Brodkey and Philip Hamburger, as well as newer staffers like Adam Gopnik and Nancy Franklin. During her editorship, she let 79 staffers go and engaged 50 new writers and editors, most of whom remain to this day, including David Remnick (whom she nominated as her successor), Malcolm Gladwell, Anthony Lane, Jane Mayer, Jeffrey Toobin, Hendrik Hertzberg, Hilton Als, Ken Auletta, Simon Schama, Lawrence Wright, John Lahr, recently departed managing editor Pamela McCarthy and executive editor Dorothy Wickenden. Brown introduced the concept of special double issues such as the annual fiction issue and the Holiday Season cartoon issue. She also collaborated with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates to devote a whole issue to the theme Black in America. Brown broke the magazine's longstanding reluctance to treat photography seriously in 1992, when she invited Richard Avedon to be its first staff photographer. She also approved controversial covers from a new crop of artists, including Edward Sorel's October 1992 cover of a punk rock passenger sprawled in the backseat of an elegant horse-drawn carriage, which may have been Brown's self-mocking riposte to fears that she would downgrade the magazine. A year later a national controversy was provoked by her publication of Art Spiegelman's Valentine's Day cover of a Jewish man and a black woman in an embracing kiss, a comment on the mounting racial tensions between blacks and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York. Brown appointed his wife Francoise Mouly as The New Yorker's art editor, a post she ocupies today. During Brown's tenure, the magazine received four George Polk Awards, five Overseas Press Club Awards, and ten National Magazine Awards, including a 1995 award for General Excellence, the first in the magazine's history. Newsstand sales rose 145 percent. The New Yorkers circulation increased to 807,935 for the second half of 1997, up from 658,916 during the corresponding period in 1992. Critics maintained it was hemorrhaging money, but Newhouse remained supportive, viewing the magazine under Brown as a start-up (which routinely lose money): "It was practically a new magazine. She added topicality, photography, color. She did what we would have done if we invented the New Yorker from scratch. To do all that was costly. We knew it would be." Under Brown, its economic fortunes improved every year: in 1995 losses were about $17 million, in 1996 $14 million, and in 1997 $11 million. In 1998, Brown resigned