This is the On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. The New Yorker magazine turned

100 this year and marking the occasion is a new documentary film on Netflix. But with some

5,000 print issues and 10 decades worth of reporting, illustrations, editing, where does one even

begin?

That's a question.

Staff writer Jolani Cobb brought to the film's director, Marshall Curry, and executive producer Jud Appetow on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

The thing that struck me about this film, you know, among the things that struck me

about this film, is that having a sense

of the history and a sense of the magazine and all of the things that go into it, it would seem to

me just an impossible task, you know, for a century. It'd be difficult to do this about one year, and, you know, for a century.

It'd be difficult to do this about one year at the New Yorker.

And even, you know, the kind of joke, the Ted Denson joke about the stack of New Yorkers that, like, I'm never going to get through those.

And that's just like a year.

And so I wonder how you all approached the daunting task of taking this sprawling,

incredibly significant, culturally significant publication, this idea that is the New Yorker, and turning it into this very

taught, very disciplined frame that we just got to understand a century of its life.

I mean, that was definitely the challenge of the film was you've got this unbelievable magazine.

Even just getting a tiny fraction of the current writers was impossible.

And that times 100 years.

It was kind of an impossible task.

Right before I started, Nick Palm Garden told me, trying to make a 90-minute film about

the New Yorker is like trying to make a 90-minute film about America. I thought, there's

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