Emdashes. Modern Times Between the Lines.

Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
A Web Comic: The Wavy Rule
Before it moved to The New Yorker:
Ask the Librarians archive

About Emdashes | Email us

 
March052009

New Yorker Stories That Haunt My Dreams

Filed under: Looked Into   Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Emily Gordon momentarily surfaces to write:

The briefest list, representing a much longer longer one spanning roughly 1981 to the present. I’ll add links later when I’m not hiring an art director for Print. Yes, you may still send your resume if you get it to me in the next couple of days.

Anyway, the beginning of that list of free-floating-anxiety-provoking, lingering-question-leaving, and dream-haunting stories (“the universe is expanding!”):
  • An elderly lady in a nursing home in, possibly, Florida, was starving to death because of the bureaucracy of Medicare, or something like that. Is she being nourished properly now, if she’s still with us?
  • The dangerous case of the dissolving pterapods. Has Obama appointed a Pterapod Czar?
  • The mothers, the nurses, and the kids in Katherine Boo’s piece about Louisiana programs that pair nurses and teenage mothers. Is it still being funded? How are the mothers? How are the kids? Are they still reeling crayfish from the back yard for dinner? I’ve eaten crayfish; is there really enough meat on them for dinner, or are they bigger in Louisiana?
  • The bees—about which Elizabeth Kolbert wrote (and gestured) so compellingly. I know they’re still not doing well as a group, because I keep hearing distressed British beekeepers on the BBC talking about the apian health crisis and the perilous honey business. I am a friend of the bee and a honey appreciator. How can I help?
  • Pretty much everyone from Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s series on the South Bronx, which later became Random Family, which I finished reading a few months ago and am still reeling from. How are you, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc? What are you writing about and when can we read it, preferably in The New Yorker? Are you still in touch with your friends and subjects from the various neighborhoods you covered so intensely well? Has anyone broken out of the cycle of poverty and pregnancy and gone to college or gotten a decent job? Is the economy eroding any gains they’ve made? Although it may be voyeuristic or simply none of my business to ask, I literally can’t stop thinking about them.
  • Not to mention Florence, Crystal, and Daquan, part of whose stories Susan Sheehan told in the series that became Life for Me Ain’t Been No Crystal Stair.
  • Roger Angell and Lillian Ross. I know they’re getting on. But I hope they’re all right.
To be continued as long as I read The New Yorker and worry, that is, as long as I live. And you? What’s haunting you from the past 1 to 84 years of The New Yorker?
0 comments

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, it may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Thanks for waiting.)

2008 Webby Awards Official Honoree
Pretty!