Remnick was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, the son of a dentist and an art teacher. He was raised in Hillsdale, New Jersey, in a secular Jewish home with, he has said, "a lot of books around." He is also childhood friends with comedian Bill Maher. He graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in comparative literature in 1981; there, he met writer John McPhee and helped found The Nassau Weekly. He is married to New York Times reporter Esther Fein and has three children, Alex, Noah, and Natasha. He enjoys jazz music and classic cinema and is fluent in Russian.

He began at The Washington Post in 1982 shortly after his graduation from Princeton. His first assignment was in sports where he covered the United States Football League. After six years, in 1988, he became the newspaper's Moscow correspondent, which provided him with the material for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lenin's Tomb. He also received the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

Remnick became a staff writer at The New Yorker in September, 1992, after ten years at The Washington Post.

Remnick's 1997 New Yorker article "Kid Dynamite Blows Up," about boxer Mike Tyson, won a National Magazine Award.

In 1998, he became editor, succeeding Tina Brown. Remnick promoted Hendrik Hertzberg, a former Jimmy Carter speechwriter and former editor of The New Republic, to write the lead pieces in “Talk of the Town,” the magazine’s opening section. In 2005, Remnick earned a salary of $1 million per year for his work as editor.

In 2003, he wrote an editorial supporting the Iraq war in the days when it started. In 2004, for the first time in its 80-year history, The New Yorker endorsed a presidential candidate, John Kerry.

On May 8, 2006, Remnick gave an interview on The Daily Show to promote his book Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker.

In May 2009 Remnick was featured in a long-form Twitter account of Dan Baum's career as a New Yorker staff writer. The tweets, written over the course of a week, described the difficult relationship between Baum and Remnick, his editor.

Remnick's biography of President Barack Obama, The Bridge, was released on April 6, 2010. It features hundreds of interviews with friends, colleagues and other witnesses to Obama's rise to the presidency of the United States. His efforts to promote his book started with an interview on The Daily Show on April 8, 2010, and it has been widely reviewed in journals.

Remnick lent his support to the campaign to release Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning after being convicted of committing adultery.

• The Last Days of the Soviet Empire New York: Random House, 1993.
• The Devil Problem: And Other True Stories. New York: Random House, 1996.
• Resurrection: The Struggle for a New Russia. New York: Random House, 1997.
• King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero. New York: Random House, 1998.
• Reporting: Writings from The New Yorker. New York: Knopf, 2006.
• The Life and Rise of Barack Obama. New York: Knopf, 2010.

Books edited

• Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker (with Susan Choi, eds.), 2000.
• The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence. New York: Random House, 2000.
• Life Stories: Profiles from the New Yorker. New York: Random House, 2000.
• Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from the New Yorker (with Henry Finder, eds.). New York: Random House, 2001.

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