If there is any one general theme here, besides the usual apocalyptic warnings about destruction of the magazine, it is the disavowal of ordinariness, as if ordinariness were the eighth deadly sin. The company is profit-making “but not in any orthodox way.” The publishers “went counter to almost every normal business impulse.” The New Yorker is a “miracle.” And so forth. To someone so convinced that those under him shared the ideals he wanted to believe he represented — gentility, fairness, modesty, self-sacrifice, antimaterialism, humanity, and above all a devotion to truth as expressed through the written word — it must have come as quite a shock to see that a lot of his employees also considered putting out the New Yorker to be a job, one for which they were increasingly poorly paid.