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9.24.07 Issue: Too Sexy for My Shoe

Filed under: Pick of the Issue Tagged: Francine du Plessix Gray, Henry Alford, Marcel Proust, Marie-Laure de Noailles, Nancy Franklin

In which the staff of Emdashes reviews the high points and discusses the particulars of the previous week’s issue (or, occasionally, another edition).

Did anybody else notice the astronomical Proust quotient in this year’s Style Issue? (Why the Style Issue for so much Proust, anyway?) I sure as hell noticed the ribald Proust reference in Francine du Plessix Gray’s Onward and Upward about Marie-Laure de Noailles, boy howdy! (For the record, ladies, I’ve never read Proust.)

Henry Alford’s Annal of Technology about the solar-powered jacket amused me very much. I do confess to being puzzled (nay, alarmed) by his unabashed use of the veddy British word “whinging,” though.

Finally, I hereby nominate Nancy Franklin for Parenthetical of the Year. Here it is, from her fine negative review of Ken Burns’s PBS documentary The War: “(There will also be, in some places, no swearing; local stations worried about F.C.C. fines for offensive language are being offered a version of the series which removes the four instances of tangy language that unaccountably made their way into a documentary about what it’s like to kill, to see your friends be killed, and to spend endless days and nights in unrelieved fear of being killed yourself.)” Thank you for that. —Martin Schneider

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Who she?

I'm Emily Gordon, reachable at emily@emdashes.com.

I'm an editor at PRINT magazine in New York City. I've worked at The Nation, Newsday, PEN America, and Legal Affairs. I've written for the NY Times Book Review, Salon, The Washington Post, The Village Voice... continued

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A few clips

Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
Interview: Designer Eleanor Grosch (for Print)
Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
Review: The King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
Review: Does The New Republic's recent redesign mean a change of tune? (for Print)
Proposal: A more attractive MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
Report: Eustace Tilley spruces up for The New Yorker's website redesign (for Print)
Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands (for Print)
Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)

More clips.

Tell me more

They say that dashes “are particularly useful in a sentence that is long and complex.” Emdashes—like em dashes—emphasizes what’s between: in particular, between the lines, covers, and issues of a magazine close to my heart.

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Written and edited by Emily Gordon (plus various guest contributors), designed by Pretty, and illustrated by Inkleaf. Additional drawings by Carolita Johnson. Kissable pencil girl by Jennifer Hadley, based on a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad.

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