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Twitter Your Way Through the Festival!
Filed under: New Yorker Festival Tagged: David Remnick, New Yorker Festival
For this year's New Yorker Festival, we're going to try a little experiment, and it will work a lot better if some of you join in. We want to have a special Emdashes Twitter dedicated to the New Yorker Festival.
If you are not acquainted with this micro-blogging technique, I recommend that you learn about it at the Twitter website. The essence of it is like writing a blog that consists of text messages. People can post messages of 140 characters or fewer to a blog from their cellphones (and also from a browser). Here's a look at Jason Kottke's Twitter.
Our goal is to have people attending events at the Festival contribute spontaneous "tweets," or messages, and have them appear on a common page accessible to everybody. There's a minor difficulty that most people will be doing this from a cellphone, and user cellphones have a strong tendency to default to their own Twitters. For users in the United States, the number to dial from your cellphone is 40404.
There is a service called Twemes that makes it easier to aggregate messages from multiple people onto a single Twitter. It's very clever—users exploit the pound (#) sign to create a kind of tag that they append to the start of each message. So all users have to do is send a tweet as they normally would, but put the string "#nyfest" at the front. If that tag is there, the message will end up on this tweme page.
It's as simple as that.
Emily's username is (what else?) Emdashes, and mine is wovenstrap.
So if on Festival weekend, you see Stephen Colbert call David Remnick "papa bear" or witness Clint Eastwood gun down some muggers, Twitter it (after calling 911) by typing #nyfest!
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.
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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
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