The New Yorker

For the past 50 years, the job of Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live,” has been to make the guest hosts of the show—Jennifer Lopez, Lizzo, Jon Hamm—look good, and to corral the egos and talents on his staff into getting the program on the air, live. Since the show’s début, in 1975, he has fine-tuned the process, paying attention to shifting cultural winds. What began as an avant-garde variety show is now mainstream. \(Amy Poehler characterizes calls it “the show your parents used to have sex to that you now watch from your computer in the middle of the day.”\) But the formula is essentially the same. Michaels compares “S.N.L.” to a Snickers bar: people expect a certain amount of peanuts, a certain amount of caramel, and a certain amount of chocolate. The show has good years and bad, like the New York Yankees, or the Dow, and the audience has come to feel something like ownership of it. Just about all viewers of “S.N.L.” believe that its funniest years were the ones when they were in high school. Michaels has been referred to as Obi-Wan Kenobi \(Tracy Morgan\), the Great and Powerful Oz \(David Spade, Kate McKinnon\), Tom Ripley \(Bill Hader\). “There’s so many people who, their whole lives, have been trying to figure him out,” Hader said. The show’s cast members and writers have speculated for years about the secret behind his tenure. “It’s him and Hitchcock,” John Mulaney told Susan Morrison \(@sumolini\). “No one else has had this kind of longevity.” Half of them believe that Michaels has repeatedly been able to remake the show for a new audience because he’s a once-in-a-lifetime talent. The other half wonder whether Michaels, gnomic and almost comically elusive, is a blank screen onto which they’ve all projected a lifetime of hopes and fears and dark jokes—whether he’s just a backdrop for the ever-shifting brilliance of the country’s best comic minds. In an excerpt from her forthcoming book, Morrison speaks with Tina Fey, Bill Hader, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, Chevy Chase, and others about the enigmatic producer: https://lnkd.in/gAQg3hhy

Lillian Ross’s profile of Ernest Hemingway for The New Yorker was a shock and a scandal when it was published, in 1950. It portrayed the writer, who had cultivated a laconic and oracular air through his stories and novels, as a voluble, pidgin-talking clown. “What makes the Hemingway-Ross moment so persistently fascinating, though, is that Hemingway was, in public, resolutely unoffended by the profile, and Ross just as resolutely unapologetic about her purposes,” Adam Gopnik writes. “It remains a small, eternal mystery not just of the history of the magazine but of the act of reporting itself: what her intentions were, what his intentions were, and why—when the tangle of their intentions made the world think that she had set out to ridicule him and succeeded—they agreed to agree that her intentions were actually pure and the profile was an act of perfect friendship.” One hypothesis is that Hemingway genuinely thought that the opining and the idiosyncrasies were charming—which, perhaps, they had been, in a drunken, egocentric kind of way. Why should he mind seeing it put down on paper? He had, at that point, spent so many years parading his oddities to the praise of his entourage that it may never have occurred to him that anyone might find them ridiculous. That Ross and her editor, William Shawn, might not have seen it as an evisceration is also possible. What writers want, and what editors celebrate when writers land them, are scenes, memorable moments, unguarded little cinematic explosions. The Hemingway profile is full of such scenes—Hemingway shyly buying a coat at Abercrombie & Fitch; Hemingway sharing caviar with Marlene Dietrich, whom he called the Kraut—and Ross and Shawn may have been too delighted with what those moments did to think very hard about what they meant. At the link in our bio, Gopnik reflects on the infamous profile and its aftermath. Illustration by Barry Blitt; Source photograph courtesy Lillian Ross Estate. #NewYorker100

Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is hard for any high-school band to tackle, but the Carmel High School marching band, one of the best in the country, had to play it from memory, while marching, dancing, and crab-stepping sideways across the field. https://lnkd.in/ghc_kHMF

Lillian Ross’s 1950 profile of Ernest Hemingway was widely regarded as ruinous. But Hemingway himself didn’t see it that way. https://lnkd.in/g3MH4W2a

A cartoon by Joe Dator. #NewYorkerCartoons Sign up for our Humor newsletter and get cartoons delivered straight to your in-box: https://lnkd.in/gZdTeNFX

There are more than 20,000 high-school band programs in the country, some with as many as 400 members. In our Anniversary Issue, Burkhard Bilger reports on the competitive marching-band circuit. #NewYorker100 https://lnkd.in/ghxNQRV2

Since its inception, the Consumer Financial Bureau Protection agency has tackled a broad range of abuses by financial firms. Now the Trump Administration, under the advisement of Elon Musk, is trying to dismantle the agency. “For a dozen years, the C.F.P.B. has been the financial cop on the beat,” Elizabeth Warren, who helped create the agency, said. “It has found more than $21 billion in fraud and scams, and scooped up that money and returned it directly to the people who were cheated. Now Elon Musk comes in and says, ‘Let’s fire the cops.’ What could possibly go wrong?” If the agency is closed, she continued, “it’s open season on everyone who has a credit card, a mortgage, a car loan, a payday loan, a student loan, or uses an online financial app.” Read more about the implications of C.F.P.B. shuttering its doors—and why Musk is personally invested in the effort: https://lnkd.in/gvFTs7H8

There are more than 20,000 high-school band programs in America, some with as many as 400 members. “Over the past 30 years, their shows have evolved into spectacles that John Philip Sousa couldn’t have imagined,” Burkhard Bilger writes. The top bands have dozens of staff, budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and fleets of trucks for their instruments, props, costumes, and sound systems. “They don’t just parade up and down the field playing fight songs. They flow across it in shifting tableaux, with elaborate themes and spandex-clad dancers, playing full symphonic scores.” Students rehearse intensely, not to play well at football games, but to prepare for a series of fiercely competitive marching-band contests in the fall, culminating in the Grand National Championships, in Indianapolis. The area is “the capital of the new marching-band culture,” Bilger writes, and has two of the country’s most successful marching band programs: the Avon High School Marching Black and Gold and the Carmel High School Marching Greyhounds. For last year’s nationals, the Carmel marching band performed Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. “The concerto was hard for any high-school band to tackle, yet the Carmel musicians had to play it from memory, while marching, dancing, and crab-stepping sideways across the field,” Bilger writes. “It’s hard to think of another group activity, past or present, of such complexity.” For our 100th Anniversary Issue, Bilger follows three bands to the national championships and reports on the competitive marching-band circuit. Read more: https://lnkd.in/g3qZyd4J

A cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan. #NewYorkerCartoons Sign up for our Humor newsletter and get cartoons delivered straight to your in-box: https://lnkd.in/gNHX_UKr

“I have always longed to be known, truly known, by another human being.” In a new work of fiction by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, drawn from her forthcoming novel “Dream Count,” a Nigerian travel writer living in the D.C. area becomes engaged to a man named Chuka—and realizes that she cannot go through with the marriage. Read it in full: https://lnkd.in/g53GJRbd #NewYorker100