My New Yorker

Gone: The Last Days of the Newtonite

by Mark Bazer

As I write this, The New Yorker is dead. It still comes out every week, or almost every week. . . . Otherwise, not a single defining element of the magazine remains.

-- from the preface to Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker, by Renata Adler

As i made my way through Renata Adler's impassioned and brave treatise on the unfortunate -- and, yes, unnecessary -- decline of the New Yorker, it became clear how sadly similar our journalistic experiences had been: Ms. Adler's with the esteemed Gotham periodical, for which she wrote and toiled so many years, and mine with my high-school newspaper, Newton North's Newtonite, for which I edited the sports page and attended many a field-hockey match.

Oh, would that it were not true! But as I write this, the Newtonite, too, is dead.

Like the New Yorker, which "used, from time to time, to publish the definitive piece on a subject," the Newtonite in my day achieved excellence in its stirring and complete reportage. The proud jury-duty experience of Ms. Handspicker, social-studies teacher; junior Pat Leavey's part-time job at a local veterinary clinic; the boys' track team's trouncing of North Quincy. Students, furthermore, could trust that each of these Newtonite pieces had been scrutinized (unofficially, of course) by the school's principal.

And if, as Ms. Adler writes, New Yorker "readers, ordinarily, turned first to the cartoons," we had our counterpart: our readers seemed most interested in the cafeteria's meal listings for the upcoming two weeks. And certainly Adler could be writing for both of us when she muses, "There is a particularly strong bond, almost of affection, in an audience that shares a sense of what is funny."

It has, on occasion, been argued that the Newtonite, to which I came in 1989, was already in decline by the late '80s. But the reality is that I found myself immersed in the biweekly's last golden age. I joined the Newtonite midway through my sophomore year. The editor was David Leventhal. Mr. Leventhal was a solid student, a loving editor, and, not infrequently, a trusting friend. And it is here that I must take issue with the other two memoirs that have been written about the Newtonite.

Though both Rachel Hitch's I Never Got My Own Mac Plus and Dan Finkelstein's Newtonite Noogies pretend to remember Mr. Leventhal with affection, it's remarkable how far both authors -- in particular Ms. Hitch -- travel in their prose to disparage the man. Ms. Hitch repeatedly returns to a wholly fabricated story of Mr. Leventhal's three-day suspension for selling hits off a bottle of Cool Whip. Of course this could never have been the case, as Cool Whip comes in a tub, not a nitrous-filled can. If Dave had one vice, it was mimeograph-sniffing.

None of this is to argue that Hitch and Finkelstein weren't pivotal figures in and around the Newtonite's classroom. If Mr. Leventhal was the father, then Ms. Hitch was the mother and Mr. Finkelstein the son. (The spirit, as Adler also coincidentally writes of the New Yorker, was J.D. Salinger. Or maybe it was that kid who dressed up as the tiger at football games.) Alas, it eventually became clear that Mr. Leventhal was being forced out of his editorship -- the story whispered in the hallways was that his parents were making him start college that fall. Soon after he left for Brown, all the things Mr. Leventhal had steered the paper clear of -- petty cliques, Career Day, the tech-voc department -- became key components of the Newtonite, rendering the paper no different from any other high-school paper. The new editor (who, in the interest of full disclosure, was me) even added a dedications page, on which sad souls could anonymously send their love to one another.

Today the Newtonite continues to win its share of awards, but the paper's integrity has been swallowed whole, as if by a man who swallows things whole. In perhaps the clearest possible indication of any publication's demise, the Newtonite's editorial operation now serves merely as a wing of the advertising department. In last year's graduation issue, a two-page spread was devoted to a story of parents' undying love for their senior daughter. Three pages later, a full-page ad -- paid for by these same parents -- proclaimed, "Jenna -- Newton Tiger to Princeton Tiger. Atta Girl! Love, Mom and Dad."

Coincidence? Once it might have been. Today, sadly, it's a different story.

Mark Bazer is on staff at Playboy.com.