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The New Yorker's Guide to the Eliot Spitzer Situation

Filed under: The Squib Report Tagged: Brendan Gill, fiction, humor, Nick Paumgarten, politics, Woody Allen

Looking at the blogosphere, I’ve seen three pieces of writing mentioned in connection with Eliot Spitzer’s stunning predicament; two of them appeared in The New Yorker.

To start, Garth Risk Hallberg at the Millions returns to Nick Paumgarten’s fine profile of the governor from last December, presciently titled “The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer” (little did he know!). Hallberg approvingly quotes Paumgarten’s description of Spitzer’s impulsiveness, which now reads like a masterpiece of understatement.

Second, the scandal reminds The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber of Portnoy’s Complaint, which did not, alas, first appear in The New Yorker, which fact should not prevent us from admiring Brendan Gill’s astonishing description of the novel as “a single, hysterical howl of excrementitious anguish.”

And finally, the Emperors Club that got Spitzer into so much trouble seems to have been more than a little bit pretentious, touting the “individual education, sophistication … erudition and educational standing/accomplishments” of its “models,” prompting the New York Times blog Laugh Lines to quote several lines from Woody Allen’s classic story “The Whore of Mensa.”

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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

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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.

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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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