Daily Inspiration Quote by David Remnick

The line lands like a newsroom aside, the kind that’s funny because it’s almost impolite in its accuracy. Remnick, long synonymous with The New Yorker’s high-minded prestige, punctures the magazine’s self-image with a needle of comic realism: everyone claims to be there for the reporting and essays, but the first hit is the cartoons. The joke isn’t just that cartoons are popular. It’s that cultural status depends on pretending they aren’t.

The “98%” is deliberately bogus precision, a statistic deployed as a wink. It mimics the language of market research while refusing its seriousness, which lets Remnick say something potentially threatening without sounding defensive. Cartoons, in this framing, are the magazine’s most democratic feature: a shared entry point that doesn’t require credentials, context, or 8,000 uninterrupted words. You laugh or you don’t. That simplicity is exactly what a certain kind of reader feels compelled to deny, because admitting you flip there first suggests you’re not doing your cultural homework.

The “other 2% are lying” sharpens the social satire. Remnick isn’t accusing readers of dishonesty so much as diagnosing a performance: consumption as self-presentation. Read the cartoons first? That’s pleasure. Claim you don’t? That’s aspiration. Coming from a journalist-editor, the line also defends the cartoon as journalism’s cousin: a single panel can do what longform often can’t, capturing a mood, a hypocrisy, a whole era’s anxiety in one beat.