Such a shock. David Remnick contributes an eloquent postscript.
Category Archives: Little Words
An Intellectual’s Fair Oeuvre
A very happy 200th post—and 45th birthday, too—to my friend Scott McLemee, a gentleman and scholar who honors both categories by belonging, iconoclastically and steadfastly, to both of them.
The Emdashes Summer Interns…
have been selected, and when I’m back from vacation next week I’ll announce them with proper fanfare—and start working with them on various tasks. Thanks for applying, everyone, and congratulations to the lovely people who—from around the globe—will be helping make Emdashes an even more pleasant, accurate, and whiz-bang place to be.
Ask Not For Whom the Booze Was Cold
Since the answer is “Hemingway,” who liked Papa Dobles with lots of ice. Other players in this daiquiri drama include Lillian Ross, Michael Palin, “cocktail scholar Philip Greene (a government intellectual-property lawyer in Washington),” A. E. Hotchner, lemon, lime, and, of course, a recipe. For God’s sake, no cherries!
The New Yorker Conference Is Viewable
There are now a whole bunch of conference videos online: Malcolm Gladwell; Rahm Emanuel and Ryan Lizza; Linda Avey, Anne Wojcicki, and Michael Specter; Gavin Newsom and Dana Goodyear; James Surowiecki and Andy Stern; Jane Mayer and Eric Haseltine; Yoky Matsuoka; Duncan Sheik and Susan Morrison; David Adjaye and Thelma Golden; and Bill Buford, David Chang, Daniel Humm, and Marc Taxiera.
Suggested Letters For Calvin Trillin and Paul Muldoon
B, for Trillin, for boudin; for Muldoon, F, for French (although I like the look of these two As, too). In any case, both of these kind and honorable men will have at least twenty-six at their service later this month, when they’ll be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
The Bench Roundup
The Book Bench is the newest in an impressively expanding list of New Yorker blogs; it’s also a bench of fame and legend, piled with books for the taking. Thanks, James Molenda of FOUND, for performing such an appropriate service to our readers.
On the Internet, Everyone Knows You’re in Dogpatch
Just debuted—real-time snapshots of where in the world people are looking at New Yorker cartoons, and precisely which cartoons they’re looking at. At press minute in greater San Francisco, interest was running high in Frank Modell, Ed Koren, and Leo Cullum. In Dogpatch, a neighborhood where, about a month ago, I became one with an incredibly crowded, jolly, and soprasetta-crazed party for the magazine Meatpaper, it may be another story. You’ll have to keep a careful watch.
LOL, LOL: LOL
On the Moth podcast (which I love so much I’m now going to the live shows—backward, eh?), Adam Gopnik riffs endearingly on being the father of an adolescent boy, control, communication, silences, and the abbreviations within the abbreviations.
Upson Downs
There are already parodies of The New Yorker‘s chilling elevator video. The spooky music, by the way, which opens with a repeated note that sounds a little like an elevator that might be opening its doors to trap you for days (or minutes), is “The Storm Begins†by Jennifer Haines.