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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!

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Who we?

Emdashes, founded in 2004 by Emily Gordon, is a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages. Learn more about us and our contributors.

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We 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.

Some writing by Emily Gordon

Review: A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore (for Newsday)
Annotated slide show: a wet, festive 2009 Coney Island Mermaid Parade (for nycgo.com)
Proposal: A better-looking MetroCard (for A Brief Message)
Feature: Muslim immigration iconography in the Netherlands, and an interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali (for Print)
Review: Does a redesign of The New Republic mean a change of tune? (for Print)
Interview: four online obsessives and visual cataloguers, Kate Bingaman, Nicholas Felton, Ellie Harrison, and John D. Freyer (for Print)
Review: King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game by Paul Hoffman (for Newsday)
Interviews: winning New Visual Artists Eleanor Grosch, Zigmunds Lapsa, Christian Cervantes, and Kate & Camilla (for Print)
Profile: lindy hop legend Frankie Manning (for Newsday, with Robert Fouch)
Feature: Rea Irvin, illustrator, bon vivant, and The New Yorker's first art director (for Print)
Profile: screenwriter and novelist Joe Keenan (for Newsday)
Review: My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World by Julian Dibbell (for Newsday)
Review: Charles Dickens by Jane Smiley (for Newsday)
Review: Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry (for Print)
Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
Report: The New Yorker's redesigned website (for Print)
Interview: James Surowiecki on what's next for the wisdom of crowds (for Assignment Zero)
Review: The Complete New Yorker (for Print)
Interview: Matthew Diffee on the appropriately inappropriate cartoons of the The Rejection Collection (for Print)
Interview: Roz Chast on Brooklyn, pysanky eggs, and animation (for Newsday)
Review: books about various New Yorker cartoonists by Liza Donnelly and Iain Topliss (for Newsday)
Review: Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life by Linda H. Davis (for Newsday)
Interview: Edward Gorey (for Newsday)

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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The New Yorker
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Founded by Emily Gordon, edited by Martin Schneider, designed by House of 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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