The New Yorker

The New Yorker was the editorial home in which James Surowiecki’s thinking about collective decisions first took a sustained public form and from which much of this book grew. Its influence was not merely a matter of publication: the magazine gave him a business column, a sequence of opportunities to develop his ideas, and an editorial community whose work helped shape both his writing and the finished book.

A Column Becomes a Book

The book began, in one sense, with a column Surowiecki wrote for The New Yorker not long after joining the magazine in the spring of 2000. He describes the book’s development as extending beyond that initial piece: later columns for the magazine also influenced what the book became. The path from column to book was therefore cumulative. The magazine provided a recurring forum in which ideas about collective decisions could be worked through over time, rather than a single occasion that simply preceded a completed manuscript.

Surowiecki credits editor David Remnick with taking a chance on hiring him and on publishing a business column in a magazine where that form of writing helped make the book possible. The acknowledgment makes the institutional contribution concrete: without Remnick’s decisions, Surowiecki says, the book would not exist. The New Yorker thus appears both as a publication and as a setting where editorial judgment opened a route for a subject and a writer to develop.

Editors and the Work of Revision

Henry Finder edited Surowiecki’s first pieces for the magazine and guided him through his first year as a columnist. He remained a source of intellectual inspiration beyond that initial period. Surowiecki emphasizes Finder’s unusual ability to make a writer feel that the work matters in itself, whether or not it matters to the world at large. That encouragement is presented as part of the conditions that sustain writing, not simply as a practical stage in editing an article.

Nick Paumgarten, who edited Surowiecki’s columns, invested time and energy in the work. Surowiecki credits him with making him a better writer and with making the book better than it otherwise would have been. The relationship connects the magazine’s regular editorial process to the book’s quality: the columns were not only a place where the ideas appeared, but also writing repeatedly shaped through close editorial attention.

The fact-checkers at The New Yorker provided another kind of support. Surowiecki says they kept him safe and made his stories better. Their contribution is described in terms of both accuracy and improvement: verification helped guard the work while also strengthening it. Together, the editors and fact-checkers represent distinct forms of labor behind the magazine’s published writing—development, intellectual guidance, revision, and checking.

The Magazine’s Place in the Book’s Origins

The acknowledgments distinguish several kinds of influence without collapsing them into one. Remnick created the professional opportunity; Finder helped guide the early work and supplied intellectual encouragement; Paumgarten improved the columns through editing; and the fact-checkers helped make the stories safer and better. The book’s emergence is consequently portrayed not as the isolated achievement of an author, but as work made possible and refined through relationships inside the magazine.

The New Yorker’s role was also sustained rather than confined to the book’s beginning. Surowiecki says that much of the book was influenced by columns he wrote for the magazine after his initial one. Its importance lies in that continuing exchange: a business column became a recurring form through which the book’s concerns could develop, while the editorial practices surrounding the column contributed to the author’s growth and the book’s final shape.