Lorne Michaels likes to say, “The history of New York is written by out-of-towners.” Susan Morrison, in her affectionate biography, Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live, writes that Toronto-born Michaels credits the line to Harold Ross. The founding editor of The New Yorker was, in fact, from Colorado. Morrison, who today is the articles editor at Ross’s now ancient magazine, has found no record that he said it, but both the maxim and the attribution feel true. Several seminal New York institutions were created by people drawn to the city’s lights rather than born under them, and it makes sense that one of their number might point out their collective contributions. If you’re going to take up space in Manhattan especially, the way Michaels has at Rockefeller Center for more than fifty years, you need to continue to earn it.
Graydon Carter, another Canadian émigré and the swoopy-haired editor of Vanity Fair from 1992 to...
Chris Jones is a former staff writer at Esquire and a contributor to The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and the Wall Street Journal.
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