SOURCE: "Laugh and Lie Down," in Partisan Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, December, 1937, pp. 44-53.

An American essayist and critic, Macdonald was a noted proponent of various radical causes from the mid-1930s until his death in 1982. In the following excerpt, he criticizes the attitudes and editorial style that he considers representative of the New Yorker.

More persistently than any other American magazine the New Yorker has exploited a distinctive attitude towards modern life. The typical New Yorker writer has given up the struggle to make sense out of a world which daily grows more complicated. His stock of data is strictly limited to the inconsequential. His Weltanschauung—a term which would greatly irritate him—is the crudest sort of philistine "common sense." But unlike most exponents of "common sense," the New Yorker type is spectacularly incompetent in the practical affairs of everyday life. He is abashed by machines...