Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines
Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Weekly: Pick of the Issue
Bimonthly: Ask the Librarians
Submit a question for the next column.
Frequently:
Headline Shooter
Seal Barks
Eustace Google
Looked Into
Today, Emdashes is three. Three cheers for three years of whatever it is we’ve been doing and will do here, God bless it. As Harold Ross might say, but he died long before the age of blogs, at which he might have looked askance. On the other hand, he might have been all for them. It’s hard to say. He’d probably blanch at Facebook. Have you read Genius in Disguise? I’m just finishing it up, and it’s a treat, whatever your level of interest in The New Yorker and the whirlwind it made. I’m simultaneously reading Victor Navasky’s funny and instructive memoir, A Matter of Opinion, and I’m proud to have worked with one of these noble men of magazines and upholders of honest journalism. That’s not to slight the women. To paraphrase Norman Mailer, every editor is a culture, and you enter deep into another culture, one that’s not your own, and you learn an awful lot from it. So three cheers for my own wise captain, too.
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
I welcome tips, questions, and comments about The New Yorker past and present, plus related events, links, typeface sightings, &c. To contact the magazine or send a submission, click here.
No fear: Everything you say or send is off the record unless we ask for your permission to use it.
This site is neither owned nor operated by The New Yorker magazine or Condé Nast Publications.
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)
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.
Primary sources
The New Yorker
Events listed by the magazine
Web resources: New Yorker writers and artists
Books, Organizations, &c.
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.
The Rossosphere
- Mick Stevens: I Really Should Be Drawing
- Resistance Is Fertile
- The essential Jane Grant
- Newyorkette
- Matthew Diffee's HuffPo blog
- Sasha Frere-Jones
- The New York Public Library records
- Map: Caption Contest Winners
- New Yorker haiku
- Between the Squibs
- New Yorker database
- Technorati: New Yorker
- Wikipedia: The New Yorker
- The New Orcer
- Access My Library
- New Yorker Comment
- Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise
- Paul Noth's Pale Force
- The New Yorker Magazine in the 1930s
- Link to suggest? Email it!
- I Hate the New Yorker
- Blog About Town
- Ben Yagoda's homepage
- Modern Spectator
- New Yorker Anti-Caption Contest
- Silence of the City
- Cartoonist Michael Maslin's homepage
- Chiasmus in The New Yorker
Comments
Congratulations, Emily! (And Martin and others!) Happy New Year to you, too. I look forward to reading and to working together in 2008.
Brian
Congrats, Emily! Keep it up and have a Happy New Year.
Happy Birthday and Happy New Year Emily!
Happy Birthday Emdashes! You’ve come a long way and I can’t wait to see what’s next!
If it weren’t midwinter, we could have a picnic with lemonade and badminton. Thanks so much for your moral support and contributions past, present, and future!
I meant to say, I reviewed that Navasky book for PW; I gave it a very good review. In the review (surely available on the Amazon page) I said something about how the book is pretty much req’d reading for anyone who is involved with magazine production. It really is pretty amazingly in-depth on the subject of editing a weekly periodical with a strong editorial line.
I like Victor’s descriptions of his Army base and his time at the Times, plus of course his tales of editing the original Monocle, the magazine that changed width and height according to its editors’ whims.
Congratulations! Emdashes is a great site! I particularly enjoy POTI. All the best in 2008!
Thanks, driedchar! And thanks for being such a great commenter. We really like reading what you have to say.
The POTIs are about to start up again, if our stamina prevails. The task can get overwhelming, so the key is to focus on just a few of the best moments, large or small, in a given week’s issue. We’re predisposed to like a lot of the magazine, needless to say—it’s the standouts we want to trumpet!