Culture industries increasingly use our data to sell us their products. It’s time to make use of their data to review them. To that end, we created the Post45 Data Collective, an open access site that peer reviews and publishes literary and cultural data. This a partnership between the Data Collective and Public Books, a series called Hacking the Culture Industries, brings you data-driven essays that change how we understand audiobooks, bestselling books, streaming music, video games, influential literary institutions akin to the Latest York Times and the Latest Yorker, and more. Together, they show a latest way of understanding how culture is made, and the way we will make it higher.
—Laura McGrath and Dan Sinykin
“View of the World from Ninth Avenue” is a famous Latest Yorker cover, from 1976. Illustrated by Saul Steinberg, its lower half includes a meticulously detailed aerial view of Manhattan’s Ninth and Tenth Avenues, with the Hudson River cutting a thick horizontal line over town grid; above the river, squeezed into the duvet’s upper half, is the remainder of the world.
Latest Jersey figures as a barely there brown stripe. Beyond Jersey are a handful of monuments scattered across blank space the colour of wheat, which is labelled, seemingly at random, with an assortment of American place names: “Los Angeles,” “Chicago,” “Utah.” In the space, the Pacific is a skinny, pale-blue strip that offers technique to three undifferentiated white hills labelled “China,” “Japan,” and “Russia.” The remainder of Europe and Asia are missing; Africa is conspicuously absent. The duvet’s warped vision of the world is a visible representation of a longstanding joke: Latest Yorkers see the remainder of the world as a mere suburb of town.
The Latest Yorker’s own relationship to geography has shifted over time. When the magazine was founded, by Harold Ross, in 1925, it aimed to be “a mirrored image in word and movie of metropolitan life”—one which was “avowedly published for a metropolitan audience.” But, for the majority of its life, the magazine has worked to forged a far wider net. Around 1945, it began commonly featuring dispatches from foreign countries, in its “Letter from” format. In 1946, the magazine published John Hersey’s landmark “Hiroshima,” marking the start of a slew of watershed publications attending to geopolitical affairs. Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” for example, was published in 1963, while Jonathan Schell’s “The Village of Ben Suc” appeared in 1967. The magazine had seemingly traded in crude cartoons and a metropolitan ethos for decidedly cosmopolitan credentials.
But what of the Latest Yorker’s fiction section? Did it transform alongside the remainder of the magazine, shifting from a metropolitan to a world imagination? And, if the magazine’s cosmopolitanism is reflected on this section, how so? Has it been textual or metatextual? Whenever you dive into the information it’s clear that the Latest Yorker fiction section offers a view of the world that’s skewed. This view will not be provincial, within the strict sense, nevertheless it endorses a really narrow vision of cosmopolitanism, one which perpetuates a flat view of the world.
The history of the Latest Yorker is mysterious and mythologized. For all of the magazine’s cultural cachet, a lot about its history, and its selection and publication process, stays unknown. The Latest Yorker has never published a masthead; it’s difficult to seek out a definitive or official record of, say, the magazine’s fiction editors outside of the letters, interoffice memos, and financial documents that comprise the magazine’s archive on the Latest York Public Library. Deborah Treisman, the present fiction editor, has mostly maintained this charisma. One thing that is thought about Treisman’s selection process, nevertheless, is her commitment to internationalism. Her tenure was expected to usher in a wave of “more global, less Eurocentric stories.”
Indeed, Treisman, under whose auspices the magazine published its first and only “International Fiction Issue,” on December 26, 2005, notes that she takes great pleasure in introducing American audiences to international writers who haven’t previously been translated into English. When Horace Engdahl—a member of the Swedish Academy, which selects the Nobel Prize laureates in literature—called American writers “too insular,” Treisman responded to the charge perfunctorily: “As for insularity amongst American writers, I actually have yet to come across any.” Her cosmopolitanism, nevertheless, happens on the metatextual level. Treisman’s vision for a more cosmopolitan magazine apparently consists of diversifying the roster of contributors; she isn’t necessarily concerned with how these writers imagine the worlds and peoples they write about.
The Latest Yorker’s founding document, its prospectus, suggests that the magazine goals to reflect metropolitan life to its audience—but texts don’t benignly or mimetically reflect places, whether these are familiar metropoles or distant lands. Descriptions of space are mediated by every kind of individual biases, systemic prejudices, and political motivations. Literary descriptions of places create “imagined geographies,” a term coined by Edward Said to check with the best way xenophobic and racist perceptions of a rustic, people, or culture arise out of textual representations, and the best way these erroneous perceptions can turn into fixed in Western imaginations. The impressions imagined geographies leave are sticky, stubborn, and have violent material consequences on the lives of racial and ethnic “Others.”
The generic techniques of fiction are especially well suited to the creation of wealthy imagined geographies because they supply writers the latitude to examine faraway places without constraint. Given these politics of space, what geography does the fiction of the Latest Yorker imagine?
On the magazine’s inception, in 1925, the fiction section was a hybrid of various genres, including miscellaneous pieces that straddle the road between prose, verse, and visual art. The section only began to cohere circa 1945. Around the identical time, the magazine began to commonly publish fiction by a small subset of authors. Between 1945 and 2019, the magazine published 7,451 stories by 1,493 different authors, but 4,398 of those stories (greater than 66 percent of them) were written by just 149 authors (lower than 10 percent of the entire pool). A lot of these 149 authors have turn into synonymous with the magazine, and their work has come to define a dynamic Latest Yorker fiction tone and magnificence, characterised by ironic detachment and a meticulous, if somewhat overbearing, attention to facticity.
These writers—whom we’d call “the Latest Yorker 149”—will be grouped right into a couple of cohorts. First, there are the humorists of the magazine’s inception: S. J. Perelman, Calvin Trillin, James Thurber, H. F. Ellis, and Veronica Geng. Next, there are a handful of international writers—Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov—whose translated stories appear within the magazine starting within the late Sixties. Meanwhile, John O’Hara, John Updike, John Cheever, Alice Munro, and Mavis Gallant make up the home writers of the Latest Yorker’s “golden age.” They’re followed by the emergence of a younger generation of normal contributors, including Antonya Nelson, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders. Essentially the most recent cohort includes Tessa Hadley, Jonathan Lethem, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Allegra Goodman, and Yiyun Li.
Nearly 40 percent of those authors are women. But there may be little racial diversity to talk of on this list: Zadie Smith and Jamaica Kincaid are the one Black women whose fiction has appeared commonly, while Yiyun Li is the magazine’s only regular fiction contributor of Asian descent. Junot Díaz is the one Latinx writer within the list. There are not any authors that discover as African American men. Treisman’s insistence on internationalism has not led to broader national representation: the vast majority of authors on this list are American or British.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, identifying every location mentioned within the 4,398 stories published by the Latest Yorker 149 within the years from 1945 to 2019 shows that the majority are in the US. Thus, inside that crucial 66 percent of the Latest Yorker’s fiction during this era, the US overwhelmingly dominates.
This statistic, while useful, doesn’t tell us much about how writers imagine the US. A rustic may be mentioned several thousand times, but that count alone wouldn’t tell us whether it is evoked using different locations. In analyzing this data, a rustic’s diversity rating is calculated by determining what percentage of all unique locations accounts for that country’s unique locations. As an illustration, a complete of two,373 unique locations are mentioned across all 4,398 stories, including countries, cities, states, and neighborhoods; of those, 1,163 are in the US, giving the US a diversity rating of 49 percent. On this 66 percent of the Latest Yorker’s fiction, not only is the US mentioned rather more steadily than every other location, additionally it is referred to using greater than 1,000 different place names, almost half of all of the unique locations I extracted from the information.
Neither raw counts of locations nor diversity scores can tell us how much granularity there may be within the references to places inside a rustic. For instance, we’d ponder whether, when the US is mentioned, it’s evoked more often through references to “the US” and “America” or through mentions of specific states, cities, or neighborhoods. To get a way of the geographic scale of the places mentioned, I assigned each form of place (whether a nation, state/province, city, or neighborhood) a worth between one and 4, before taking a weighted average for every country, to reach at a granularity rating. The closer this rating is to 4, the more likely it’s that this country is referred to through larger geographic divisions, like country or state. If a rustic scores closer to 1, it’s more more likely to be evoked through references to smaller constitutive parts, like cities or neighborhoods.
Plotting these two scores gives us a way of what the imagined geography of every country within the corpus looks like, when it comes to variety (how many various ways a rustic is mentioned) and granularity (whether these evocations usually tend to be small scale or national).
As a baseline, the US has a granularity rating of two.39, which tells us that its literary geography is skewed toward a metropolitan imagination than a national one. This is smart, provided that locations in Latest York State alone account for nearly a fourth of all American locations.
Most countries (except for the US, the UK, and France) have extremely low diversity scores, which is why they cluster around the underside of Figure 1. Greater than 60 percent of the countries mentioned have a granularity rating above three, meaning they’re referred to most frequently by country name. Mali, Honduras, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, and Bahrain, for example, all cluster at 4, because they’re only referred to by country name. The opposite cluster, at two, indicates that many countries are referred to through mentions of a single city—normally, the capital or probably the most populous city. That is the case for Croatia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen, which come to mind through references to Zagreb, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and Aden, respectively.
In other words, Latest Yorker fiction isn’t insular within the strict sense of focusing solely on American places. Yet, the magazine’s fiction does tend toward a nefarious type of insularity that perpetuates monolithic views of most of the countries it evokes. In other words, even when a rustic aside from the US is mentioned, only a handful of various place names are utilized in reference to the country. Figure 2, a magnified version of the underside half of Figure 1, shows that the Latest Yorker’s fiction doesn’t look much beyond the US—and, when it does, it effaces significant intranational difference or variety.
Such a narrow view is illustrated by how China is imagined in Latest Yorker fiction. China is referred to 435 times, accounting for roughly 1 percent of all geographic locations mentioned within the nearly 4,400 stories surveyed. These references are composed of only nine distinct place names: China, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, Lhasa, Nanking, Beijing, Kiukiang, and Penglai. When it comes to granularity, China scores 3.4; it’s most frequently referred to in national terms, despite the fact that it’s roughly the identical size because the continental United States and its regions and cities are culturally and geographically varied.
Lots of the countries that rating relatively high in each metrics are the standard suspects—the UK, France, Italy—with one exception. There’s an outlier that has a comparatively high diversity rating and that outperforms the US within the granularity measure: Ireland. A former colony, whose landmass and population are significantly smaller than those of the US, Ireland boasts a granularity rating of 1.875. The country is mentioned using 77 unique locations, placing it in the highest five most diverse countries within the corpus. There are a lot of plausible the explanation why evocations of Ireland are each diverse and granular, but one striking detail stands out. Of the 176 stories that mention Ireland, 135 are by Irish writers—the likes of Edna O’Brien, Roddy Doyle, and William Trevor.
By comparison, of the 213 stories that mention China, only 10 are written by an writer of Chinese descent. All 10 are by Yiyun Li.
Zooming in on the stories that check with China offers another explanation for the dearth of diversity and granularity within the country’s treatment: most of those stories evoke China in reference either to American politics or to travel from China to the US. That is the case in stories akin to Garrison Keillor’s 1972 “US Still on Top, Says Remainder of World,” by which Keillor invokes the victory of the US over China in the fictional “Earth standings” with a purpose to satirize President Nixon’s rhetoric of American exceptionalism. In the identical vein, temporary references to China occur in John Cheever’s 1962 “A Vision of the World,” because the protagonist dreams of flying from the US to an island within the Pacific, over the coast of China.
What little diversity there may be in mentions of China arises from older stories by authors with vexed political ties to the country: John J. Espey, who was born in Shanghai to American missionaries; Emily Hahn, an American who lived in China for a few years and had a protracted affair with a British Intelligence officer stationed there; and Shirley Hazzard, an Australian American who spent her teenage years in Shanghai and Hong Kong as a spy for the British Combined Intelligence Services. These older stories offer a more diverse geography of China, then, nevertheless it is one acquired through the vestiges of imperialism.
Given the expectation that Treisman’s tenure would feature a more global Latest Yorker fiction section, it’s puzzling that this monolithic view of China persists into the twenty first century. The tendency to represent China in national terms recurs in Li’s stories. Her fiction imagines Asia in relation to diasporic identity. In “All Can be Well” (2019), she writes of a personality’s family becoming “boat people, migrating from Vietnam to Hong Kong, to Hawaii and later to California.” In “Gold Boy, Emerald Girl” (2008), a personality leaves China “for America right after college, a move intended to assert a spot for himself—an entire continent, in the long run, as in twenty years he had drifted from Latest York to Montreal, then Vancouver, and later San Francisco.” These short excerpts are indicative of a broader pattern in Li’s work. In her stories, the geographic attention paid to North America far outstrips the eye paid to any East Asian country, when it comes to each diversity and granularity.
Within the limited oeuvre of the Latest Yorker 149, then, we see a shift from a comparatively diverse (though still quite limited) representation of China—one tainted by imperialism—to a literary geography of the country that hides behind pretensions to globalism while remaining steeped in a provincial American exceptionalism.
The impressions imagined geographies leave are sticky, stubborn, and have violent material consequences on the lives of racial and ethnic “Others.”
The outcomes gleaned from the Latest Yorker data reveals that the connection between an writer’s demographic information and the places they write about will not be clear. This may increasingly seem intuitive, nevertheless it runs counter to what editors on the Latest Yorker—including Treisman and Erin Overbey, the magazine’s former archive editor—imagine concerning the relationship between demographics and internationalism in fiction.
In 2021, Overbey tweeted a series of diversity statistics concerning the magazine’s publication history. Her tweets painted a damning picture. The institution, perhaps, will not be overtly racist. Yet its largely white masthead, Overbey shows, has led to the egregious exclusion of Black, Asian American, Latinx, and Indigenous writers, in addition to women’s voices.
Overbey’s statistics make no mention of the fiction section, nevertheless it’s tempting to see the case of Ireland’s imagined geographies as bolstering her claim concerning the importance of demographic diversity. It’d encourage editors to think that national identity categories necessarily translate to increased or more ethical geographic attention. But, even when one were able to determine a causal relationship between writer demographics and the content of fiction, that argument would risk devolving into the language of essentialism. The case of China shows that richer geographic attention arises from contact, and that there isn’t any direct correlation between fixed categories of nationality and a wealthy imagined geography.
Thus, the prescience of Steinberg’s famous cover of a Latest Yorker’s skewed vision of the world will not be merely the outsize importance he grants to Latest York City, but in addition the schematic way he depicts other countries. For all of the ironic self-awareness this cover suggests concerning the Latest York–centrism of the magazine’s readership, it’s, actually, emblematic of the fiction section’s myopia.
In the combination, the fiction the Latest Yorker commonly publishes provides a partial and limited view of the world. This view stays stable even during Treisman’s tenure, despite the expectation that she would construct a more international fiction section. Studying the magazine’s literary geography shows that Latest Yorker fiction represents only a specific strain of literature—one with surface-level pretensions to cosmopolitanism, fairly than real global engagement.
Imagined geographies create types of relation between the reader and a faraway place and its peoples. These relations will be antagonistic, as Edward Said’s study of Orientalism shows, but they can be instructive, compassionate, or empathetic. Treisman intuits this much when she suggests that the mission of fiction is informational and humanitarian, and that its goal is to permit the reader “to see and empathize with the unfamiliar.” That the Latest Yorker should publish fiction that gives a more representative view of the world and informs readers about unfamiliar places will not be just an aesthetic imperative, then—it’s an ethical one, too.
With due to Aley Eladawy, Heather Rogers, and Andy Perluzzo for his or her work constructing the corpus. 
