Seminal New Yorker® cover by Saul Steinberg.

Fasten your seatbelts, it may get a little bumpy today. My $100 donation is going to a three-year subscription to The New Yorker. What?!! (I can hear a few of you yelp) that’s not a charity .. it’s not even a non-profit! Well, I’m pretty sure Conde Nast would tell you it’s almost totally non-profitable—but above and beyond that, The New Yorker fits all my criteria for giving. It’s an organization that I firmly believe is making the world a better, smarter, more informed, civilized, cultivated, delightful and elegant place –and I’m the decider.

September 11, 2006 cover.

I love The New Yorker. I adore the fiction (it’s introduced me to Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, Jonathan Franzen, Junot Diaz, and a host of others); “Talk of the Town”; “The Current Cinema” (Anthony Lane more than David Denby) and the hilarious Nancy Franklin on TV. I am crazy about Ian Frazier, not hip enough for Sasha Frere-Jones’s music thing, love Hilton Als whatever he’s writing, am captivated by Adam Gopnik’s Frenchie musings, always read Jane Mayer’s forensic political pieces and Jeffrey Toobin‘s legal coverage, am scared to death by Seymour Hersch’s exposes on Iraq and Afghanistan and Elizabeth Kolbert’s environmental treatises, will happily dive into anything by Tad Friend, Patricia Marx or Louis Menand, and feel the entire country should be required to read Atul Gawande’s pieces on health care. I could go on and on…

February 4, 2008 cover.

Then there are the whimsical, tragic, hilarious, delightful, poignant and haunting covers that every week capture an elusive moment in time. And let’s not forget the cartoons –which alone would be worth the price of admission.

New Yorker cartoon by Roz Chast.

The best part about The New Yorker is that it gives you access to everything that’s brilliant about New York – the energy, intellectual ferment, fashion, and heady stew of ideas, art, culture, business, power and politics– without you ever having to set foot on a subway, pay a doorman to let you in your own building, or wake up in the city that never sleeps.

Yes, The New Yorker has made my world a better place for 30 years, so without further ado or apology, I’m extending my subscription (and my $100 worth of support) to The New Yorker for another three years. As Neil Young would say, “Long may you run.”

(And I hope they don’t sue me for using their covers!)