Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
A Web Comic: The Wavy Rule
Before it moved to The New Yorker:
Ask the Librarians archive
About Emdashes | Email us
Features & Columns:
Headline Shooter
On the Spot
Looked Into
Two comments (one with a thoughtfully provided image of the poked painting “Le Rêve”) on the whole hole-in-the-Picasso incident that Nick Paumgarten wrote a Talk about this week. (Later: Gawker wonders who spilled the beans.)
In the Times today, Sarah Lyall reports on the state of British kids’ school lunches, a nice counterpart to that excellent recent story about the saintly chef’s odyssey to make cafeteria lunches healthier. Know why there are no specifics in that stentence? Because I can’t find the piece anywhere, not on Greg.org, not through Google, not on the New Yorker website, and not in The Complete New Yorker, since I don’t have the new updated Disk One (or the pricey but magically light and functional—I tested it at the festival—hard drive) yet. I feel blue.
There’s another pithy festival wrapup you should read, in the Daily Blague. A snippet:…Otherwise, it was stand-up comedy all the way. Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Lane, Mark Singer even - all of these men can take to the stage whenever they please. Mr Shteyngart won’t even have to work out a routine. The chunk of Absurdistan that he read was a great deal funnier than it had been on the page. Mr Lane could not have talked faster, but his paean to Ava Gardner forced him speak overtime. (It was almost embarrassing: we were confronted with a man who seemed prepared to throw his life away for an actress’s smile.) Mr Saunders read some forthcoming stuff that I can’t wait to have entire.
The demographic shifts were interesting: heavily under-thirty five for the novelists, Mr Gladwell, and Mr Ashbery; heavily retired for Mr Trillin (in conversation with Mr Singer). Without making a point of doing so, Mr Trillin’s conversation ranged over the history of The New Yorker, the staff of which he joined the year after I started reading it. He had keen things to say about journalism, and how very protected from its rush New Yorker writers used to be. Afterward, at lunch, I chewed over what he’d said, and came to see that this relatively new feature, the New Yorker Festival, has taken the venerable magazine one step closer to an institute of higher learning. Students of The New Yorker University scuttled across the campus of Manhattan in pursuit not so much of edification as of the kind of solidarity that the best universities’ students feel.
Hello! We're a small band of culture writers, editors, and artists based in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Emdashes, which spent its formative years as a New Yorker blog, is our collection of conversations—mostly civilized—about magazines, movies, design, punctuation, and other things that stir us.
Want to know more about the people who contribute to Emdashes, and the secret meanings behind our column titles? All about us.
We welcome tips, questions, comments, and corrections, and are always on the lookout for ardent, obsessive contributors. Click here to email us.
We host occasional book giveaways. Publishers, please email us for our postal address.
Our favorite things | Compliments and press
Looking for The New Yorker magazine? Kudos on your classy taste. Here's how to contact The New Yorker.
Dashes, some say, “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like an em dash itself—provides a thoughtful pause amid the hubbub.
Emdashes, founded in 2004, is written and drawn by Emily Gordon, Martin Schneider, Pollux, Jonathan Taylor, and Benjamin Chambers, as well as occasional guest contributors. All posts before October 2008 are by Emily Gordon.
The site was designed by House of Pretty with illustrations by Jesse R. Ewing.
Additional drawings are by Carolita Johnson and Pollux (author of our web comic, "The Wavy Rule"). The Emdashes pencil logo is by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.
Everything you tell or send us is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.
Comments
I’m going to do this because someone has to. Somebody must get Emily that hard drive for Christmas!
I presume it’s update-able?
Okay people, hint thrown! Catch!
I digested that article and had the same impression you did, about the “saintly” qualities of Ann Cooper … Well, depends on the valences of “saintly” … And then someone sent me the NYT article too!
I would also note that the school lunches article was clueless enough to earn a slightly critical letter to the editor. I always (naively, I guess) assume that the appearance of a letter to the ed on a particular topic indexes a certain volume of similar mail. Like seeing a mouse.