It’s been some time since our last Marginalia recommendation, and after giving Malcolm Gladwell such a hard time last week we figured it was time to show The New Yorker some love. And we do love it, unabashedly, right down to the famously oblique slice-of-what-we-all-pretend-to-be-New-York-life cartoons that, like us, have always followed Michael O’Donoghue’s wise dictum: “Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor.” We are also happy to second Bob Duggan’s comment from a few posts back in declaring our genuine admiration for James Wood’s essays.
But the wide world of the Internet holds people who are even bigger New Yorker groupies than we are, and some of them have gotten together and created a blog. That blog is Emdashes: The New Yorker Between the Lines, which bills itself as “a place where keen and dedicated readers of The New Yorker, past and present, can find related news and commentary: about people, subjects, and ideas within the magazine, and events and conversations outside its pages.” Their title, like ours, is basically an editing in-joke, but founder Emily Gordon’s elucidation of it turns punctuation into poetry:
“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.”
Who could read that without hearing the stirring of violins? Emdashes, moreover, is no mere New Yorker manqué but a lively and well-produced publication in its own right. The contributors are all talented professional writers for a variety of other media outlets, and the blog is in part an aggregation of reviews, interviews, and features they have published elsewhere. The site even has its own in-house illustrators, including Pollux (a.k.a. Paul Morris), who contributes his comic “The Wavy Rule.” Thus, while Emdashes is in no way affiliated with The New Yorker, it is an excellent way of getting your New Yorker fix between issues, during those long lonely weeks when you’re waiting breathlessly to see whether you will triumph in the Caption Contest at last. Speaking of which: for entertaining reading that is affiliated with the New Yorker, head over to The Cartoon Lounge, which contains one of the single funniest blog posts we’ve ever seen.
