Five years ago today, I sat in the appropriately named Williamsburg bar The Lucky Cat (now Bruar Falls), enjoying tea and free wifi, and began this blog. One was far from a lonely number; from the beginning, Emdashes had friends, commenters (though as a readership, dear readership, you tend to be shy, preferring to send me thoughtfully composed emails rather than shout to the public square), supporters, and exactly one member of the peanut gallery, whose small legumes haven't scarred.

But Emdashes today is a lot more than a gal in a bar feeling warm toward a heartbreakingly flawless Donald Antrim essay. It's an honest-to-Irvin team, a clan of kindred spirits, a gathering place for like-minded New Yorker-philes for whom a casual read and a quick look will never be enough. It's the blog's core group of friends and collaborators, Martin Schneider and Pollux and Jonathan Taylor and Benjamin Chambers, about whom I can't say enough, and I hope they know how thoroughly I treasure their winsome and steady posts, essential ideas, and intercontinental companionship. It's the many excellent guest writers and artists, and smart and generous interns, who've contributed to the blog over the past five years.

I'm almost too emotional to write this, and it's almost New Year's Eve, so, for once, I'm at a loss for words. What can I say but thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you? To Patric King and Su from House of Pretty, illustrators Jesse Ewing and (righteously lupine) Carolita Johnson, and the New Yorker librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, whose clever minds are only outdone by their open hearts, and who have taken their fabulous Emdashes Ask the Librarians column all the way to The Big Show. To David Remnick and the New Yorker staff, from 1925 on out, for being there week in and week out, in the best and worst of times--proving that the life of the mind, the world of the page, and the shimmering pixels of the screen can be noble, beautiful, truthful, and funny causes to which to dedicate oneself. To you, reader. Stay with us; we'll be here.

Pollux writes:

For the economist Paul Krugman, the years 2000 to 2009 may have been The Big Zero, but for me, thanks to Emdashes, the last couple of years have been an Era of Plenty. I mean the kind of "Plenty" that matters, the kind that is less about material acquisition and more about gaining access to new thoughts and ideas.

Emily writes (I'm the only person who contributes to the "Personal" category, but it's always safe to specify):

I'm incredibly pleased to announce that the panel I proposed for the next South By Southwest Interactive has been accepted out of more than 2,300 submissions--and was in the first batch of the first day of announcements, no less. The lineup of speakers is likely to change slightly, as will the nuances of the discussion, but the longhorn and short of it is, I'll be in Austin come March in my first official role as a content strategist, or critic of content strategy, or strategic content provider, or online publisher, or maybe just--editor/writer.

If you're planning to be at SXSW, I'd love to hear from you, and if you have any more suggestions about what I should cover at this event, please let me know!

Emily Gordon writes:

This is the panel proposal I submitted for potential inclusion in next March's South by Southwest Interactive festival. If you click on the PanelPicker, sign up in a flash, and click on the little thumbs-up button, you'll be helping me get there! Voting ends Friday, so if you do it now while you're thinking about it, you'll be helping out a lot. Thanks so much!

Why Keep Blogging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple

Organizer:
Emily Gordon, Founder, Emdashes.com; Editor-in-Chief, Print magazine

Description:
Now that we think in 140-character strings and live through Facebook, it's tempting to throw out the blog baby with the bathwater. These seasoned bloggers explain the vitality of this still-revolutionary medium--the resources, community, continuity, and space for real ideas that only blogs can provide--and its infinite future potential.

Questions Answered:
1. Why blog when there are newer, shorter, quicker mediums to express myself in?
2. If there's no barrier to blogging, what makes any blog special?
3. Which blogs are going to be worth reading in 2, 5, 10, and 50 years?
4. What can blogging do for my life--creatively, socially, professionally, and intellectually?
5. What techniques do the bloggers with the most staying power use to keep their readers--and themselves--informed and inspired?
6. Why blogging during a recession is the smartest thing you can be doing with your time
7. What works as a blog post and what works better as a tweet or status update, and why?
8. How do veteran bloggers avoid the 10 blog traps that rookies always fall into?
9. Why is it so important to keep commenters happy and engaged--and how do I do it?
10. Is it worth it to revive a dead blog--and should I kill the one I don't love anymore?

So far, the people I've asked to be on the panel if we make it to the show are:

• Daniel Radosh, blogger, radosh.net; contributing editor, The Week; author, Rapture Ready! Adventures In The Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture

• Book-writer and blog-writer Lizzie Skurnick, who writes the blockbuster Fine Lines column at Jezebel, which turned into her new book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading; her book blog, The Old Hag; and, of course, www.lizzieskurnick.com.

• Scott Rosenberg, author, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters; blogger, www.wordyard.com

• Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan; bloggers, Go Fug Yourself; authors, Go Fug Yourself: The Fug Awards

• Ron Hogan, blogger, Beatrice and GalleyCat; book critic; author, The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane! American Films of the 1970s

• Paddy Johnson, blogger, Art Fag City

• Josh Fruhlinger, blogger, The Comics Curmudgeon

And if we do make it--and you'll be in Austin for the festival--come on by and I'll thank you in person!

Emily Gordon writes:

Can I imagine life without the cartoonist-writer-painter-animator-multimedia artist-graphic designer-comrade-confidante-friend known to Emdashes readers as the daily comic commentator Pollux? No, I cannot.

Paul Morris arrived at my virtual doorstep in January 2008 like an encyclopedia salesman, except that the encyclopedia he was selling was himself, and he asked for no down payment. He soon became my co-conspirator in the quest to reinstall founding New Yorker art director Rea Irvin in the collective mind as the uncompromising impresario he was.

Not long after that, I started reading Paul's online comic, "Arnjuice," noting how the drawings' elegant angles and intense conservation of line mirrored the dialogue's dreamy humor and sharp insight into the vagaries of the human animal. As I dug deeper into his oevre, which is not a word you can use for the output of every twentysomething, and caught a glimpse of its fine art (like these recent portraits of jazz musicians—that's "The Banjoist," above), I further observed how Paul's Spanish and British heritage expressed themselves in all his work in linguistically limber, deeply colorful, and agreeably dissonant ways. I was impressed.

So I asked on a whim if he was willing to draw a comic for Emdashes. He was. We named it "The Wavy Rule" after Irvin's famous wiggly dividing lines. I was thinking of some sort of regular contribution; Paul made it daily. We needed someone to fill in on a few written posts for the blog; he did it so charmingly that he now writes a weekly column just about the cover art of The New Yorker. He stands at the essential center of the Emdashes tapestry along with Martin Schneider, Benjamin Chambers, Jonathan Taylor, Erin Overbey, and Jon Michaud, all of whom I applaud daily, if not hourly. How this all happens every day—often, these days, without me even clicking my mouse—is a never-ending source of wonderment. Paul, like everyone I name above, is (as Dylan Thomas would say) the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

In short, we are in awe. That this is going to make him radish-red with embarrassment is one of the reasons he is so beloved to us. We here at the disparate dots on Google Maps known as Emdashes HQ celebrate all that is Paul, Pollux, and everything he is set to become. We couldn't do without him, and we wish him a very happy birthday indeed.