The New York Times Magazine: Its History, Columns and Crossword

On 15 February 1942 the New York Times printed its first crossword, in the Sunday edition, in a paper that had once called the form “a primitive form of mental exercise”. The attack on Pearl Harbor two months earlier is usually given as the push that finally brought the puzzle in. That puzzle sits at the back of The New York Times Magazine today, 21 squares wide, and it is a good point of entry for a title that is read as much for its columns and its long features as for its covers.

The Magazine in dates

How the supplement began, 1896 to the Markel years

The New York Times Magazine first came out on 6 September 1896, as a part of the Sunday paper, and its first issue carried the first photographs the newspaper had ever printed. A year later its coverage of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, done at considerable cost, helped to lift circulation.

Its identity as an intellectual forum came later, under Lester Markel, who edited the Sunday paper from 1923. Markel is credited with the idea of separate Sunday sections and was responsible for the Magazine, the Book Review and the Arts and Leisure section. He ran the Magazine as a place for essays by public figures, and writers outside journalism, politicians among them, appeared there beside reporters. Accounts describe him as intense and autocratic, and his stamp stayed on the Sunday paper for decades. The list of names that appeared under his editorship is long: contributors to the Magazine over the twentieth century included W. E. B. Du Bois, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams and Leo Tolstoy. A physicist beside a playwright beside a novelist, all inside a Sunday supplement, shows what Markel meant the pages to be.

For readers used to British supplements, the closest relatives are the ones that arrive with the Saturday or Sunday papers, though few carry the same expectation of long, edited pieces. For the wider category of magazines published inside newspapers, the types of journals guide gives the classification.

Markel’s best-known line is a rule about reporting: “What you see is news. What you know is background. What you feel is opinion.” He was born in 1894, edited the Sunday paper from 1923 to 1964, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for the Review of the Week section, which he had built. He founded the International Press Institute in 1951 and, after leaving the Times in 1968, hosted a television programme, News in Perspective. The Magazine of his years was his idea of what a Sunday reader should be told, a point of view his successors have kept revising.

The columns that made its name

Three columns show what the Magazine does with a regular slot.

William Safire’s On Language began in 1979 and, by 1990, was drawing more mail than any other feature. It was a weekly lesson in usage, argument about words and, often, Safire correcting his readers’ corrections. The Ethicist, which started in 1999, put real dilemmas to a columnist and printed the answer, and it was often contentious: the point of the column was that sensible people could disagree. Consumed, begun in 2004 by Rob Walker, looked at the things people buy and what they say about the buyer.

The Ethicist changed hands several times. Ariel Kaminer replaced the original columnist, Randy Cohen, in 2011, the novelist and critic Chuck Klosterman took the slot in 2012, and in September 2015 the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah became its sole author. A column of moral advice depends on the person writing it, and a new name changed the tone each time. John Hodgman’s column, begun in January 2012, followed a different logic, with readers’ disputes settled as if by a judge.

None of the three was a news column. The Magazine’s strength lies there, in questions the daily paper has no space to ask. The weakness is the same thing seen from the other side: the weekly can feel remote from what happened on Thursday.

The 1619 Project and the argument about it

In August 2019 the Magazine devoted an issue to the 1619 Project, led by Nikole Hannah-Jones, which examined the place of slavery in American history. It was named for 1619, when the first enslaved Africans reached colonial Virginia. The work grew beyond the issue into a curriculum, a podcast, a book and a documentary series, and Hannah-Jones received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her essay.

The project was also disputed. Historians including Gordon Wood and Sean Wilentz objected to the claim that protecting slavery was a primary reason the colonists declared independence. The Times afterwards changed the wording, saying it was “a primary motivation for some of the colonists”, and Jake Silverstein, the editor, declined to issue broad corrections. Reasonable readers still disagree about whether the change settled anything, and the issue shows the Magazine’s willingness to publish something that will be argued over for years.

The Sunday crossword and other puzzles

The Sunday crossword lives in the Magazine. Margaret Farrar edited it from the first puzzle in 1942 to 1969, occasionally signing as Anna Gram, and she set rules that lasted: rotational symmetry in the grid, and three letters as the shortest answer. Will Shortz took over the crossword in October 1993, after a brief interim by Mel Taub that autumn, and he is still the editor. Shortz was born in 1952 in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and took a degree in enigmatology at Indiana University in 1974, a course of study he designed himself. He has been the puzzle master on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday since its launch in 1987, and he founded the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 1978. The 2006 documentary Wordplay is about him and that tournament. The Sunday puzzle is 21 by 21, while weekday grids are 15 by 15.

The Times held out against crosswords for years after they became a craze in the 1920s, and the first one in 1942 was not the paper’s idea of itself. Eugene Maleska, who edited it before Shortz, died in 1993. A typical Sunday puzzle is about as hard as a Thursday weekday grid, which tells a newcomer where to start.

Alongside it come acrostic puzzles by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon and other variety puzzles. People who buy the Sunday paper for the crossword alone are not rare, and the Magazine would probably not mind.

Poetry and the shorter pieces

A poetry page runs in the Magazine with a guest editor choosing the poems. In 2017 the poet Matthew Zapruder was editing it, and he explained his rule: the poem has to be fairly short and must work when it arrives in a non-poetic context, read by people with little preparation. He said his task as an editor was to find as great a variety of recently published American poetry as he could without lowering the quality. He admitted that plenty of excellent poems do not suit that space, and the page is therefore a particular kind of poetry, not a survey of the whole art. For poetry readers who want a British counterpart, the poetry magazines directory lists the titles that publish verse in the UK and when they open for submissions.

Spin-offs and later supplements

T magazine, a style supplement, started in 2004. Two more followed in 2006: PLAY, on sport, and Key, on property. These sit outside the main weekly, and they belong to the family of paper-based supplements discussed in the guide to the covers of magazines, where cover design is covered.

Editors since Markel have included Hugo Lindgren, hired in September 2010, whom Jake Silverstein replaced in 2014 after moving from Texas Monthly. Silverstein has edited the Magazine ever since, which makes the 1619 Project his most discussed project.

What kind of magazine it is

A newspaper magazine has a different job from a stand-alone one. It does not have to win a buyer on the newsstand each month, because the buyer has already paid for the Sunday paper, and that frees it to run a piece of eight thousand words on a single subject. It also carries the paper’s name, which brings both access and expectations: a feature in the Magazine is read as the Times speaking, even when the writer is a freelancer with a strong voice.

That position produces its characteristic strengths, which are long reporting, a few regular columns that readers follow for years and puzzles that keep people coming back each week. Its limits are the reverse: a weekly rhythm cannot follow a fast-moving event. Anyone expecting the speed of a Spectator column should look to the daily paper instead.

If you only read one thing from the Magazine, make it a single long feature from a recent Sunday, not the columns. The columns reward habit, and the features reward a free hour.

Reading it from the UK, and how it compares

A British reader will most easily meet the Magazine online, through the paper’s digital subscription, and the policy on how much is free changes often enough that it is not worth quoting. Compare it with National Geographic, the other American title with a very long history, and with the weekly British titles in the guide to political magazines, where the opinion essay is the main form. For sources, see the Wikipedia article on the Magazine, the entry on Lester Markel, the crossword entry, the 1619 Project entry and the interview with Matthew Zapruder about the poetry page.

Most readers outside the United States will want the long essays and the crossword and nothing else, and of the two, the Sunday puzzle is the easier to try before committing to a subscription.