The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor looks at the New Yorker of editor David Remnick -- not to mention Remnick himself.

An excerpt:

Last February, after U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney had peppered a friend with bird shot while hunting quail in Texas, The New Yorker magazine pulled its cover art evoking Mardi Gras in a battered New Orleans and instead ran a cartoon mocking the hunting accident. A parody of the Brokeback Mountain movie poster that shows two pensive cowboys staring in opposite directions, the new cartoon depicted Cheney in a Stetson blowing the smoke off his gun barrel while an alarmed-looking George W. Bush appears behind his shoulder. It was plugged-in; it was political; it gave readers, even those regulars by now well accustomed to the magazine's newsy agenda, a little frisson. Here was the venerable New Yorker cracking jokes about the week's headlines like some comic on Saturday Night Live.

"A week where the Vice-President shoots his friend in the face, I'm supposed to let that opportunity go?" demands David Remnick, the magazine's editor since 1998 and the ebullient newshound who has led it into this increasingly topical territory. "It's irresistible."

After years of red ink, Remnick has made the magazine profitable and pushed circulation over the million mark. He has done so without compromising The New Yorker's impeccable editorial standards, its commitment to the best of both journalism and short fiction, but he has also greatly sharpened its political focus. With editorialist Hendrik Hertzberg leading the charge in The Talk of the Town section, the magazine now provides a weekly evisceration of the Bush regime, and it is credited by media critics with being the first U.S. publication, after an initial false start, to question the administration's justification of the war in Iraq. In 2004, The New Yorker did something it had never done in 79 years of publishing: It endorsed a presidential candidate, backing Democrat John Kerry.

"It was ridiculous that we would take a political stance on everything from Vietnam to Watergate, and a presidential election comes along and we not supposed to express an opinion," Remnick said during a recent visit to Toronto to promote Reporting, a collection of his own writing for the magazine. "It seemed overly decorous, faithful to a principle lost in the mists of time."

Indeed, Remnick is loath to agree The New Yorker is newly politicized; he argues the magazine has always taken a stand and that his version simply reflects the zeitgeist.

"It's a very political moment. The nineties were about the end of history, the endless boom; there was a kind of overpleasant millennial moment. . . . It was bogus. Global warming was happening in the nineties, we just weren't paying attention."

After Sept. 11, 2001, we were and, to Americans, issues of domestic and especially foreign policy suddenly seemed pressing. That day, Remnick phoned Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter whose recent scoops on the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and on the Pentagon's plans for Iran have shaken the world, and said, "I guess I know what you are going to be doing for the next number of years."