Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines
Best of Emdashes: Hit Parade
Weekly: Pick of the Issue
Bimonthly: Ask the Librarians
Submit a question for the next column.
Frequently:
Headline Shooter
Seal Barks
Eustace Google
Looked Into
Lizzie Widdicombe: An Ingenious Talk Technique
Filed under: Looked Into Tagged: books, events, Lizzie Widdicombe, TOTT
Widdcombe covered a festive book event (Not Quite What I Was Planning). Each pithy phrase is subtly witty: It’s no longer than six words. Appropriate for the book in question! I couldn’t make the party, sadly. But I did contribute a tale. Oh, you’d like to hear it? “Do as say, not as did.” (P. 180, in all its glory.) Another memoirist compiled a master list. Moved to write your short story? Show off your quick, dirty syntax.
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"It Can’t Be Just Another News Site Flashing Headlines": The Newyorker.com Design
Filed under: Clips Tagged: design, interviews, newyorker.com
I interviewed esteemed Winterhouse designers William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand, who worked with The New Yorker on the magazine’s web redesign, as well as the web editors at Harper’s, The Nation, and Scientific American. It’s all in PRINT, and, at a quality newsstand near you, in print.
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You’ll love (possibly) my review of James Ellroy’s My Dark Places, published in The Nation in 1996. This is my first attempt at uploading a PDF, which seems like an easier way of dealing with clips when I don’t have them in text form. Let’s try it! Hey, that’s handy—at least in this browser, it just comes right up on screen.
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My Interview With Roz Chast for Newsday
Filed under: Clips Tagged: books, cartoons, clips, Roz Chast, Steve Martin
New Yorker Cartoonist: These Days, She’s Changing Her Toon
By Emily Gordon
Special to Newsday
November 26, 2006
For a public humorist, Roz Chast is admirably discreet. She laughs often and may occasionally say, “La la la la la,” as the people in her New Yorker cartoons do, but her humor is also decidedly ironic. The New York Times has described her as “small, blond, bespectacled and self-deprecating—equal parts Mia Farrow and Woody Allen.” In person, whether she’s onstage reading her cartoons to a fanatically attentive audience, casing the umbrella rack at an upscale drugstore or considering the oddness of eyebrows, she’s an appealingly diplomatic personage.
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The competitive pursuit of trivia
By Emily Gordon
Special to Newsday
October 29, 2006
BRAINIAC: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, by Ken Jennings. Villard, 269 pp., $24.95.
PRISONER OF TREBEKISTAN: A Decade in “Jeopardy!,” by Bob Harris. Crown, 339 pp., $23.95.
The recital of known facts has often kept chaos at bay, but in a culture blanketed with “truthiness” and spin, Internet alter egos and reporters composing out-of-state bulletins from their living rooms, perhaps facts have become more important than ever. It seems wrong, then, to dismiss the precise naming of details from the world’s history of art, politics, science, technology, and so forth as mere “trivia,” a game as frivolous as Twister.
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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
I 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.
A few clips
- Report: Learning to read with comic books edited by Françoise Mouly (for Print)
- 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)
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.
Primary sources
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Events listed by the magazine
Web resources: New Yorker writers and artists
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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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