Karen’s Quirky New York: NAC Awards Medal of Honor to The New Yorker Ed. David Remnick

New York’s glitterati gathered at Gramercy Park’s National Arts Club (NAC) on May 6 to celebrate as journalist, writer, and editor David Remnick received the club’s Medal of Honor for Achievement in Literature.

Remnick was honored not just for his own writing, which is impressive in its global, multi-genre scope and sheer vastness of word count, but also for his contribution to literature as editor of The New Yorker magazine.

Under Remnick’s leadership, which began in 1998, The New Yorker has become America’s most honored magazine, renowned for introducing global authors such as Haruki Murakami, Alice Munro, and Vladimir Nabokov to its massive readership (over 1.3 million monthly subscribers in 2025, and an estimated 20 million monthly online readers).

In 2016, The New Yorker became the first magazine to receive a Pulitzer Prize for its writing, and it has now won eleven Pulitzers, including the gold medal for public service. The New Yorker has also won more than fifty National Magazine Awards during Remnick’s tenure.

Remnick was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2016. With the much-coveted (if largely unknown) NAC Medal of Honor, Remnick joins the ranks of previous recipients dating back to 1968. Not surprisingly, Remnick has published the work of many of the medal’s past honorees in The New Yorker.

When former New Yorker editor Tina Brown resigned, the New York Post gave Remnick 50-to-1 odds to be her replacement. In his acceptance speech at NAC, Remnick humbly stated he still didn’t know how he’d gotten the job. Obviously he hasn’t done too badly.

David J. Remnick (born October 29, 1958) was a staff writer for the magazine for six years before becoming its editor. He was previously The Washington Post’s correspondent in the Soviet Union. One of his earliest pieces for The New Yorker was about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In 1993, Solzhenitsyn’s wife Natalia invited Remnick to dine at NAC on the occasion of Solzhenitsyn being awarded a Medal of Honor.

Recounting the story during his acceptance speech, Remnick said Solzhenitsyn did not attend the dinner; he would not attend such events. But he did send a long message to Gramercy Park in a vodka bottle—a dire jeremiad about the decline of literature and the downward spiral of cultural values throughout the land. His speech was hilarious. Remnick added, “You have gone from giving this award to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to giving it to someone who edits talking dog cartoons. You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

The ever-humble Remnick won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his tome “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire,” based on his time in Russia. He also met his wife, journalist Esther Fein—former New York Times political reporter and foreign correspondent—while working in Russia. They married in October 1987 and have three children.

Remnick is the author of numerous books, including “King of the World,” a biography of Muhammad Ali, which was named the top nonfiction book of the year by Time magazine in 1998. His most recent book is “Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music” (2023). He has also been editor or co-editor of numerous anthologies of essays from The New Yorker.

The New Yorker celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. The fascinating Netflix documentary “The New Yorker at 100,” gives a glimpse into Remnick’s leadership role, with an inside look into the making of the 100th anniversary issue. The documentary also has interviews with many of the magazine’s key staff, including the “much vaunted” fact checkers.

Many New Yorker staff members, past and present, were at the award ceremony. Speakers included the magazine’s long-serving editorial director, Henry Finder and The New York Review of Books editor Emily Greenhouse. Greenhouse recounted stories of working as an editorial assistant to Remnick earlier in her career (2012-2014), and the necessity of creating a handbook of Yiddish adjectives in order to understand Remnick’s feedback. “This story is fakakta – too megillah!” Staff writer and music critic Kelefa Sanneh, who coined the term “rockism” and was once in a Devo cover band, gave a speech equal in hilarity to that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1993 message in a bottle. The audience was in stitches.

Julie Just, former senior editor of The New York Review of Books and current chair of the NAC’s Literary Committee, was the evening’s emcee. After a brief foray writing for our beloved West Side Spirit, Just worked as editor William Shawn’s secretary at The New Yorker, and was promoted several times to become assistant editor in the fiction department, where she read the slush pile (author names A through K), proving that Straus News is a literary launch pad perhaps equal to The New Yorker.

Also present was “Comma Queen” author and New Yorker writer Mary Norris, who began working at the magazine in 1978 and was a query proofreader there for 24 years. She has a column-within-a-column for “Shouts and Murmurs” called “Finishing School.”

Many NAC members put on their black-tie best to join the celebration, including Nicholas Lowry, a beloved, longtime appraiser on PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow” who specializes in antique posters. Known for his plaid-forward style as much as his bonhomie, he attended the Medal of Honor ceremony in a kilt and sporran.

The NAC commissions a portrait of each Medal of Honor recipient for display in their portrait gallery. The distinguished American portrait artist Michael Shane Neal painted Remnick’s portrait, which will join a host of literary luminaries, including Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Alexander McCall Smith, Tom Wolfe, John Updike, and many more.

Karen Rempel is a New York-based writer, model, and artist. Her Karen’s Quirky New York column illuminates quirky clothes and places in Manhattan. For past stories, see https://karenqs.nyc.