Emdashes. Modern Times Between the Lines.
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
Sempé Fi: Cover Art
October 23 Issue: Grandees
Filed under: Pick of the Issue Tagged: ads, GOAT, John Lahr, Lauren Collins, Michael Specter, poetry, Rea Irvin, Sasha Frere-Jones, Steve Coll, TOTT
Best Talk: “Nuke Rebuke,” Steve Coll. Of course, the Picasso story shouldn’t be missed.
Best entertaining thing before “The Critics”: Lauren Collins’s “Mink Inc.”
Best frightening thing before “The Critics”: Michael Specter’s incredible “The Last Drop.”
Best thing in “The Critics”: John Lahr, when he writes, tends to win this category.
Best poem: Let’s make a pact, fellow sonneteers and others (that means you) in need of metrical sustenance: Read first, then judge. I liked Brad Leithauser’s “Son.” Why aren’t the poems ever online? I’ve asked this before.
Best cartoon: discussed here.
Best Critic’s Notebook: You don’t read these too regularly, I sense that, and that’s a crying shame. Excerpt from Sasha Frere-Jones’s “Brut Force”: “Eddie Argos, the leader of the London band Art Brut, likes to get right to the point. In a song about a brand-new girlfriend, he sings, ‘Got myself a brand-new girlfriend, so many messages to send, got myself a brand-new girlfriend.’ Another song, about forming his band, leaves equally little room for interpretation: ‘We formed a band, we formed a band, look at us, we formed a band.’” I like all the critics at this length; they get to do something fun in the space, and it’s often just what you wanted to know.
Best note in GOAT (that’s Goings On About Town): “Some guitarists are bent on cramming together as many notes as possible.” Tied with: “Walking underneath it prompts a nice pleasure-fear frisson.”
Best ad: Much as I genuinely love advertorials, and I’ll be revisiting those in the magazine in months to come (there’s a new writer for the Hawaii ad-icles, did you notice?), I must say the mirthful mummies in the Queen Mary 2 ads freak me out and hold me captive. Vaguely Tilley-ish type on those. I’d like to know what face that is—gotta befriend this Gert Wiescher guy. Actually, I’m going to write him and see if he’ll give me an interview. Won’t that be fun?
Hey ho, looks like the intrepid Matt Dellinger and his hearty crew have done something new on newyorker.com: linky bios for the current issue. Nice idea. Aw, poets too!
About us
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.
Tell me more
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.
Other writing by Emily Gordon
- Reviews: theater writing (for Time Out Chicago)
- Profile: Valerie Casey, Designers Accord founder, is spearheading the design of sustainability (for SXSW World)
- Feature: Rea Irvin: visionary art director, bon vivant, New Yorker founding father (for Print)
- Slide show: the Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for NYCgo.com)
- Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
- Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
- Homage: Celebrating lindy-hop legend Frankie Manning (for NYCgo.com)
- Inquiry: Does a New Republic redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
- Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
- Interviews: four up-and-coming designers under 30 (for Print)
- Profile: novelist and dance critic Laura Jacobs (for Newsday)
Blogroll highlights
- Box Office Boffo
- World of Pollux
- Jonathan Taylor
- Carolita Johnson
- Songs for blogroll lovers (more links)
- Follow us on Twitter
- Befriend us on Facebook
- Get a t-shirt at the Emdashes store
No fear
Everything you tell or send us is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.
Comments
Now I can’t find it but I recently flipped past an ad for UPMC in The New Yorker. As in University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Does the magazine have regional ads? I saw your mummies, however.
I love GOAT. Some of the magazine’s best writing is found there. It’s artfully put together. The illustrations are cool. The photography is great. There have been occasions when I have taken The New Yorker with me on long plane trips and I have spent the whole time immersed in GOAT. I read it all – “Tables For Two,” “Critic’s Notebook,” “Pop Notes,” what’s showing at the Met, who’s playing at the Knitting Factory - the whole shootin’ match. I soak it up. And the funny thing is that I don’t live in New York. I read it because I like the writing. Hooray for GOAT!
The Leithauser poem is in fact the best poem featured in the magazine in recent memory; but sadly that’s not terribly high praise.
Z.B.S.—I’m going to start concentrating on the poems in each issue, and I hope you’ll help out; the standouts should be lauded and read by everyone (especially the so-called readers who think they can get away with “not being into poetry”—what the dickens would their literary heroes think of such a lazy, shameful boast?). The bafflingly weak poems should also be noted as such.
Oh, I’ve never been known to shy from collaborative whining.