Author Archives: Emdashes

New Yorker Summit Comestibles Feted as “Yummy” by Gracious Attendee

Martin Schneider writes:
I couldn’t be at the New Yorker Summit yesterday, but through the magic of Twitter, I have iron-clad verbal/visual evidence that the food served during the lunch break was “quite good for being in a box.”
In an unprecedented (for Emdashes) follow-up “Twinterview” (wince), attendee Jed Cohen elaborated: “Steak sandwich + tortellini salad + cookies + apple = yummy. Thanks New Yorker/NYU catering!”
Cohen continued: “They also had a grilled vegetable wrap and some kind of chicken sandwich.” (Can Emily confirm?)
Never doubt that Emdashes will provide muckraking of the first order!
(Jed also posted in a more thoughtful way about the Summit. Why not go over and check it out?)

Adam Gopnik and Steven Pinker Debate Darwin, May 20

From the press release:
Adam Gopnik, author of Angels & Ages, A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life and Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and many other works, will debate a simple and deep subject: How far can Darwin take us as a guide to why we are the way we are? [I suspect neither side will be adopting the creationist position…. —Ed.]
Here are the details:
ADAM GOPNIK with STEVEN PINKER
Angels and Ages
Wednesday, May 20, 2009 at 7:00 PM
South Court Auditorium
The New York Public Library
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street / Enter at Fifth Avenue
Buy Tickets & SAVE $10 on every LIVE ticket!
Become a Friend of the Library for as little at $40 and you ticket
will be $15 instead of $25 plus you will pay NO service fees.
Adam Gopnik, author of Angels & Ages, A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life and Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and many other works, will debate a simple and deep subject: How far can Darwin take us as a guide to why we are the way we are?
Gopnik draws a line and suggests that Darwin can take us only to the edge of art and culture and not beyond; Pinker suggests that Darwin, and Darwinian thinking, in the form of evolutionary psychology, can take us deep into the seeming mysteries of why we like stories and pictures, and the kind of stories and pictures we like.
Both ardent Darwinians [See? Told you. —Ed.], Adam Gopnik and Steven Pinker will offer different—perhaps complementary, perhaps permanently contrasting—visions of what Darwin’s legacy is on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth.
About Adam Gopnik
Adam Gopnik has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1986. In 2000, he began writing New York Journal, about culture and daily life in New York City. He previously spent five years in Paris, writing Paris Journal, a similar column about the life of an expatriate in Paris. Gopnik is the author of Paris to the Moon, The King in the Window, and Through the Children’s Gate. In 1998, he received the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting for his Paris Journal. Before he came to The New Yorker he was an editor at Alfred A. Knopf and a fiction editor at GQ. In 1990, Gopnik co-curated an exhibition entitled “High and Low: ModernArt and Popular Culture” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with the museum’s director, Kirk Varnedoe. He also co-authored the book under the same title.
About Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the American Psychological Association. He is the author of The
Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate, and writes frequently for The New Republic and The New York Times. He has been named Humanist of the Year, and is listed in Foreign Policy and
Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and in
Time magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.” His latest book is The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

The Wavy Rule, a Daily Comic by Pollux: Strunk and White’s Elements of Love, Mechanics, and Hair Styling

strunkwhite5.PNG
“The 50th anniversary edition of _The Elements of Style_ by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White has been released!”:http://emdashes.com/2009/04/omit-needless-controversy-fift.php Look for the sidebar ad to the right of the screen to order your Wavy Rule anthology today!
Click on the cartoon to enlarge it!
Read “The Wavy Rule” archive.

New Yorker Summit: Happening Today

Martin Schneider writes:
The New Yorker Summit is taking place today at New York University. (A bit more convenient location than the Conference of previous years, which was held way over by the West Side Highway, in Chelsea.)
The lineup includes many luminaries, including Howard Dean, Geoffrey Canada, Nassim N. Taleb, Naomi Klein, and Elizabeth Edwards, along with familiar personages from the magazine like Seymour Hersh, Malcolm Gladwell, James Surowiecki, Ryan Lizza, and on and on. (Here’s the schedule.)
If I weren’t on the other side of the Atlantic, I would so be covering this. Failing that, we refer you to Jason Kottke, who has promised “some sort of live-ish coverage.”
More to come as the magazine posts reports, videos, and the like. Attendees, I wish you all intellectual, social, and culinary pleasure.
Update: The group NYU Students Organizing for America is covering the summit live via Twitter.

Milton Glaser, David Remnick, and An Unnamed Aide … Sing Together

Martin Schneider writes:
The indispensible Jason Kottke today posted a passage from Milton Glaser’s Ten Things I Have Learned, about how to detect when you are being nourished or sapped by a given person:

And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.

Shrewd words indeed. They reminded me of a passage from “The Wilderness Campaign,” a David Remnick Profile of Al Gore from 2004 (the bearded, liberated, post-2000 Al Gore), describing why, for all of Gore’s success in politics, it might have been an awkward fit for him. Here it is (emphasis mine; New Yorker don’t truck with no bold text):

Other aides were less harsh, saying that Gore was brusque and demanding but not unkind. Yet, once freed of the apparatus and the requirements of a political campaign, Gore really did savor his time alone, thinking, reading, writing speeches, surfing the Internet. “One thing about Gore personally is that he is an introvert,” another former aide said. “Politics was a horrible career choice for him. He should have been a college professor or a scientist or an engineer. He would have been happier. He finds dealing with other people draining. And so he has trouble keeping up his relations with people. The classical difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that if you send an introvert into a reception or an event with a hundred other people he will emerge with less energy than he had going in; an extrovert will come out of that event energized, with more energy than he had going in. Gore needs a rest after an event; Clinton would leave invigorated, because dealing with people came naturally to him.”

That’s all. It jogged a memory, and I couldn’t rest until I had posted it here.

You Don’t Have to Read Gawker to Know That Americans Are Short

Emily Gordon writes:
Gawker notes today that an Organisation for Economic Co-operating and Development study is reporting alarming (to some) news that Americans aren’t getting taller, even though people in the other countries in the OECD (including Canada and the U.K.) are inching steadily upward.
But New Yorker-ophiles will remember Burkhard Bilger’s findings back in April 2004, in his Reporter at Large called “The Height Gap.” Bilger writes, in part:

Walking along the canals of Amsterdam and Delft, I had an odd sensation of drowning–not because the crowds were so thick but because I couldn’t lift my head above them. I’m five feet ten and a half–about an inch taller than the average in the United States–but, like most men I know, I tend to round the number up. Tall men, a series of studies has shown, benefit from a significant bias. They get married sooner, get promoted quicker, and earn higher wages. According to one recent study, the average six-foot worker earns a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars more, over a thirty-year period, than his five-foot-five-inch counterpart–about eight hundred dollars more per inch per year. Short men are unlucky in politics (only five of forty-three Presidents have been shorter than average) and unluckier in love. A survey of some six thousand adolescents in the nineteen-sixties showed that the tallest boys were the first to get dates. The only ones more successful were those who got to choose their own clothes.
…
The average American man is only five feet nine and a half–less than an inch taller than the average soldier during the Revolutionary War. Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics–which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans–women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.

Just in case I still thought this a trivial trend, Komlos put a final bar graph in front of me. It was entitled “Life Expectancy 2000.” Compared with people in thirty-six other industrialized countries, it showed, Americans rank twenty-eighth in average longevity–just above the Irish and the Cypriots (the Japanese top the rankings). “Ask yourself this,” Komlos said, peering at me above his reading glasses. “What is the difference between Western Europe and the U.S. that would work in this direction? It’s not income, since Americans, at least on paper, have been wealthier for more than a century. So what is it?”

Well, which would you rather read, some chart or the mellifluous Bilger? I’m going to read this one again, and for the record, I’m 5’7″ on my very best days.