Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker

Overview
The collection gathers David Remnick's reportage and essays from his years at The New Yorker, presenting a mosaic of contemporary life through long-form journalism. Selections range from intimate profiles of public figures to wide-angle dispatches on political upheaval and cultural shifts, all shaped by Remnick's facility for narrative and detail. The pieces together show a reporter interested in both the private textures of personality and the large movements that reconfigure societies.

Range of Topics
Coverage moves fluidly among politics, international affairs, cultural criticism, and sports, refusing to confine the reader to a single beat. Political reporting examines power and personality inside Washington and beyond, while international pieces take readers to post-Soviet cities, war-affected regions, and other sites of geopolitical change. Cultural essays consider literature, music, and art with a mind for how creative life intersects with public events, and the sports writing underscores how games can reflect national character and human drama.

Narrative Style and Voice
Remnick's prose is conversant and assured, combining an elegant sentence with a reporter's eye for concrete detail. He often opens with a scene that places the reader at the center of a moment, then widens the lens to provide context and analysis. The voice is at once humane and probing, skeptical of easy judgments while clear about what matters; humor and erudition appear without undercutting the seriousness of his subjects.

Recurring Themes
Questions of power, identity, and the consequences of historical change recur throughout the pieces. Many essays explore how leaders' personalities shape policy, how political institutions bend under stress, and how ordinary people navigate upheaval. A sense of history's weight infuses the reporting: moments are treated as both immediate events and as points on longer arcs. The moral texture of choice, who benefits, who suffers, what gets remembered, threads through political dispatches and cultural portraits alike.

Reporting Method and Sources
The work reflects classical magazine reporting: patient observation, deep interviews, and synthesis of complex material into accessible narrative. Remnick privileges scenes and voices, allowing firsthand detail and quoted speakers to animate broader claims. Background research is folded into the storytelling rather than isolated in footnotes, producing prose that reads like a guided tour through events rather than a detached briefing.

Memorable Portraits and Scenes
Many pieces linger because of their vivid character sketches and atmospheric scenes. Whether depicting a politician's private mannerisms or the texture of a city recovering from turmoil, the portraits are drawn with specificity that makes their subjects feel real and consequential. Small moments, a glance, a line of dialogue, an unexpected gesture, are used to reveal larger truths about ambition, fear, and resilience.

Legacy and Reception
The collection highlights why Remnick became a prominent voice in American journalism: his ability to move between the intimate and the institutional, to find narrative momentum in complex topics, and to write with clarity and conviction. Critics and readers have praised the range and craft of these pieces, noting how they exemplify long-form journalism's capacity to deepen understanding where short accounts cannot. The writing also helps explain Remnick's later role as an influential editor and commentator.

Conclusion
The assembled reportage offers a sustained example of how narrative journalism can illuminate contemporary life. Scenes and characters stand at the center, but the work continually returns to larger questions of power, history, and cultural meaning. For readers who value careful, well-told journalism that balances reporting rigor with literary grace, the collection provides a lively and thoughtful guide through the political and cultural landscape of its era.