1, 2004 issue, the magazine for the first time endorsed a presidential candidate,^{[citation needed]} choosing to endorse John Kerry over George W. Bush.^[9] They continued this in 2008, endorsing Barack Obama over John McCain.^[10]

Cartoons[link]

The New Yorker has featured cartoons (usually gag cartoons) since it began publication in 1925. The cartoon editor of The New Yorker for years was Lee Lorenz, who first began cartooning in 1956 and became a New Yorker contract contributor in 1958. After serving as the magazine's art editor from 1973 to 1993 (when he was replaced by Françoise Mouly), he continued in the position of cartoon editor until 1998. His book, The Art of the New Yorker: 1925–1995 (Knopf, 1995), was the first comprehensive survey of all aspects of the magazine's graphics. In 1998, Robert Mankoff took over as cartoon editor, and since then Mankoff has edited at least 14 collections of New Yorker cartoons.

The New Yorker's stable of cartoonists has included many important talents in American humor, including Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Charles Barsotti, George Booth, Roz Chast, Tom Cheney, Sam Cobean, Leo Cullum, Richard Decker, Helen E. Hokinson, Ed Koren, Mary Petty, George Price, Charles Saxon, David Snell, Otto Soglow, Saul Steinberg, William Steig, Richard Taylor, James Thurber, Barney Tobey and Gahan Wilson.

Many early New Yorker cartoonists did not caption their own cartoons. In his book The Years with Ross, Thurber describes the newspaper's weekly art meeting, where cartoons submitted over the previous week would be brought up from the mail room to be gone over by Ross, the editorial department and a number of staff writers. Cartoons would often be rejected or sent back to artists with requested amendments, while others would be accepted and captions written for them. Some artists hired their own writers; Helen Hokinson hired James Reid Parker in 1931. (Brendan Gill relates in his book Here at The New Yorker that at one point in the early 1940s, the quality of the artwork submitted to the magazine seemed to improve. It was later found out that the office boy (a teenaged Truman Capote) had been acting as a volunteer art editor, dropping pieces he didn't like down the far edge of his desk.)^[11]

Several of the magazine's cartoons have climbed to a higher plateau of fame. One 1928 cartoon drawn by Carl Rose and captioned by E. B. White shows a mother telling her daughter, "It's broccoli, dear." The daughter responds, "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it." Three years later, the Broadway musical Face the Music featured a musical number named "I Say It's Spinach".^[12] The catchphrase "back to the drawing board" originated with the 1941 Peter Arno cartoon showing an engineer walking away from a crashed plane, saying, "Well, back to the old drawing board."^[13][14]

The most reprinted is Peter Steiner's 1993 drawing of two dogs at a computer, with one saying, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". According to Mankoff, Steiner and the magazine have split more than $100,000 in fees paid for the licensing and reprinting of this single cartoon, with more than half going to Steiner.^[15][16]

Over seven decades, many hardcover compilations of cartoons from The New Yorker have been published, and in 2004, Mankoff edited The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, a 656 page collection with 2004 of the magazine's best cartoons published during 80 years, plus a double CD set with all 68,647 cartoons ever published in the magazine. This features a search function allowing readers to search for cartoons by a cartoonist's name or by year of publication. The newer group of cartoonists in recent years includes Pat Byrnes, Frank Cotham, Michael Crawford, Joe Dator, Drew Dernavich, J.C. Duffy, Carolita Johnson, P.C. Vey, Zachary Kanin, Farley Katz, Glen Le Lievre, Michael Maslin, Ariel Molvig, Paul Noth, Barbara Smaller, David Sipress, Mick Stevens, Julia Suits, Christopher Weyant and Jack Ziegler. The notion that some New Yorker cartoons have punchlines so non sequitur that they are impossible to understand became a subplot in the Seinfeld episode "The Cartoon", as well as a playful jab in an episode of The Simpsons, "The Sweetest Apu".

In April 2005, the magazine began using the last page of each issue for "The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest." Captionless cartoons by The New Yorker's regular cartoonists are printed each week. Captions are submitted by readers, and three are chosen as finalists. Readers then vote on the winner, and any U.S. resident age 18 or older can vote. Each contest winner receives a print of the cartoon (with the winning caption), signed by the artist who drew the cartoon.

Films[link]

The New Yorker has been the source of a number of movies. Both fiction and non-fiction pieces have been adapted for the big screen, including: Flash of Genius (2008), based on a true account of the invention of the intermittent windshield wiper by John Seabrook; Away From Her, adapted from Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over The Mountain", which debuted at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival; The Namesake (2007), similarly based on Jhumpa Lahiri's novel which originated as a short story in the magazine; The Bridge (2006), based on Tad Friend's 2003 non-fiction piece "Jumpers"; Brokeback Mountain (2005), an adaptation of the short story by Annie Proulx which first appeared in the October 13, 1997, issue of The New Yorker; Jonathan Safran Foer's 2001 debut in The New Yorker, which later came to theaters in Liev Schreiber's debut as both screenwriter and director, Everything is Illuminated (2005); Michael Cunningham's The Hours, which appeared in the pages of The New Yorker before becoming the film that garnered the 2002 Best Actress Academy Award for Nicole Kidman; Adaptation (2002), which Charlie Kaufman based on Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, written for The New Yorker; Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, which also appeared, in part, in The New Yorker in 1996 before its film adaptation was released in 1999; The Addams Family (1991) and its sequel, Addams Family Values (1993), both inspired by the work of famed New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams; Brian De Palma's Casualties of War (1989), which began as a New Yorker article by Daniel Lang; Boys Don't Cry (1999), starring Hilary Swank, began as an article in the magazine, and Iris (2001), about the life of Iris Murdoch and John Bayley, the article written by John Bayley for the New Yorker, before he completed his full memoir, the film starring Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent; The Swimmer (1968), starring Burt Lancaster, based on a John Cheever short story from The New Yorker; In Cold Blood (1967), the widely nominated adaptation of the 1965 non-fiction serial written for The New Yorker by Truman Capote; Pal Joey (1957), based on a series of stories by John O'Hara; Mister 880 (1980), starring Edmund Gwenn, based on a story by longtime editor St. Clair McKelway; The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) which began as a story by longtime New Yorker contributor James Thurber; and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), adapted from Sally Benson's short stories.

The history of The New Yorker has also been portrayed in film: In Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, a film about the celebrated Algonquin Round Table starring Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dorothy Parker, Sam Robards portrays founding editor Harold Ross trying to drum up support for his fledgling publication. The magazine's former editor, William Shawn, is portrayed in Capote (2005) and Infamous (2006).

Style[link]

One uncommonly formal feature of the magazine's in-house style is the placement of diaeresis marks in words with repeating vowels—such as reëlected, preëminent and coöperate—in which the two vowel letters indicate separate vowel sounds. The magazine also continues to use a few spellings that are otherwise little used, such as "focusses", "venders", and "teen-ager".

The magazine does not put the titles of plays or books in italics but simply sets them off with quotation marks. When referring to other publications that include locations in their names, it uses italics only for the "non-location" portion of the name, such as the Los Angeles Times or the Chicago Tribune.

Formerly, when a word or phrase in quotation marks came at the end of a phrase or clause that ended with a semicolon, the semicolon would be put before the trailing quotation mark; now, however, the magazine follows the more commonly observed style and puts the semicolon after the second quotation mark.

The magazine also spells out the names of numbers, such as "twenty-five hundred" instead of "2500", even for very large figures. It also spells out professional sports leagues with periods, e.g. N.B.A.

The New Yorker's signature display typeface, used for its nameplate and headlines and the masthead above The Talk of the Town section, is Irvin, named after its creator, the designer-illustrator Rea Irvin.^[17]

The body text of all articles in The New Yorker is set in Adobe Caslon.^[18]

Readership[link]

Notwithstanding its title, The New Yorker is read nationwide with 53% of its circulation in the top ten U.S. metropolitan areas. According to Mediamark Research Inc., the average age of the New Yorker reader in 2009 is 47 (compared to 43 in 1980 and 46 in 1990). The average household income of The New Yorker readers in 2009 is $109,877 (the average income in 1980 was $62,788 and the average income in 1990 was $70,233).^[19]

Also according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, The New Yorker's renewal rate (the percentage of subscribers who renew their subscription each year) is 85%—one of the highest reported rates in the industry. Mediamark Research Inc. reported that readers spend, on average, 81 minutes each week reading The New Yorker.

Eustace Tilley[link]

The magazine's first cover illustration, a dandy peering at a butterfly through a monocle, was drawn by Rea Irvin, the magazine's first art editor, based on an 1834 caricature of the then Count d'Orsay which appeared as an illustration^[20] in the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The gentleman on the original cover, now referred to as "Eustace Tilley", is a character created by Corey Ford for The New Yorker. The hero of a series entitled "The Making of a Magazine", which began on the inside front cover of the August 8 issue that first summer, Tilley was a younger man than the figure on the original cover. His top hat was of a newer style, without the curved brim. He wore a morning coat and striped trousers. Ford borrowed Eustace Tilley's last name from an aunt—he had always found it vaguely humorous. "Eustace" was selected for euphony, although Ford may have borrowed the name from Eustace Taylor, his fraternity brother from Delta Kappa Epsilon at Columbia College of Columbia University.

Tilley was always busy, and in illustrations by Johann Bull, always poised. He might be in Mexico, supervising the vast farms that grew the cactus for binding the magazine's pages together. The Punctuation Farm, where commas were grown in profusion, because Ross had developed a love of them, was naturally in a more fertile region. Tilley might be inspecting the Initial Department, where letters were sent to be capitalized. Or he might be superintending the Emphasis Department, where letters were placed in a vise and forced sideways, for the creation of italics. He would jump to the Sargasso Sea, where by insulting squids he got ink for the printing presses, which were powered by a horse turning a pole. It was told how in the great paper shortage of 1882 he had saved the magazine by getting society matrons to contribute their finery. Thereafter dresses were made at a special factory and girls employed to wear them out, after which the cloth was used for manufacturing paper. Raoul Fleischmann, who had moved into the offices to protect his venture with Ross, gathered the Tilley series into a promotion booklet. Later, Ross took a listing for Eustace Tilley in the Manhattan telephone directory.

The character has become a kind of mascot for The New Yorker, frequently appearing in its pages and on promotional materials. Traditionally, Rea Irvin's original Tilley cover illustration is reused every year on the issue closest to the anniversary date of February 21, though on several occasions a newly drawn variation has been substituted.

Covers[link]

"View of the World" cover[link]

Saul Steinberg created 85 covers and 642 internal drawings and illustrations for the magazine. His most famous work is probably its March 29, 1976 cover,^[21] an illustration titled "View of the World from 9th Avenue", sometimes referred to as "A Parochial New Yorker's View of the World" or "A New Yorker's View of the World", which depicts a map of the world as seen by self-absorbed New Yorkers.

The illustration is split in two, with the bottom half of the image showing Manhattan's 9th Avenue, 10th Avenue, and the Hudson River (appropriately labeled), and the top half depicting the rest of the world. The rest of the United States is the size of the three New York City blocks and is drawn as a square, with a thin brown strip along the Hudson representing "Jersey", the names of five cities (Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Las Vegas; Kansas City; and Chicago) and three states (Texas, Utah, and Nebraska) scattered among a few rocks for the U.S. beyond New Jersey. The Pacific Ocean, perhaps half again as wide as the Hudson, separates the U.S. from three flattened land masses labeled China, Japan and Russia.

The illustration—humorously depicting New Yorkers' self-image of their place in the world, or perhaps outsiders' view of New Yorkers' self-image—inspired many similar works, including the poster for the 1984 film Moscow on the Hudson; that movie poster led to a lawsuit, Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc., 663 F. Supp. 706 (S.D.N.Y. 1987), which held that Columbia Pictures violated the copyright that Steinberg held on his work.

The cover was later satirized by Barry Blitt for the cover of The New Yorker on October 6, 2008. The cover featured Sarah Palin looking out of her window seeing only Alaska and in the very background Russia.^[22]

The March 21, 2009 cover of The Economist, "How China sees the World", is also an homage to the original image, but depicting the viewpoint from Beijing's Chang An street instead of Manhattan.^[23]

9/11[link]

Hired by Tina Brown in 1992, Art Spiegelman worked for The New Yorker for ten years but resigned a few months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The cover created by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly for the September 24, 2001 issue of The New Yorker received wide acclaim and was voted in the top ten of magazine covers of the past 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors, which commented:

New Yorker Covers Editor Françoise Mouly repositioned Art Spiegelman's silhouettes, inspired by Ad Reinhardt's black-on-black paintings, so that the North Tower's antenna breaks the "W" of the magazine's logo. Spiegelman wanted to see the emptiness, and find the awful/awe-filled image of all that disappeared the on 9/11. The silhouetted Twin Towers were printed in a fifth, black ink, on a field of black made up of the standard four color printing inks. An overprinted clear varnish helps create the ghost images that linger, insisting on their presence through the blackness.

At first glance, the cover appears to be totally black, but upon close examination it reveals the silhouettes of the World Trade Center towers in a slightly darker shade of black. In some situations, the ghost images only become visible when the magazine is tilted toward a light source.^[24] In September 2004, Spiegelman reprised the image on the cover of his book In the Shadow of No Towers, in which he relates his experience of the Twin Towers attack and the psychological after-effects.

"New Yorkistan"[link]

In the December 2001 issue the magazine printed a cover by Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz showing a map of New York in which various neighborhoods were labeled with humorous names reminiscent of Middle Eastern and Central Asian place names and referencing the neighborhood's real name or characteristics (e.g. "Fuhgeddabouditstan", "Botoxia"). The cover had some cultural resonance in the wake of September 11 and became a popular print and poster.

Controversial covers[link]

Crown Heights in 1993[link]

For the 1993 Valentine's Day issue, the magazine printed a cover by Art Spiegelman depicting a black woman and a Hasidic Jewish man kissing, referencing the Crown Heights riot of 1991.^[25][26] The cover was criticized by both black and Jewish observers.^[27] Jack Salzman and Cornel West describe the reaction to the cover as the magazine's "first national controversy."^[28]

2008 Obama cover satire and controversy[link]

Wikinews has related news: New Yorker's Obama cover sparks outrage

"The Politics of Fear", a cartoon by Barry Blitt featured on the cover of the July 21, 2008, issue, depicts then presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama in the turban and salwar kameez typical of many Muslims, fist bumping with his wife, Michelle, portrayed with an Afro and wearing camouflage trousers with an AK-47 assault rifle slung over her back. They are standing in the Oval Office, with a portrait of Osama Bin Laden hanging on the wall and an American flag burning in the fireplace in the background.^[29]

Many New Yorker readers saw the image as a lampoon of "The Politics of Fear", as the image was titled. Some of Obama's supporters as well as his presumptive Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, accused the magazine of publishing an incendiary cartoon whose irony could be lost on some readers. The New Yorker's editor David Remnick said: "The intent of the cover is to satirize the vicious and racist attacks and rumors and misconceptions about the Obamas that have been floating around in the blogosphere and are reflected in public opinion polls. What we set out to do was to throw all these images together, which are all over the top and to shine a kind of harsh light on them, to satirize them,"^[30] citing the excesses in the image to rebuff the concern that it could be misunderstood, even by those unfamiliar with the magazine.^[31][32] In an interview on Larry King Live shortly after the magazine issue began circulating, Obama said "Well, I know it was The New Yorker's attempt at satire... I don't think they were entirely successful with it..." But Obama also pointed to his own efforts to debunk the allegations portrayed in The New Yorker cover through a web site his campaign set up: "[They are] actually an insult against Muslim-Americans, something that we don't spend a lot of time talking about.""^[33][34]

Later that week, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart continued The New Yorker cover's argument about Obama stereotypes with a piece showcasing a montage of clips containing such stereotypes culled from various legitimate news sources.^[35] The New Yorker Obama cover was later parodied by Stewart and Stephen Colbert on the October 3, 2008, cover of Entertainment Weekly magazine, with Stewart as Obama and Colbert as Michelle, photographed exclusively for the magazine in New York City on September 18.^[36]

New Yorker covers are not always related to the contents of the magazine or are only tangentially so. In this case, the article in the July 21, 2008, issue about Obama did not discuss the attacks and rumors but rather Obama's political career to date. The New Yorker later endorsed Obama for president.

See also[link]

New York City portal

• Culture of New York City
• List of The New Yorker contributors
• Media of New York City

Books[link]

• Ross and the New Yorker by Dale Kramer (1951)
• The Years with Ross by James Thurber (1959)
• Ross, the New Yorker and Me by Jane Grant (1968)
• Here at The New Yorker by Brendan Gill (1975)
• About the New Yorker and Me by E.J. Kahn (1979)
• Onward and Upward: A Biography of Katharine S. White by Linda H. Davis (1987)
• At Seventy: More about the New Yorker and Me by E.J. Kahn (1988)
• Katharine and E.B. White: An Affectionate Memoir by Isabel Russell (1988)
• The Last Days of The New Yorker by Gigi Mahon (1989)
• Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel (1997)
• Here But Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and the New Yorker by Lillian Ross (1998)
• Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing by Ved Mehta (1998)
• Some Times in America: and a life in a year at the New Yorker by Alexander Chancellor (1999)
• The World Through a Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury by Mary F. Corey (1999)
• About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made by Ben Yagoda (2000)
• Covering the New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers from a Literary Institution by Françoise Mouly (2000)
• Defining New Yorker Humor by Judith Yaross Lee (2000)
• Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker, by Renata Adler (2000)
• Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross edited by Thomas Kunkel (2000; letters covering the years 1917 to 1951)
• New Yorker Profiles 1925–1992: A Bibliography compiled by Gail Shivel (2000)
• NoBrow: The Culture of Marketing – the Marketing of Culture by John Seabrook (2000)
• Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker by David Reminick and Henry Finder (2002)
• Christmas at The New Yorker: Stories, Poems, Humor, and Art (2003)
• A Life of Privilege, Mostly by Gardner Botsford (2003)
• Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker by Angela Bourke (2004)
• Let Me Finish by Roger Angell (Harcourt, 2006)

Movies[link]

• Top Hat and Tales: Harold Ross and the Making of the New Yorker (Carousel Film and Video, 2001, 47 minutes)^[37][38]

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikisource has a list of copyright renewals: The New Yorker

• The New Yorker official website
• Official mobile site
• A Guided Tour Through The New Yorker
• You Norker: A Forum for Readers of The New Yorker Magazine
• Boxer, Sarah. "A Gaggle of Cartoonists," The New York Times, February 14, 2000.
• New Yorker 1950–1955 album

Look up new yorker in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

New Yorker may refer to:

• A resident of New York City (see Demographics of New York City)
• A resident of New York state (see Demographics of New York)
• The New Yorker, a magazine
• A predecessor newspaper to Horace Greeley's New York Tribune
• NewYorker, a German fashion company
• The New Yorker Hotel
• Chrysler New Yorker, a car
• the New Yorker (NKP train), a train operated by the New York, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad between Chicago and Buffalo
• the New Yorker (PRR train), a train operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad between New York and Detroit
• The New Yorkers, a musical by Cole Porter
• a train operated by Amtrak as part of the Clocker service

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Turn On the Bright Lights is the debut studio album by American post-punk revival band Interpol, released in August 2002. The album was recorded in November 2001 at Tarquin Studios in Connecticut, and was co-produced, mixed and engineered by Peter Katis and Gareth Jones. It was released on August 19, 2002 in the United Kingdom and August 20 in the United States, through independent record label Matador Records. Upon release, the record peaked at number 101 on the UK Albums Chart. It reached number 158 on the Billboard 200 in the United States, as well as spending 73 weeks in the Billboard Independent Albums, peaking at number five.

"PDA," "NYC," "Obstacle 1" and "Say Hello to the Angels" were the singles from Turn On the Bright Lights, and a video was shot for each with the exception of "Say Hello to the Angels."

The album was certified Gold by the RIAA on August 29, 2011 for shipments of 500,000 copies.^[2]

Promotion and release[link]

The release of Turn On the Bright Lights was preceded by the marketing of the band's self-titled Interpol EP in June 2002, their first release for Matador. The EP contained three tracks: radio single "PDA", future single "NYC", and "Specialist". All three tracks later appeared on the album, with "Specialist" included as a bonus track in Australian and Japanese editions. Further promotion continued at the beginning of the following year, when the band played the 2003 NME Awards Tour alongside The Datsuns, The Polyphonic Spree and The Thrills.^[3]

Track listing[link]

All tracks written by Interpol.

1. "Untitled" – 3:56
2. "Obstacle 1" – 4:11
3. "NYC" – 4:20
4. "PDA" – 4:59
5. "Say Hello to the Angels" – 4:28
6. "Hands Away" – 3:05
7. "Obstacle 2" – 3:47
8. "Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down" – 6:28
9. "Roland" – 3:35
10. "The New" – 6:07
11. "Leif Erikson" – 4:00

Bonus tracks on Australian edition[link]

• "Specialist" – 6:39

Bonus tracks on Japanese edition[link]

Two different versions exist. One version has the following bonus tracks:

• "Interlude" – 1:02
• "Specialist" – 6:39

The other version has the following bonus tracks:

• "Hands Away" (Peel session)
• "Obstacle 2" (Peel session)
• "PDA" (video)
• "NYC" (video)
• "Obstacle 1" (video)

Bonus tracks on Mexican edition[link]

• "Interlude" – 1:02
• "Specialist" – 6:39
• "PDA" (video)
• "NYC" (video)
• "Obstacle 1" (video)

Critical reception[link]

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[4]
Drowned in Sound	(9/10)[5]
NME	(8/10)[6]
Pitchfork Media	(9.5/10)[7]
PopMatters	(9/10)[8]
Q	[9]
Robert Christgau	C+[10]
Rolling Stone	[11]

Interpol's debut album gained so much critical success that not only was it hailed as one of best debuts of 2002, but is considered by some to be one of the best records of the decade. Turn On the Bright Lights made several critics' Top 10 lists of 2002.

• Thee-O – #1
• Michael Azerrad – #1
• Chris Baldwin – #10
• Greg Beets – #2
• Eric Broome – #8
• Dana Buoniconti – #5
• Nick Catucci – #6
• Paul Clements – #4
• Dave Clifford – #4
• Ethan Covey – #8
• Corey du Browa – #8
• Cyndi Elliott – #7
• Norm Elrod – #3
• John Elsasser – #7

The rest of the list is located at The Village Voice.

Awards[link]

• #1 – Pitchfork Media: Top 50 Albums of 2002
• #3 – Pitchfork: Top 100 Albums of 2000–2004
• #20 – Pitchfork: Top 200 Albums of 2000s
• #5 – Stylus: Top 20 Albums of 2002
• #6 – Stylus: Top 50 Albums 2000–2005
• #13 – Stylus: Top 100 Albums of 2000s
• #10 – NME: Albums of 2002
• #8 – NME: Top Albums of the 00s
• #59 – Rolling Stone: 100 Best Albums of the Decade

Personnel[link]

• Paul Banks – lead vocals, guitar
• Daniel Kessler – lead guitar, backing vocals
• Carlos D – bass, keyboards
• Samuel Fogarino – drums, percussion

Chart performance[link]

Certifications[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Turn on the Bright Lights at Metacritic

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2012)

This article may contain wording that merely promotes the subject without imparting verifiable information. Please remove or replace such wording, unless you can cite independent sources that support the characterization. (May 2012)

Daphne Diana Joan Susanna Guinness (born 9 November 1967) is an artist of both British and Irish nationality. She also serves as an inspiration and muse to other artists of the avant-garde.^{[citation needed]} She is an heir by direct descent of Arthur Guinness, the 18th-century inventor of the beer that still bears his name.

Early life[link]

Her father is Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne, and the eldest son of Diana Mitford Mosley and Bryan Guinness. Diana was the daughter of David Freeman-Mitford, 2nd Baron Redesdale, the father of the celebrated Mitford sisters. Guinness's mother, Jonathan's second wife, was Suzanne Lisney (died 2005), of Cadaques, Spain, and Paris. Lisney was an artist and muse to Man Ray and Dali. When Daphne was 13, she became aware that she had a further three half-siblings by Susan "Shoe" Taylor, her father’s mistress.^[1]

Guinness is the granddaughter of The Hon. Diana Mitford, who first married Bryan Walter Guinness. Mitford divorced Guinness and married the leader of the British Union of Fascists, Sir Oswald Mosley. Daphne has said she did not know of Mosley's political affiliations, before she heard, in 1980, on the BBC news that he had died.^[1]

Her great-aunt Jessica gave her a taste for music, literature and politics. Jessica Mitford's causes included her involvement in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and then in the Communist Party in America.

As a child, Guinness grew up in the country houses owned by her family in England and Ireland. Holidays were spent in an 18th-century monastery in Cadaques, Spain. There her neighbours included Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Dieter Roth, and Richard Hamilton.^[2]

She remains close to her last remaining great-aunt Deborah, 'Debo', the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, whom she accompanied on her recent trip to NYC: a lecture tour promoting her latest memoir, ‘Wait for Me!’

Controversy[link]

She insists that she is not eccentric. ”I loathe the word," she says. "It has become devoid of meaning: it is a blanket statement hinting at lunacy. Perhaps 'bohemian' might be considered as an alternative word, if one needs to be labelled."^[3] She has maintained in statements published on her Twitter account that she did not refer to Victoria Beckham as an "ugly pig", as was alleged by the Sunday Times (UK).^[4][5] She also claimed to have used nail polish to color her lips.^[6]

Fashion[link]

Daphne Guinness is an important figure in the world of fashion, as a notable face, a collector, and an icon. At the request of Fashion Institute of Technology director Valerie Steele, she spent two years mounting an exhibition of a hundred displays of her clothing, which was staged within the context of her other projects, film and modelling. She is courted by many of the best-known names in fashion (such as Karl Lagerfeld, NARS, MAC, Akris, and Philip Treacy), working with them artistically or as a model or both.

Her best-known friend was the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Scheduled to model for charity on the runway the day his suicide was announced, Guinness veiled herself in mourning.

In January 2011, she was asked by Tom Ford to close his brilliant comeback womenswear show.

She creates and invents many objects herself, many inspired by her fascination with armour. She is known for a taste for skinny pants and platform pumps.^[7] She designs fashion, jewelry, and perfume for herself when she cannot find exactly what she wants to wear or buy. She has said that she created more than 100 pieces in 2010 alone.

Since 1994, she has been on the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame, which seeks to identify the best-dressed women in the world. In 2011, she created a make-up line for MAC cosmetics.^[8]

Inspiration and muse[link]

Daphne Guinness seeks to inspire young women through her intensely cultivated style and elegance. Lady Gaga is among them, as she discussed on a broadcast featured on SHOWstudio.com. Cathy Horyn of the New York Times asked Gaga about any influence by Isabella Blow and Daphne Guinness. Lady Gaga replied: “Isabella and Daphne are two exceptional human beings, women, icons. And more than that! They have helped me look inside myself. I’ve examined their lives and their personalities in order to understand myself better. Daphne, like Isabella, is a huge source of inspiration for me. I cherish their lives. I cherish them both. It is as if we are all cut from the same cloth”.^[9]

Maecenas[link]

She donates a signification portion of her assets to help artists, theatres, or libraries in difficulties in London.

Charity work[link]

She has walked in two of Naomi Campbell’s Fashion for Relief shows with the purpose of raising funds for disaster victims. In the same vein, in April 2008, she auctioned off a part of her wardrobe, with the entire proceeds going to a struggling British charity called Womankind Worldwide, which deals with women’s issues at home and abroad, such as domestic violence.

On 27 June 2012, through the auction house Christie's, she will auction off a hundred pieces of her clothing to raise money for the Isabella Blow Foundation, which Guinness founded to commemorate her late friend and bring attention to mental health issues.^[10][11]

Commitments[link]

In June 2010, for an undisclosed sum, she blocked the planned Christie’s auction of the wardrobe of Isabella Blow, her friend who committed suicide in 2007. This collection had inestimable artistic value. Asked by Suzy Menkes, and the Financial Times, why she intervened, she simply declared that she was not going to stand by whilst the memory of her friend "was scattered to the four winds". She intends for the Blow archive to be seen by students.

Art[link]

Daphne Guinness has worked in a variety of roles: artist, actress, muse, model, collector and designer.^[1] She is the muse of many photographers who are fascinated by her beauty and feel for artistic performance. Steven Klein, the renowned photographer of such celebrities as Madonna and Lady Gaga, chose Guinness for two Vogue Italia covers. In the first, she plays Jean Seberg in Romain Gary’s "Les Oiseaux vont mourir au Perou” In the other, she embodies Delphine Seyrig in Alain Resnais' masterpiece, ‘L’annee derniere a mariebad’.

David LaChapelle is a longtime friend and collaborator, and chose her to appear in his Maybach advertising campaign in two intricate pictures for the car's Zeppelin model. On another occasion, when working for LaChapelle, she spent six hours in a tank of water, immersed for up to two minutes at a time, to produce two underwater images, including the famous "Daphne Guinness in Water".

She is also featured in the series "Return to Eden", which has not yet been released.

In September 2011, more than half a million visitors attended the Alexander McQueen exhibition “Savage Beauty”, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Shortly thereafter, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology devoted one of its galleries to about a hundred of Daphne’s most important pieces.^[12]

On 31 January 2012, Styleite.com reported that Guinness had put her art-filled Fifth Avenue apartment for sale for $14M USD.^[13]

Filmography[link]

Film producer[link]

Daphne Guinness has produced and edited three short films :

• "Cashback", short film nominated for an Academy Award in 2004, was later made into a feature-length version. Guinness produced this film for the photographer Sean Ellis.^[1]

• "The Phenomenology of Body" was a hymn to the evolution of the female wardrobe over millenia, and is available on the NY Times website.

• "Mnemosyne" was an 'anti-commercial' made to comment on the scent, "DAPHNE", that Guinness made at the request of Comme des Garcons. It was distinct enough from the product it supported that that the film was nominated for a Webby award and garnered independent attention.

Acting[link]

• In 2011, Guinness starred in Joe Lally’s film, "The Murder of Jean Seberg". Seberg was the tragic American actress who was Jean-Luc Godard's muse, and the one-time wife of the French writer Romain Gary. Seberg was politically engaged and would fight alongside the Black Panthers.^[2]

• In December 2011, she was photographed, while recorded livestream, by Nick Knight of SHOWstudio.com for 36 hours, resulting in five short films which were played in the windows of the Parisian department store, Le Printemps. In several of these films, Guinness, a soprano, sang opera arias, making her public musical debut.

• At the end of 2011, photographers Markus Klinko and Indrani, Daphne Guinness, and stylist GK Reid produced "The Legend of Lady White Snake", a film based on an ancient Chinese legend, wherein Daphne played the complex central role of Lady White Snake.^[14] Bernard-Henri Lévy wrote her dialogue for the film.^[15] This was made possible by Guinness's large collection of contacts. The icon was instructed to wear her most reptilian pair, and to make sure they matched.^[16]

Personal life[link]

In 1985, when she moved to New York City, she "inherited" many of her sister Catherine's friends. In this way, Guinness came to know Andy Warhol, for whom her sister had been a personal assistant for many years. In 1987, she married Spyros Niarchos, the second son of Stavros Niarchos, the shipping magnate. The couple had three children. Her settlement, obtained at the time of her 1999 divorce, is for an undisclosed sum, which was added to her Guinness inheritance.

She lives in London and Manhattan with her three children: Nicolas Stavros Niarchos (born 1989), Lex Spyros Niarchos (born 1991), and Ines Sophia Niarchos (born 1995).^[1]

She has been romantically involved with French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy for a number of years, and cuts a lone figure at events.^[17] Since 2008, the couple have appeared publicly more often together. In an issue Harper's Bazaar (USA) dated February 2011, Guinness confirmed to journalist Derek Blasberg: ‘He is obviously the love of my life.”^[5]

References[link]

1. ^ ^{a b c d e} Garratt, Sheryl. Daphne Guinness's glove story, Daily Telegraph, June 25, 2011. Accessed May 3, 2012.
2. ^ ^{a b} http://showstudio.com/contributor/daphne_guinness
3. ^ Sauers, Jenna. Field Guide: Daphne Guinness and Her Thoughts on Hitler, Jezebel, September 22, 2011. Accessed May 3, 2012.
4. ^ Attwood, Naomi. Daphne Guinness defends herself on Twitter and denies she was rude about Victoria Beckham!, Grazia Daily, March 14, 2011. Accessed May 3, 2012.
5. ^ ^{a b} Blasberg, Derek. The Real Daphne Guinness, Harper's Bazaar, February 11, 2011. Accessed May 3, 2012. Page 2
6. ^ Wellman, Victoria. Daphne Guinness admits she's worn nail polish on her LIPS (so how on earth did she get it off?), Daily Mail, December 21, 2011. Accessed May 3, 2012.
7. ^ http://www.zimbio.com/Daphne+Guinness
8. ^ http://www.maccosmetics.com/whats_new/8276/index.tmpl
9. ^ Daphne Guinness for MAC, Style and Wisdom, December 12, 2011. Accessed May 3, 2012.
10. ^ http://www.zimbio.com/Daphne+Guinness/articles/IOdRIGXeqsn/Daphne+Guinness+auctioning+clothes
11. ^ Rawi, Maysa. The Daphne Guinness collection: Heiress' wardrobe set to fetch thousands at charity auction, Daily Mail, April 13, 2012. Accessed May 3, 2012.
12. ^ Mead, Rebecca. Precarious Beauty, The New Yorker, September 26, 2011. Accessed May 3, 2012.
13. ^ Fenner, Justin. Daphne Guinness’s Fifth Avenue Apartment Is On The Market For $14M, Styleite, January 31, 2012. Accessed May 3, 2012.
14. ^ Sparks, Cator. Do It Daphne! Guinness Shines in Short Film Based on Ancient Chinese Legend, Stylelist, March 4, 2012. Accessed May 3, 2012.
15. ^ Feitelberg, Rosemary. Daphne Guinness and 'The Legend of Lady White Snake', Women's Wear Daily, February 7, 2012. Accessed May 3, 2012.
16. ^ Trujillo, Krissy. [1] Accessed May 12, 2012.
17. ^ http://stylecelebration.blogspot.com/2011/11/daphne-guiness-finally-admits-to.html

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Richard Dawkins
Dawkins in 2010 at Cooper Union in New York City
Born	Clinton Richard Dawkins (1941-03-26) 26 March 1941 (age 71) Nairobi, Kenya Colony
Nationality	British
Education	MA, DPhil (Oxon)
Alma mater	Balliol College, Oxford
Occupation	Ethologist
Years active	1967–present
Employer	University of California, Berkeley University of Oxford
Organization	Fellow of the Royal Society Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
Known for	Gene-centered view of evolution, concept of the meme, as well as advocacy of atheism and science.
Notable work(s)	The Selfish Gene (1976) The Extended Phenotype (1982) The Blind Watchmaker (1986) The God Delusion (2006)
Influenced by	Charles Darwin, Ronald Fisher, George C. Williams, W. D. Hamilton, Daniel Dennett, Bertrand Russell, Nikolaas Tinbergen, John Maynard Smith, Robert Trivers
Spouse	Marian Stamp Dawkins (m. 1967–1984) Eve Barham (m. 1984–?) Lalla Ward (m. 1992–present)
Children	Juliet Emma Dawkins (born 1984)
Parents	Clinton John Dawkins Jean Mary Vyvyan (née Ladner)
Awards	ZSL Silver Medal (1989) Faraday Award (1990) Kistler Prize (2001)
Website
The Richard Dawkins Foundation

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford,^[1] and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.^[2]

Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.^[3]

Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement.^[4] He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief."^[5] As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.^[6]

Biography[link]

Dawkins was born in Nairobi, Kenya.^[7] His father, Clinton John Dawkins (1915–2010),^[8] was an agricultural civil servant in the British colonial service, in Nyasaland (now Malawi). Dawkins has a younger sister.^[9] His father was called up into the King's African Rifles during World War II,^[10][11] returning to England in 1949, when Dawkins was eight. His father had inherited a country estate, Over Norton Park, which he turned into a commercial farm.^[8] Both his parents were interested in natural sciences; they answered Dawkins' questions in scientific terms.^[12]

Dawkins describes his childhood as "a normal Anglican upbringing".^[13] He was confirmed, and embraced Christianity until his mid-teens, at which point he concluded that the theory of evolution was a better explanation for life's complexity, and ceased believing in a god.^[9] Dawkins states: "the main residual reason why I was religious was from being so impressed with the complexity of life and feeling that it had to have a designer, and I think it was when I realised that Darwinism was a far superior explanation that pulled the rug out from under the argument of design. And that left me with nothing."^[9]

He attended Oundle, a Church of England school,^[9] from 1954 to 1959. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Nobel Prize–winning ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen, graduating in 1962. He continued as a research student under Tinbergen's supervision, receiving his M.A. and D.Phil. degrees by 1966, and remained a research assistant for another year.^[7] Tinbergen was a pioneer in the study of animal behaviour, particularly in the areas of instinct, learning and choice.^[14] Dawkins' research in this period concerned models of animal decision-making.^[15]

From 1967 to 1969, he was an assistant professor of zoology at the University of California, Berkeley. During this period, the students and faculty at UC Berkeley were largely opposed to the ongoing Vietnam War, and Dawkins became heavily involved in the anti-war demonstrations and activities.^[16] He returned to the University of Oxford in 1970 taking a position as a lecturer, and in 1990, as a reader in zoology. In 1995 he was appointed Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, a position that had been endowed by Charles Simonyi with the express intention that the holder "be expected to make important contributions to the public understanding of some scientific field",^[17] and that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins.^[18]

Since 1970 he has been a fellow of New College.^[19] He has delivered a number of inaugural and other lectures, including the Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture (1989), first Erasmus Darwin Memorial Lecture (1990), Michael Faraday Lecture (1991), T. H. Huxley Memorial Lecture (1992), Irvine Memorial Lecture (1997), Sheldon Doyle Lecture (1999), Tinbergen Lecture (2004) and Tanner Lectures (2003).^[7] In 1991 he gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for Children. He has also served as editor of a number of journals, and has acted as editorial advisor to the Encarta Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia of Evolution. He is a senior editor of the Council for Secular Humanism's Free Inquiry magazine, for which he also writes a column. He has been a member of the editorial board of Skeptic magazine since its foundation.^[20]

He has sat on judging panels for awards as diverse as the Royal Society's Faraday Award and the British Academy Television Awards,^[7] and has been president of the Biological Sciences section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004 Balliol College, Oxford instituted the Dawkins Prize, awarded for "outstanding research into the ecology and behaviour of animals whose welfare and survival may be endangered by human activities".^[21] In September 2008, he retired from his professorship, announcing plans to "write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in 'anti-scientific' fairytales."^[22]

Personal life[link]

On 19 August 1967, Dawkins married fellow ethologist Marian Stamp in Annestown, County Waterford, Ireland;^[23] they divorced in 1984. Later that same year, on 1 June, he married Eve Barham (19 August 1951^[24]–28 February 1999) in Oxford. They had a daughter, Juliet Emma Dawkins (born 1984, Oxford).^[24] Dawkins and Barham also divorced^[25] and she later died of cancer.^[26][27] In 1992 he married actress Lalla Ward^[25] in Kensington and Chelsea, London.^[24] Dawkins met her through their mutual friend Douglas Adams,^[28] who had worked with her on the BBC's Doctor Who.

Work[link]

Evolutionary biology[link]

Dawkins at the University of Texas at Austin, March 2008

In his scientific works, Dawkins is best known for his popularisation of the gene-centred view of evolution. This view is most clearly set out in his books The Selfish Gene (1976), where he notes that "all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities", and The Extended Phenotype (1982), in which he describes natural selection as "the process whereby replicators out-propagate each other".^[29] In his role as an ethologist, interested in animal behaviour and its relation to natural selection, he advocates the idea that the gene is the principal unit of selection in evolution.

Dawkins has consistently been sceptical about non-adaptive processes in evolution (such as spandrels, described by Gould and Lewontin)^[30] and about selection at levels "above" that of the gene.^[31] He is particularly sceptical about the practical possibility or importance of group selection as a basis for understanding altruism.^[32] This behaviour appears at first to be an evolutionary paradox, since helping others costs precious resources and decreases one's own fitness. Previously, many had interpreted this as an aspect of group selection: individuals were doing what was best for the survival of the population or species as a whole, and not specifically for themselves. British evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton had used the gene-centred view to explain altruism in terms of inclusive fitness and kin selection − that individuals behave altruistically toward their close relatives, who share many of their own genes.^[33][a] Similarly, Robert Trivers, thinking in terms of the gene-centred model, developed the theory of reciprocal altruism, whereby one organism provides a benefit to another in the expectation of future reciprocation.^[34] Dawkins popularised these ideas in The Selfish Gene, and developed them in his own work.^[35]

He has also been strongly critical of the Gaia philosophy theory of the independent scientist James Lovelock.^[36][37][38]

Critics of Dawkins' approach suggest that taking the gene as the unit of selection − of a single event in which an individual either succeeds or fails to reproduce − is misleading, but that the gene could be better described as a unit of evolution − of the long-term changes in allele frequencies in a population.^[39] In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains that he is using George C. Williams' definition of the gene as "that which segregates and recombines with appreciable frequency."^[40] Another common objection is that genes cannot survive alone, but must cooperate to build an individual, and therefore cannot be an independent "unit".^[41] In The Extended Phenotype, Dawkins suggests that because of genetic recombination and sexual reproduction, from an individual gene's viewpoint all other genes are part of the environment to which it is adapted.

Advocates for higher levels of selection such as Richard Lewontin, David Sloan Wilson, and Elliot Sober suggest that there are many phenomena (including altruism) that gene-based selection cannot satisfactorily explain. The philosopher Mary Midgley, with whom Dawkins clashed in print concerning The Selfish Gene,^[42][43] has criticised gene selection, memetics and sociobiology as being excessively reductionist^[44] and suggests that the popularity of Dawkins' work is due to factors in the Zeitgeist such as the increased individualism of the Thatcher/Reagan decades.^[45]

In a set of controversies over the mechanisms and interpretation of evolution (the so-called 'Darwin Wars'),^[46][47] one faction was often named after Dawkins and its rival after the American palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, reflecting the pre-eminence of each as a populariser of pertinent ideas.^[48][49] In particular, Dawkins and Gould have been prominent commentators in the controversy over sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, with Dawkins generally approving and Gould generally being critical.^[50] A typical example of Dawkins' position was his scathing review of Not in Our Genes by Steven Rose, Leon J. Kamin and Richard C. Lewontin.^[51] Two other thinkers on the subject often considered to be allied to Dawkins are Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett; Dennett has promoted a gene-centred view of evolution and defended reductionism in biology.^[52] Despite their academic disagreements, Dawkins and Gould did not have a hostile personal relationship, and Dawkins dedicated a large portion of his 2003 book A Devil's Chaplain posthumously to Gould, who had died the previous year.

Dawkins' book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution expounds the evidence for biological evolution.^[53] All of his previous works dealing with evolution had assumed its truth, and not explicitly provided the evidence to this effect. Dawkins felt that this represented a gap in his oeuvre, and decided to write the book to coincide with Darwin's bicentennial year.^[54]

Meme[link]

Dawkins coined the word meme (the behavioural equivalent of a gene) as a way to encourage readers to think about how Darwinian principles might be extended beyond the realm of genes.^[55] Indeed, it was intended as an extension of his "replicators" argument, but it took on a life of its own in the hands of other authors such as Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore. These popularisations then led to the emergence of the field of memetics, from which he has distanced himself.^[56]

Dawkins' memes refer to any cultural entity that an observer might consider a replicator of a certain idea or a complex of ideas. He hypothesised that people could view many cultural entities as capable of such replication, generally through exposure to humans, who have evolved as efficient (although not perfect) copiers of information and behaviour. Memes are not always copied perfectly, and might indeed become refined, combined or otherwise modified with other ideas, resulting in new memes, which may themselves prove more, or less, efficient replicators than their predecessors, thus providing a framework for a hypothesis of cultural evolution, analogous to the theory of biological evolution based on genes.^[57]

Although Dawkins invented the specific term meme independently, he has not claimed that the idea itself was entirely novel,^[58] and there have been other expressions for similar ideas in the past. For instance, John Laurent has suggested that the term may have derived from the work of the little-known German biologist Richard Semon.^[59] In 1904 Semon published Die Mneme (which appeared in English in 1924 as The Mneme). This book discussed the cultural transmission of experiences, with insights parallel to those of Dawkins. Laurent also found the term mneme used in Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the White Ant (1926), and has highlighted the similarities to Dawkins' concept.^[59] Author James Gleick describes Dawkins’ concept of the meme as "his most famous memorable invention, far more influential than his selfish genes or his later proselytizing against religiosity".^[60]

Criticism of creationism[link]

Dawkins is a prominent critic of creationism (the religious belief that humanity, life and the universe were created by a deity,^[61] without recourse to evolution^[62]). He has described the Young Earth creationist view that the Earth is only a few thousand years old as "a preposterous, mind-shrinking falsehood",^[63] and his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker, contains a sustained critique of the argument from design, an important creationist argument. In the book, Dawkins argued against the watchmaker analogy made famous by the 18th-century English theologian William Paley in his book Natural Theology. Paley argued that, just as a watch is too complicated and too functional to have sprung into existence merely by accident, so too must all living things, with their far greater complexity, be purposefully designed. Dawkins shares the view generally held by scientists that natural selection is sufficient to explain the apparent functionality and non-random complexity of the biological world, and can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, albeit as an automatic, nonintelligent, blind watchmaker.^[64]

Dawkins at the 34th annual conference of American Atheists, 2008

In 1986 Dawkins participated in an Oxford Union debate, in which he and English biologist John Maynard Smith debated Young Earth creationist A. E. Wilder-Smith and Edgar Andrews, president of the Biblical Creation Society.^[b] In general, however, Dawkins has followed the advice of his late colleague Stephen Jay Gould and refused to participate in formal debates with creationists because "what they seek is the oxygen of respectability", and doing so would "give them this oxygen by the mere act of engaging with them at all". He suggests that creationists "don't mind being beaten in an argument. What matters is that we give them recognition by bothering to argue with them in public."^[65]

In a December 2004 interview with American journalist Bill Moyers, Dawkins said that "among the things that science does know, evolution is about as certain as anything we know." When Moyers questioned him on the use of the word theory, Dawkins stated that "evolution has been observed. It's just that it hasn't been observed while it's happening." He added that "it is rather like a detective coming on a murder after the scene... the detective hasn't actually seen the murder take place, of course. But what you do see is a massive clue... Huge quantities of circumstantial evidence. It might as well be spelled out in words of English."^[66]

Dawkins has ardently opposed the inclusion of intelligent design in science education, describing it as "not a scientific argument at all, but a religious one".^[67] He has been referred to in the media as "Darwin's Rottweiler",^[68] a reference to English biologist T. H. Huxley, who was known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas. He has been a strong critic of the British organisation Truth in Science, which promotes the teaching of creationism in state schools, and he plans—through the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science—to subsidise the delivery of books, DVDs and pamphlets to schools, in order to counteract what he has described as an "educational scandal".^[69]

Advocacy of atheism[link]

Dawkins lecturing on his book The God Delusion, 24 June 2006.

Dawkins is an outspoken atheist and a prominent critic of religion. In an interview with Thomas Bass for a book published in 1994 he described himself as a "fairly militant atheist".^[70] In 1996, when asked if he would prefer to be known as a scientist or a militant atheist, he replied "Bertrand Russell called himself the Passionate Sceptic. It's aiming high, but I'll shoot for that."^[71] Dawkins is an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society,^[72] a vice-president of the British Humanist Association (since 1996),^[7] a Distinguished Supporter of the Humanist Society of Scotland,^[73] a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board,^[74] a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism,^[75] and a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.^[76] In 2003 he became a signatory of the humanist manifesto Humanism and Its Aspirations, published by the American Humanist Association.^[77] As a result of his advocacy of atheism, Dawkins has sometimes been described as a vocal, militant rationalist,^[78][79] and as "the UK's Chief Atheist".^[80]

Dawkins believes that his own atheism is the logical extension of his understanding of evolution^[81] and that religion is largely incompatible with science.^[82] In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins wrote:

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.^[83]

In his 1991 essay "Viruses of the Mind" (from which the term faith-sufferer originated), he suggested that memetic theory might analyse and explain the phenomenon of religious belief and some of the common characteristics of religions, such as the belief that punishment awaits non-believers. According to Dawkins, faith − belief that is not based on evidence − is one of the world's great evils. He claims it to be analogous to the smallpox virus, though more difficult to eradicate.^[84] Dawkins is well known for his contempt for religious extremism, from Islamist terrorism^[85] to Christian fundamentalism; but he has also argued with liberal believers and religious scientists, from biologists Kenneth Miller^[86] and Francis Collins^[87] to theologians Alister McGrath and Richard Harries.^[88] Dawkins has stated that his opposition to religion is twofold, claiming it to be both a source of conflict and a justification for belief without evidence.^[89] However, he describes himself as a "cultural Christian",^[90] and proposed the slogan "Atheists for Jesus".^[91]