Author Archives: Emdashes

Emdashes Fall Interns: We Want You!

The Emdashes team is looking for bright, New Yorker-phile, syntax-and-punctuation-consumed, creative, and cheerful interns for the fall season. The internship will span from mid-September through December and will be supervised by various members of the staff, all of whom have been interns and will be friendly and supportive mentors in literary-media-political-illustration-design-niche blogging.
It will involve whatever you are best at doing from this list: editing, writing, idea-generating, organizing, tagging, coding, linking, doing multimedia tasks to be determined, reporting local events (not just in New York but wherever you happen to be), reading, reviewing, collecting, scanning, sleuthing, event planning, and/or obsessing. Actually, obsessing is the only absolute requirement. Attention to detail and horror at factual, typographical, and orthographical errors are key.
Benefits include free stuff (books, tickets to events, and the like), plenty of positive reinforcement and honest advice from professional editors and writers, web publication experience, writing clips, and a ticket to the hottest party in town: the Emdashes 5th Anniversary Extravaganza, near New Year’s of this year.
Please send a short email explaining why you are the perfect Emdashes intern to emily at emdashes dot com, and attach your CV and a writing sample or two. We’re looking forward to meeting you!

Rea Irvin’s Birthday Today

reairvinbirthday3.png
_Pollux writes_:
On this day, a hundred and twenty-eight years ago, Rea Irvin was born in a Californian town named San Francisco. A hundred and three years ago, Irvin traveled to the East Coast to assist in a birth that occurred eighty-four years ago–the founding of _The New Yorker_.
Thomas Edison invented the Kinetoscope as well as the lightbulb, and Rea Irvin did more than simply create the Eustace Tilley cover portrait.
Irvin lent his good taste and good sense towards the creation of _The New Yorker_’s page design, headings, spot illustrations, as well as the archetype of the typical _New Yorker_ single-panel cartoon.
As Emily writes in her important and much-needed “article”:http://www.printmag.com/Article.aspx?ArticleSlug=Everybody_Loves_Rea_Irvin on him, “it was Irvin’s own intimacy with classic form and craft, and his genial willingness to share that expertise, that allowed him to create a complete device: a design, a typeface, a style, and a mood that would be instantly recognizable, and eminently effective, almost a century later.”
Emily and I have worked to pull Rea Irvin out of the shadows that seem to enshroud his life and his work. I wrote the initial Wikipedia article on him, and, in the true spirit of Wikipedia, others have contributed to it, the latest contribution being a series of Irvin “drawings.”:http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Rea_Irvin
Rea Irvin is one of our heroes, and one of the patron saints of this publication that we love so much.
In his honor, we declare August 26 to be **Rea Irvin Day**. Celebrate accordingly.

Blind Items from the New Yorker Festival Blog, Part 2

Martin Schneider writes:
More Festival blind items from the New Yorker Festival blog (here’s the first one):

Which television personality got her big break when she won a contest to be a radio host on WRNX, in Holyoke, Massachusetts?

What actor and playwright once played a New Yorker theatre critic in a movie?

Which singer-songwriter once said, “I’m one of those people that will probably look better and better as I get older—until I drop dead of beauty”?

Any guesses?

What’s in This Week’s New Yorker: 08.31.09

Martin Schneider writes:
A new issue of The New Yorker comes out tomorrow. A preview of its contents, adapted from the magazine’s press release:
In “The Rubber Room,” Steven Brill goes inside a facility where New York City teachers who have been accused of misconduct, or, in some cases, incompetence are required to spend each day—for which they receive full pay—while they await arbitration. Under the terms of the city’s contract with the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, teachers with more than three years’ seniority are guaranteed a job for life and cannot be fired unless they are “charged with an offense and lose in the arduous arbitration hearing,” Brill writes. Teachers can sit idle in these facilities, commonly referred to as “Rubber Rooms,” for as many as five years.
In “Perfect Match,” Burkhard Bilger profiles tennis’s Bob and Mike Bryan, “the best doubles team of their generation,” and examines the evolution of doubles tennis.
In “Useless Beauty,” Nick Paumgarten visits Governors Island in New York Harbor and explores the battle over how to develop it now that it is back under New York’s control.
In Comment, Laura Secor looks at the history of coerced confessions and show trials in Iran, and explains why such tactics are ineffectual today.
James Surowiecki asks if the public’s resistance to Obama’s health-care-reform plan is psychological.
Paul Simms sends a corporate memo about restructuring in one’s personal life.
Elif Batuman chronicles the rise of comedy traffic schools.
Elizabeth Kolbert explores extreme experiments in low-impact living.
James Wood examines attempts to defend God from the new atheists.
Alex Ross notes a recent return to improvisation in bel-canto opera.
Anthony Lane reviews Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock and The Baader Meinhof Complex.
There is a short story by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Sneak Peek: Tasty Previews of the New Yorker Festival

Martin Schneider writes:
I see that the New Yorker Festival blog has posted a few blind items pertaining to the featured personalities who will be appearing at the 2009 Festival in October. Here they are:

Which author said that her most famous short story took twice as long to write as a novel “because I had to imagine my way into the minds of two uneducated, rough-spoken, uninformed young men”?

Which young movie actor pretended to have different accents—”Italian, Russian, Irish”—when he worked at a McDonald’s drive-thru?

This creator of an Emmy Award-winning drama was once a contestant on “Jeopardy!” (Answer in the form of a question, please.)

Any guesses? I figured out a couple of them, but I’d like to hear what you think. We’re hearing that there’ll be several more of these blind posts before the schedule is announced in September. Exciting!