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HENRY Finder, editorial director of The New Yorker magazine, is immaculately groomed, in a jaunty blazer, his back to Manhattan's midtown skyline.
He peppers his conversation with names of famous writers, quotes Gertrude Stein from memory. He uses (and savours) words such as "effluvia", "untendentious", "Pecksniffian", "pollute the epistemic riverbed", "plinth".
He unashamedly paints New York as the centre of the world, an axis of culture around which the world spins.
It could come across as a pose, as arrogance or snobbery. But it doesn't. There's something about his youthful ease and personable style — Finder is more like a dimensional traveller from an alternative US where all is cultured, educated and genteel. It's as if Eustace Tilley, the iconic monocled, top-hatted dandy born on The New Yor-ker's front cover, has popped by clothing outfit Brooks Brothers to update his look.
Finder "is" his magazine. Like Finder, The New Yorker somehow breathes in a bubble of old-fashioned air, but breathes out savvy and agenda-setting writing.
The magazine has an illustration on the cover every week, uses a baroque, idiosyncratic typeface and puts two dots over the second "o" in co-operate. It contains few photographs, begins with 25 pages of tiny-font what's-on listings, publishes poems and is packed with cartoon sketches drawn with the dusty, corny wit of an age before irony.
And yet it was one of the first magazines on the iPad, has just landed on the iPhone and is setting the pace in digital sales. Its political writing is sharp; its long (long, long) form journalism clear, modern and occasionally devastating (for example, the magazine exposed the Abu Ghraib atrocities). It regularly attracts some of the best writing talent in the world.
In an age when journalism is descending to frantic searches through Reddit.com for top-10 lists of cat GIFs, somehow The New Yorker has made itself a retro-clothed success story.
What's old is new again.