If you read today's encomium to "The Sopranos" from New Yorker capo David Remnick—"the richest achievement in the history of television"—you'd be hard-pressed not to see certain parallels between Remnick's history of the show with the history of a certain magazine we all know and love. Here's the translation.

Around the time of Tina Brown's departure as editor of The New Yorker, in 1998, a humble newspaperman who has been on the magazine's staff, "reluctantly"...