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Ian Buruma on a New Era at The New York Review of Books

Ian Buruma, the new editor of The New York Review of Books, in the magazine’s offices.Credit...Vincent Tullo for The New York Times

Some shoes are harder to fill than others. Robert Silvers, the editor synonymous with The New York Review of Books, ran the left-leaning intellectual magazine with single-minded fervor from the time he co-founded it in 1963 until he died at 87 in March. His shoes may as well be Shaquille O’Neal’s.

In the days after Silvers’s death, dozens of writers effused on the magazine’s website and elsewhere. Michael Chabon called him “brilliant” and “inspiring,” a “walking chronicle of postwar literary-political history.” The historian Stephen Greenblatt wrote: “We shall not see his like again.”

One can understand why Ian Buruma, when he was announced as The Review’s new editor in May, thought: “What the hell have I taken on?” But that only came after a happier intitial reaction. “I thought it was a challenge I would regret not accepting,” Buruma said. “The first feeling was a sense of euphoria, of a changed life.”

The Dutch-born Buruma, who officially took the reins of the magazine after Labor Day, is an award-winning journalist and the author of numerous acclaimed books. At 65, he has little experience editing but a lot of familiarity with The Review, to which he’s contributed since 1985.

“I felt it was important for someone to know The Review, and Ian certainly had that,” the magazine’s publisher, Rea Hederman, said of hiring Buruma. “He knew Bob almost as long as I did.”

Buruma has been based in New York since 2005, but before then spent time in Hong Kong and London, among other places. He lived in Japan for several years in the 1970s, and many of his books have dealt with Japanese history and culture. Two of his best-known works, “The Wages of Guilt” (1994) and “Year Zero: A History of 1945” (2013), are studies of the moral and political aftermath of World War II. He speaks six languages.

A reviewer once called Buruma’s writing “disarmingly reasonable and calm,” and this is precisely how he comes across in person. We spoke on a hot August afternoon in the magazine’s headquarters on Hudson Street in the West Village. Towers of books teetered throughout; but the space was surprisingly airy and light-filled.

Buruma sat on a sofa in a communal meeting space looking like someone ready for a laid-back weekend in his polo shirt. The time he spent in the office over the summer getting to know the staff and terrain might have been technically unofficial, but he was busy making assignments, contacting potential new contributors and learning the ways of a place that had only known the leadership of Silvers and Barbara Epstein, the publication’s co-founder and editor who died in 2006.

Asked if he wanted to replicate Silvers’s herculean office hours, which he kept until the end of his life, Buruma just laughed. Silvers did the vast majority of direct interacting with writers, virtually lived at the office and dictated emails that read more like lengthy formal letters.

“It was a monarchy, and I think perhaps it will be a slightly more democratic operation,” Buruma said. “Certainly I think I’ll be more collaborative. One great strength of The Review at the moment is that it has a number of very, very bright young editors who know more about certain things than I do.”

Buruma said he was most daunted by the shift from “thinking of the world as a writer — which is a rather self-centered way of looking at the world. That’s a very different mind-set from finding other people to do things, improving their thinking, helping them.”

Hederman said he “didn’t have any trepidation at all” about Buruma’s relative lack of editing experience. “As a writer, Ian was thoughtful about editing. He paid attention to the way his pieces were edited by Bob and others. He had strong feelings about the kind of editing he liked and didn’t like.”

Hederman said Silvers thought of Buruma as a possible editor of The Review, but Hederman and others also said that Silvers never expressed strong opinions about what should happen after his tenure. Silvers, like many who observed him, seemed to believe he would be in his perch forever.

Buruma intends to feature a more unpredictable ideological roster, given the unprecedented nature of the country’s political climate.

“We’re not living in the same time as Nixon or Clinton or Bush,” he said. “Under Trump, the distinctions that used to exist, roughly speaking, between left and right, have become much more fluid. People who may never have come within a mile of the pages of The Review 20 years ago might have a place in it now. Everything will be looked at with fresh eyes.”

“It’s kind of like being put in charge of the Parthenon,” Sam Tanenhaus, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review and a contributor to The New York Review, said. “If you change one little figure on the frieze, it will be seen as earthshaking by the people who watch it so closely every day.”

Hederman said: “It will be a different publication, it has to be. Bob was one person, and everything went through Bob.”

Some changes are already evident. On Aug. 23, Elizabeth Drew, a longtime contributor to the magazine, wrote on Twitter: “Due to a decision I didn’t make, I’ll not be covering Washington politics for New York Review. You’ll find my work elsewhere.”

In response to a request for comment by email, Buruma said only: “We never told Elizabeth Drew no longer to write for the NYRB.”

Reached by email, Drew said: “Technically, they are correct that no one asked me to stop writing for them.” But she said unanswered letters and phone calls over the summer, and other signs from editors at The Review, made it clear to her that her reporting from Washington was no longer wanted. “I believe that an editor has a right to change writers; the wisdom of his decisions will be for others to judge,” she said.

Less debated personnel moves are also being made. Matt Seaton, currently a staff editor for the Op-Ed section of The Times, will join The Review on Sept. 18 as an editor in charge of the magazine’s NYR Daily blog. Hugh Eakin, a senior editor at The Review since 2006 who ran the blog in addition to other duties, recently started a yearlong leave as a Cullman fellow at the New York Public Library. Eakin expects to return to the magazine when the fellowship is over.

The blog is part of an increasingly robust online operation at The Review, though the magazine remains more firmly anchored to its print product than many of its peers. Surprisingly, the magazine didn’t see the significant increase in subscribers after the 2016 presidential election that other left-leaning publications did. But about 130,000 print subscriptions are part of a total circulation of about 150,000, which has remained steady in recent years.

Buruma said he was enthusiastic about helping to continue strengthen the magazine’s online offerings. He will also institute changes in the subjects covered, however gradually. “I share many of Bob’s interests, but not all of them,” he said. “One area I think we could do more in is contemporary art, for example. I also think foreign literature could be featured more.” He hopes to publish more pieces about areas he considers neglected, including Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Despite potential additions in those areas, Buruma provides a clear line of continuity for The Review. He is also a white man in his mid-60s at a time when the left is especially sensitive to issues of diversity in the media and elsewhere.

“We would like to be as diverse as we possibly can, but the main thing is to maintain the quality of the publication,” Hederman said. “We think we can do that and be diverse at the same time.”

Buruma stressed the importance of featuring writers from various backgrounds, but said he also wanted to be careful not to typecast writers by always assigning them to cover authors and subjects based on factors like shared ethnicity or gender.

More broadly speaking, the naming of a new editor for the first time in the magazine’s history is a chance for fresh recruiting.

“I think the worst thing you can do as a middle-aged editor is to try and second-guess what young people would like to read, what interests them, and then go off in some awkward way like the minister in a church who whips out a guitar and starts singing folk songs,” Buruma said. “I think the way to do it is to find young writers, and then you’ll automatically move to things that they’re interested in, and that’s one of the ways of rejuvenating the publication.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Change Means a Challenge. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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