REMNICK, DAVID

REMNICK, DAVID (1958– ), U.S. editor, author. A native of Hillsdale, NJ, and a graduate of Princeton University with a degree in comparative literature, Remnick became the fifth editor of The New Yorker magazine in 1998 after an award-winning career as a reporter and foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. Starting in 1982 as an intern in the Post's Style section, he worked the night police beat and covered tennis and professional basketball for the Sports section and The Post's Magazine before going to Moscow for a four-year tour in 1988. Remnick chronicled the politics and personalities of the upheaval in the Soviet Union, which was soon to disappear as a national entity. He wrote Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. The Wall Street Journal compared the reportage with John Reed's influential eyewitness account of the formation of the Soviet Union, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). After a stint as a visiting fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, Remnick became a staff writer for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and other publications. His book, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (1998), chronicles the early career of the heavyweight champion and placed Ali's career in a wider cultural context. In 1998, after a stellar career at the magazine, publishing more than 100 articles on an array of subjects, everything from Boris Yeltsin's political travails to Luciano Pavarotti's opera career to Mike Tyson's rise and fall, Remnick was named editor of The New Yorker, succeeding   Tina Brown. Remnick brought a more serious tone to the magazine, which published major exposes, included articles by Seymour hirsch exposing degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison. In addition to editing the magazine, and writing introductions to various collections of articles, Remnick continued to report and write his own lengthy articles for the magazine, some from the Middle East. In New York, he was on the Board of Overseers of yivo , which seeks to preserve the foremost resources for the study of the history and culture of East European Jews. His wife, Esther Fein, was a correspondent for The New York Times. (Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)