Emily Gordon writes:

Once upon a time, from 2004 to about 2010, Emdashes was a New Yorker fan blog. But now that The New Yorker has so many blogs of its own for people to follow and be-fan, we’ve slowly started morphing back into what we intended to be in the first place: a punctuation blog.

Fortunately, sometimes our first love, The New Yorker, venntersects with our second love, punctuation. Today marks one such occasion. You probably already know that the magazine sponsors a weekly Twitter contest, Questioningly, in which people tweet entries (along with the hashtag #tnyquestion) in response to editor Ben Greenman’s inspired and loopy challenges. Greenman just posted the results of the most recent contest: Invent a new punctuation mark. Some of the winners:

There were inventions specific to the online world, such as @seancarman’s smÅ¿ticon, which consisted of “two colons on either side of an internet comment identifying it as an out-of-character expression of rage.” There were inventions characteristic of our age, such as @madbeyond’s sollipsis, “a personalized ellipsis points shifting the discussion back to me me me.” But for the winner we went beyond rage and self-absorption to @toddlerlit’s bad-writing apology mark.

You’ll have to read on to find out more.

Meanwhile, do you know what an interroverti is? It’s the winner of our own punctuation contest from a few years back, in which we asked reader to name the nameless upside-down question mark. There are pictures, too. Enjoy. And since readers seem undaunted by the winner having been announced in 2008 and are still posting submissions, we invite you to do the same.

Yesterday, _American Prospect_ blogger Ezra Klein “wrote”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=12&year=2008&base_name=biden_hearts_rail about VP-Elect Joe Biden’s fondness for railway systems and, more grandly, the happenstance origins of major programs in our country: since Biden likes trains, we might see more train funding, goes the thought. Klein made the following comparison:

For instance, John F. Kennedy’s interest in poverty, which laid the groundwork for the War on Poverty, came because he read Dwight MacDonald’s long essay on Michael Harrington’s book _The Other America._ And thus a national crusade was born. If he’d missed that issue of _The New Yorker,_ the path of American social policy might have proven quite different.

Now _that_ got my attention. I’d never heard of this. Is it really true? Did JFK really move to reduce poverty because of MacDonald’s _New Yorker_ article? MacDonald’s review, titled “The Invisible Poor,” appeared in the January 19, 1963, issue. The full article can be read on the _New Yorker_ “website”:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1963/01/19/1963_01_19_082_TNY_CARDS_000075671?currentPage=all (Digital Edition link “here”:http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1963-01-19#folio=082).
If you search on “harrington macdonald kennedy” on Google, it quickly becomes evident that the story is an accepted piece of Kennedy administration lore. I’m guessing that this was a fairly celebrated incident at the time.
Here’s “Jon Meacham”:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_/ai_14687957 in the _Washington Monthly_ in 1993:

President Kennedy read this in the January 19, 1963, _New Yorker,_ in a long review by the critic Dwight Macdonald of Michael Harrington’s book _The Other America._ The book and the review together forced a sea change in American attitudes toward the poor. Just five years earlier, in 1958, John Kenneth Galbraith had declared poverty no longer “a massive affliction [but] more nearly an afterthought,” and nobody thought to contradict him until Harrington, a socialist journalist, came along.
The Harrington/Macdonald case convinced Kennedy, who had first witnessed large scale poverty in Appalachia during his 1960 West Virginia primary campaign. An antipoverty program was being drafted when the president was murdered, and Lyndon Johnson quickly picked up the standard.

Astonishing. I honestly didn’t know that the War on Poverty started with JFK. I thought it was all Johnson, using the memory of JFK as means to his own ends rather than completing his predecessor’s project. I mean, I’d heard that sort of language used to describe it, but I had dismissed it as sentimentality, I guess. But Kennedy really did start it.
To my eyes, MacDonald’s review does not particularly read like an article that would launch $6.6 trillion of government spending (as George Will, a critic of the effort, “reckons it”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/03/AR2006030301756.html). It is possible that we are more aware of poverty, relative to MacDonald’s audience, or just more accustomed to strong advocacy. MacDonald spends a lot of time carping about the poor writing and evidentiary standards of Harrington’s competitors but duly wades through the statistical evidence with a hardheaded refusal to accept the conclusions of others.
But then, right when the argument is at its most abstruse, out pops clarity. These words sound intended to reverberate in the Oval Office itself:

They [the authors of another book under review] claim that 77,000,000 Americans, or _almost half the population,_ live in poverty or deprivation. One recalls the furor Roosevelt aroused with his “one-third of a nation—ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” But the political climate was different then.

Different, eh? Kennedy apparently decided that maybe he could prove MacDonald wrong.
I don’t have much more to add. Were Emdashes readers aware of the significance of MacDonald’s review? I’d love to hear more about it.

In 2004, Robert Birnbaum “interviewed”:http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personalities/birnbaum_v_renata_adler.php Renata Adler at “The Morning News”:http://www.themorningnews.org/; unsurprisingly, the matchup of these two idiosyncratic people produced an interesting, wide-ranging, scattershot interview touching on many aspects of writing and reporting and publishing.
My colleague Benjamin Chambers has “twice”:http://emdashes.com/2008/07/speedboat-jen-fain-is-the-writ.php expressed “befuddlement”:http://emdashes.com/2007/03/other-things-im-excited-about.php at Adler’s inability to quote the last line of her own novel Speedboat accurately. The line Adler mangled, in her book _Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker,_ runs as follows: “It could be that the sort of sentence one wants right here is the kind that runs, and laughs, and slides, and stops right on a dime.”
With this in mind, here’s the sentence that jumped out at me: “I have this quirk, this neuroticism, [pause] this habit . . . of editing all the way down to the wire and past.”
So that’s it. She was just editing past the wire again!

Jonathan Taylor, whom we’ve just welcomed to the Emdashes team, writes:
This article in the November Vanity Fair explains the disappearance from The New York Review of Books of the artist who helped define its virtually unchanging look: David Levine, who caricatures the glorious and the notorious of belles lettres and statecraft with huge heads on vestigial bodies (or, sometimes, vice versa). His vision succumbing to macular degeneration, Levine in 2006 for the first time had work rejected by the Review for reasons of execution rather than scurrilousness. The article is a fine sidelong portrait of a publication that’s venerable, yet in fact still young enough to be only now exiting (slowly) the era of its founders.
It also turns out that Levine had several taste tiffs with The New Yorker, for which he has provided 71 illustrations. One reject was this watercolor of Bush in flightsuit atop an array of coffins, which ran in 2005 instead in the Review. It seems practically banal today, but plausibly exceeds the limits of The New Yorker‘s political prudence. (The magazine’s emphatic Barack Obama endorsement is still careful to specify that “There is still disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his horrific regime.”)
A little more alarming is the tale of a cartoon of Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon that the magazine altered unilaterally. It removed some missiles that accompanied Sharon as a counterpart to the machine-gun wielding masked militants looming behind Abbas. David Remnick told Vanity Fair, “David Levine is a great political artist and kept on publishing with us after this, but all I remember about this was thinking that with Sharon being so ominously huge in the drawing, the bombs were too much.” It certainly seems that Levine has a thing about Sharon’s hugeness, if not his enormity (the kaffiyeh on this Sharon I think perfectly typifies Levine’s blunt sharpness, if you will).
Perhaps the context is useful in reading Levine’s rather sweeping take on the state of New Yorker cartooning in an interview with The Nation: “I think they’ve let down the barrier of quality, and it is just terrible.” (Can this be true of every current contributor, including the older cartoonists who continue to draw regularly for the magazine?) But the anger seems rooted in his determination that cartooning have a legible positive purpose: “Caricature is a form of hopeful statement: I’m drawing this critical look at what you’re doing, and I hope that you will learn something from what I’m doing.” Levine compares the cartoonist to the golem created by a rabbi to fend off anti-Semitic attacks: “When things are settled, he’s not needed.”
The New York Review‘s site hosts a complete Levine gallery, searchable by subject name or categories like “Tycoons, Plutocrats, Midases.” The overlap of the two magazines’ preoccupations means there are a lot of images of New Yorker interest over there: David Remnick; William Shawn; a passel of Updikes, from 1971 to 1994; a quorum of Malcolms, including a Gladwell and two contrasting Janets; a Joan Didion or two; a couple of somewhat disturbing Rebecca Wests; even a rather calming Helen Vendler.

Martin Schneider writes:
Something in the New York Observer that does not go by the name of “Transom” has a nice piece by Leon Neyfakh about Bob Miller’s new HarperStudio project, that remarkably ambitious effort to jettison the outdated publishing techniques of large advances and the practice of taking on remaindered copies you might have heard about. (I’m all for this stuff, by the way.)
In the piece, we learn that:

The most eye-catching title on the list is probably the collection of short, unpublished humor pieces by Mark Twain, which will be out in April. Other notable books in the mix: a memoir by 3rd Rock From the Sun star John Lithgow, a history of humor by New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, and a Toni Morrison-edited collection called Burn This Book, about “the power of the word,” that will feature pieces by her, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, David Grossman, and others.

Emdashes salutes Mankoff’s third billing in this paragraph (beat out Morrison!) and eagerly awaits the book; it sounds like a pip.