Emdashes. The New Yorker between the lines

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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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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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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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