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Best of the 01.19.09 Issue: The United States of Tara and a Poem Called "Eh?"
Filed under: Pick of the Issue Tagged: Barack Obama, Guy Billout, Judith Thurman, Samantha Power, Tad Friend
Martin Schneider writes:
This issue had Guy Billout's cover with Obama (or an Obama-esque figure) parting the political seas of red and blue. Candidates include Tad Friend on marketing movies, Judith Thurman on Scrabble, and Samantha Power on Gary Haugen. Our crack team will be weighing in shortly!
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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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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.
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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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Comments
I think this week it’s a toss-up between Thurman and Friend. Friend’s piece is full of great quotes and is very funny. I e-mailed it to a couple marketing friends of mine, and to our middle son, who really enjoyed Friend’s “cable guy” article a couple of years ago. But … when all is said and done and the tiles are toted up, POTI this week has to go to Thurman’s “Spreading The Word,” does it not? I mean, if the test of a great piece is whether it catches your attention and holds it, in spite of the subject matter, well, as Pauline Kael would say, that’s not nothing! I cannot abide Scrabble. Nevertheless, I loved Thurman’s piece for the writing, which combines words, quotes, and ideas in heretofore unheard of and beautiful combos, e.g., “At lexulous.com, you can choose a practice game against the computer, although, compared with Maven or Quackle, the Agarwallas’ digital mastermind is a nitwit who leaves the triple-word scores undefended, offers lame hints, misses bingos, and squanders the blanks, and whom I beat at least half the time.” The surreal reality of a sentence like that trumps whole essays by Jill Lepore!