[In the following excerpt, the critic notes changes in the editorial stance and subject matter of the New Yorker as a possible reaction to the social and political upheavals of the late 1960s.]

"We had been hoping to hear from our old friend Ernest M. Frimbo," began the lead article in the only magazine that could begin like that. Some pages on, however, a reader of the Sept. 26 New Yorker came across what seemed to be a radical departure from the sort of urbane, good-humored, politically unprovocative fare that once made the magazine as predictable in its way as a Sears, Roebuck catalogue.

The article in point is "The Greening of America," a 39,000-word essay by Yale University law professor Charles A. Reich. No popular magazine has ever published a more comprehensive and unforgiving indictment of America's consumer culture—or at least no magazine that has traditionally taken so much of its tone from that culture. In the presence of gilt-edged ads for Caribbean cruises and exotic furs, Reich charges that Americans have created "a society that is unjust to its poor and minorities, is run for the benefit of a privileged few, lacks its proclaimed democracy and liberty, is ugly and artificial, destroys the environment and the self, and is, like the war it spawns, 'unhealthy for children and other living things'."

Obviously, that sort of thing strikes a new note for a publication that, for decades after its birth in 1925, seemed dedicated to the proposition that outrage was unpardonable and that politics, like a rainy summer at the shore, was a distasteful reality to be borne with good grace and composure. But the Reich article was no isolated phenomenon. Last week's New Yorker featured a wry but alarming report on the National Guard by Renata Adler. Paired with Richard Harris's 1968 indictment of the National Rifle Association, the Adler article may well convince the extreme right that The New Yorker is out to disarm the nation. A year ago, before the public furor over the Song My affair, the magazine printed "Casualties of War," Daniel Lang's powerful account of the rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl by four GI's. And following the Cambodian invasion this spring, The New Yorker devoted its Notes and Comment section to an impassioned protest against President Nixon's "act of usurpation." Casual readers remark that even the matchless cartoons seem to be growing more topical and militant.

If The New Yorker is on its way to becoming the Ramparts of the carriage trade, only one man has to answer for it. The magazine's shabby editorial offices on 43rd Street are the personal kingdom of William Shawn, 63, a kindly and courtly man who inherited the editorship from Harold Ross, The New Yorker's perfectionist founder, in 1952. Granting a rare interview last week—but retaining at least a semblance of his cherished privacy by typing out the answers to some of the questions—Shawn pointed out that there was nothing droll or cozy about such New Yorker offerings as John Hersey's "Hiroshima" (1946), James Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time" (1962), Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (1962) and Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (1963).

"It's been my theory that the notion of 'frothiness' goes back to the 1920s, and is a rumor of a rumor." Shawn told Newsweek's Judith Gingold. "As I see it, people are always discovering that The New Yorker is more serious, less frothy than they thought it was. Every few years, the same discovery is made again." Shawn does allow, however, that the magazine's "seriousness" has at least been accelerated by the seething'60s. "This is a time of crises, emergencies, alarms and issues," he explained, "and since The New Yorker is, as it's always been, a journalistic magazine, it inevitably deals with all of these one way or another. I wish the world were otherwise, and if it ever becomes otherwise, I imagine The New Yorker will become otherwise, too."

Shawn may be selling his own role a bit short, for if The New Yorker reflects the tone of its times it also reflects the singular mind of William Shawn. The 1930s, after all, were also a time of "crises, emergencies, alarms and issues," but one would have hardly deduced any of that from perusing Harold Ross's magazine. Several years ago, New Journalist Tom Wolfe dismantled The New Yorker in a pair of articles that characterized Shawn as "the museum curator, the mummifier, the preserver-in-amber, the smiling embalmer … for Harold Ross's New Yorker." On that occasion, a number of Wolfe's facts didn't check, and five years later his unflattering portrait of Shawn doesn't check well either. If The New Yorker has moved with relative ease from social banter to reform and dissent, much of the credit goes to the editor and his ready acceptance of young writers and young ideas.

One of these young writers, 27-year-old Rick Hertzberg, finds his boss "receptive, incredibly respectful of writers, and extremely generous." "Shawn and the magazine are so confident, so unaffected, that nothing threatens them," says the shaggy-maned Hertzberg. "I've never noticed the slightest reaction to long hair at The New Yorker, or any relation between long hair and the kind of stories I cover." Notes and Comment, once the special province of E.B. White, is now frequently given over to Vietnam comment by Jonathan Schell, who is 27. And when students took to the streets last spring to protest the Cambodian invasion, it was with The New Yorker's editorial blessing.

Although none of his staffers even hint that Shawn might change his editorial policies to reap an extra dollar, the magazine's new tone seems at least partly attributable to some unpleasant economic realities. The entire magazine business is in a general slump this year, but The New Yorker has been witnessing a slow, steady drop in its advertising revenue since 1967, and its circulation—which now stands at 456,000—has fallen 4 per cent during the same period. And although New Yorker men steadfastly refuse to recognize the existence of any real competition, Manhattan's breezy, fast-growing New York magazine has been making steady gains in the ad race.

All this long ago suggested that it was time for The New Yorker to jettison the quaint, somewhat arrogant assumption that the people who deserved the magazine would somehow discover it. And recently The New Yorker has begun to act on that realization. In April the magazine named a new ad agency, Lord, Geller, Federico and Partners, which promptly launched an intensive attempt to increase The New Yorker's circulation. As part of its pitch to the young, Harold Ross's haughty old slick has at last offered itself on the electronic media and even gone one step beyond—to an advertisement in the Village Voice, the hip, Greenwich Village weekly. Not that The New Yorker is about to compete with the underground press on its home turf. In matters sexual, for example, the magazine has chosen to ignore the vanguard and remain as verbally squeamish as that little old lady in Dubuque.

William Shawn admits that his embargo on cursing and copulation has cost him some good writing through the years, but he plans no changes. And certainly few top writers mind dropping a few expletives for a place in Mr. Shawn's showcase. Happy writers, in fact, are the magazine's best advertisements. Charles Reich, the painstaking polemicist of "The Greening of America," admits he had second thoughts about publishing a revolutionary manifesto in such a stronghold of conspicuous consumption. After working with The New Yorker editors for five months, however, Reich sounded eminently enthusiastic. "I've had twenty years of this sort of work and I've never had a better experience," he said, "Those people are consummate professional craftsmen. It's the last vestige of something different—an example of what an institution would look like after the world changes the way I want it to."