Martin Schneider writes:
Another New Yorker Festival has come and gone, and it must be said it was a good one. We posted last week about the existence of Fora.tv’s pay-per-view videos of a good number of the events. After the jump we post some tasty snippets to whet your appetite.
Lorrie Moore:

E. Annie Proulx:

Dave Eggers:

Joyce Carol Oates:

Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith:

Paul Krugman:

Ken Auletta:

Stephen King:

Fashion Forward:

James Surowiecki:

Cynthia Nixon on Gay Marriage:

Calvin Trillin:

Malcolm Gladwell:

Ian Frazier:

Jonah Lehrer:

Martin Schneider writes:
There’s only one day of the year we can run that headline, and today is that day.
Emily and I will be attending events all weekend. I’ll be at tonight’s “Living History” event with E. Annie Proulx, E.L. Doctorow, and Peter Carey, and I’ll be seeing Bill Simmons and Neil Gaiman, among others. Emily will be at the James Taylor, Pee-Wee Herman (they’re listing it as “Paul Reubens,” and we get that, but hey, it’s The Pee-Wee Herman Show on Broadway!), and Sympathy for Delicious events, and other ones too. And we may have guest writers weighing in.
Remember: as it did last year, the New Yorker Festival is offering a small number of tickets to all events during the weekend, so a lucky few of you will still get in!
Here’s to another great festival! See you there!

Martin Schneider writes:
Inevitably, a magazine with the reach of The New Yorker has a substantial audience across the country and in other countries. Lots of people want to participate in the New Yorker Festival, which takes place October 1-3, but are simply too far away. Those people are likely to rejoice in Fora.tv.
Fora.tv will be streaming a total of 18 NYF events as they happen (click on the link above for the exact list). You can purchase access to single events ($4.95 each) or the entire package ($59.95). Then you can watch the events as they are happening as well as on demand for 30 days after the festival. According to Fora.tv, live access “includes interactive chat, Twitter stream and simultaneous viewing—yes, you can purchase multiple programs that take place at the same time.”
Good luck to both Fora.tv and its eager customers!

The entire staff of Emdashes is excited to bring this year’s New Yorker Festival schedule. It looks like another terrific year, and we hope to see you there! There are more details on all of the events here.
Tickets for The New Yorker Festival will go on sale at 12 noon E.T. on Friday, September 10th. Click here for details.
Friday, October 1
6 p.m.
“The Social Network” (Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake, Aaron Sorkin)
Directors Guild Theatre ($30)
7 p.m.
James Taylor
Acura at SIR Stage37 ($35)
Alec Baldwin
SVA Theatre 1 ($35)
“Living History” (Peter Carey, E. L. Doctorow, Annie Proulx)
SVA Theatre 2 ($25)
Lorrie Moore
(Le) Poisson Rouge ($25)
9:30 p.m.
Possessed (Jonathan Safran Foer, Orhan Pamuk)
Directors Guild Theatre ($25)
Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith
Acura at SIR Stage37 ($25)
Giving Voice (Uwem Akpan, Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers)
SVA Theatre 1 ($25)
The Parent Trap (Mary Karr, Tobias Wolff)
SVA Theatre 2 ($25)
Sex and Violence (Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates, Wells Tower)
(Le) Poisson Rouge ($25)
Saturday, October 2
10 a.m.
The Tea Party (Dick Armey, Jill Lepore, Rick Santelli, Anthony Weiner)
Directors Guild Theatre ($30)
Paul Krugman
Acura at SIR Stage37 ($30)
Atul Gawande
SVA Theatre 1 ($30)
Ken Auletta
SVA Theatre 2 ($30)
1 p.m.
Bill Simmons
Directors Guild Theatre ($30)
The Vampire Revival (Noël Carroll, Stephen King, Matt Reeves, Melissa Rosenberg)
Acura at SIR Stage37 ($30)
Fashion Forward (Maria Cornejo, Naeem Khan, Phillip Lim, David Neville, Marcus Wainwright)
SVA Theatre 1 ($30)
James Surowiecki
SVA Theatre 2 ($30)
4 p.m.
Natural Disasters (Susan Hough, Charles Mandeville, Joshua Wurman, Don Yeomans)
Directors Guild Theatre ($30)
David Simon
Acura at SIR Stage37 ($30)
The Case for Gay Marriage (David Boies and other panelists, to be announced)
SVA Theatre 1 ($30)
Paul Goldberger
SVA Theatre 2 ($30)
6:30 p.m.
Tales Out of School 2 (David Grann, Jane Mayer, Susan Orlean, Jeffrey Toobin, Calvin Trillin)
(Le) Poisson Rouge ($50)
7 p.m.
Werner Herzog
Directors Guild Theatre ($35)
Yo-Yo Ma
Acura at SIR Stage37 ($35)
Paul Reubens
SVA Theatre 1 ($35)
Patricia Clarkson
SVA Theatre 2 ($35)
8 p.m.
“The Human Scale” (Lawrence Wright)
3LD Art & Technology Center ($35)
10 p.m.
“Sympathy for Delicious” (Mark Ruffalo, Christopher Thornton)
Directors Guild Theatre ($30)
Regina Spektor
Acura at SIR Stage37 ($35)
Andrew Bujalski, Greta Gerwig, and Joe Swanberg
SVA Theatre 2 ($30)
Sunday, October 3
10 a.m.
Morning at the Frick (Peter Schjeldahl)
The Frick Collection ($60)
Tugboat Manhattan (Burkhard Bilger)
South Street Seaport Museum ($120)
11 a.m.
Come Hungry (Calvin Trillin)
Ticket buyers will be contacted concerning the location. ($120)
Steve Carell
Acura at SIR Stage37 ($30)
12 noon
Inside the Artist’s Studio (Platon)
Ticket buyers will be contacted concerning the location. ($60)
A Visit to the Glass House (Paul Goldberger)
The Philip Johnson Glass House ($150)
1 p.m.
Neil Gaiman
Directors Guild Theatre ($30)
The Cartoon Caption Game (Robert Mankoff, Matthew Diffee, Carolita Johnson, Barbara Smaller)
Condé Nast Executive Dining Room ($35)
Malcolm Gladwell
SVA Theatre 1 ($30)
Ian Frazier
SVA Theatre 2 ($30)
4 p.m.
Verses (John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Cynthia Cruz, Jorie Graham, Tracy K. Smith, Paul Muldoon)
Directors Guild Theatre ($20)
Live from New York (Seth Meyers and others)
Acura at SIR Stage37 ($30)
Your Brain on the Internet (Nicholson Baker, Elizabeth Phelps, Jonah Lehrer, Jaron Lanier)
SVA Theatre 1 ($30)
Alex Ross
SVA Theatre 2 ($30)

Martin Schneider writes:
The New Yorker has announced the program for the 2010 New Yorker Festival, scheduled for October 1-3. As always, the event will feature author events on the Friday, followed by a wide variety of events over the next two days.
The 2010 New Yorker Festival
New York, August 26, 2010 – During the weekend of October 1st through October 3rd, The New Yorker will present its eleventh annual Festival, a three-day celebration that will once again bring together a distinguished group of writers, thinkers, artists, and other luminaries from fields including film, music, politics, economics, architecture, fashion, and literature. Since the Festival’s inception, events have sold out quickly, drawing close to twenty thousand people from around the world every year. The full program guide will be included in the September 13, 2010, issue of the magazine, on newsstands September 6th, and will be available at newyorker.com/festival.
Among this year’s highlights:
Interviews with the actor Alec Baldwin; the actor Steve Carell; the actress Patricia Clarkson; the New Yorker staff writer Ian Frazier; the author Neil Gaiman; the actor John Goodman; the director Werner Herzog; the economist Paul Krugman; the cellist Yo-Yo Ma; the co-creator of Treme, David Simon; the actor Paul Reubens; the best-selling author and ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons; the singer-songwriter and pianist Regina Spektor; and the singer-songwriter James Taylor.
New Yorker writers David Grann, Jane Mayer, Susan Orlean, Jeffrey Toobin, and Calvin Trillin will gather for an evening of stories about life at the magazine, presented in conjunction with the Moth performance series and hosted by Andy Borowitz.
A panel, Live from New York, will feature Seth Meyers, the head writer for Saturday Night Live, and other cast members, to be announced; the event will be moderated by David Remnick.
In a series of New Yorker Talks, Ken Auletta will investigate the impact that Google and the Internet have had on the media (and everyone else); Atul Gawande will discuss end-of-life care; Malcolm Gladwell will look at the magical year of 1975; Paul Goldberger will explain why architecture matters; Alex Ross will explore the bass lines of music history; and James Surowiecki will analyze talent and context in a random world.
Friday Night Fiction events will feature discussions among New Yorker contributors Peter Carey, E.L. Doctorow, and Annie Proulx; Jonathan Safran Foer and Orhan Pamuk; Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates, and Wells Tower; Uwem Akpan, Edwidge Danticat, and Dave Eggers; and Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff. Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith will read from their work, and Lorrie Moore will talk with Deborah Treisman.
An opening-night screening of David Fincher’s film The Social Network, about the founding of Facebook, will be followed by a discussion with the film’s stars, Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake, and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.
The Tea Party, a panel featuring Dick Armey, the chairman of FreedomWorks; Jill Lepore, a contributing writer at The New Yorker; Rick Santelli, the on-air editor at CNBC; and Anthony Weiner, the New York congressman, will explore the rise of the right. The event will be moderated by David Remnick.
About Town excursions will include breakfast and a tugboat ride with the vice-president of McAllister Towing Buckley McAllister, the tugboat owner and operator George Matteson, and Burkhard Bilger; a tour of Philip Johnson’s Glass House, followed by brunch and a discussion with Paul Goldberger; a tour of Platon’s studio, followed by drinks and conversation with Elisabeth Biondi; Peter Schjeldahl’s third annual tour of the Frick Collection, before public hours begin; and a tasting walk from Greenwich Village to Chinatown with Calvin Trillin.
The Fashion Forward panel will feature designers of “the new guard”: Maria Cornejo, Naeem Khan, Phillip Lim, and David Neville and Marcus Wainwright. The event will be moderated by Judith Thurman.
A live version of The New Yorker‘s Cartoon Caption Contest will feature judges and cartoonists Matthew Diffee, Carolita Johnson, and Barbara Smaller; the event will be hosted by Robert Mankoff.
A panel on gay marriage will feature David Boies and others, to be announced; the event will be moderated by Jeffrey Toobin.
The Vampire Revival, a panel moderated by Joan Acocella, will feature Noël Carroll, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center; the writer Stephen King; Matt Reeves, the writer and director of the upcoming film Let Me In; and Melissa Rosenberg, the screenwriter for all three films in the Twilight saga, as well as the upcoming fourth.
Lawrence Wright will perform his new one-man show, The Human Scale. The show is based on Wright’s New Yorker article, “Captives” about the crisis in Gaza. This will be the first performance of a four-week run.
After a sneak-preview screening of Sympathy for Delicious, which won the U.S. Dramatic Special Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, Rebecca Mead will talk with the film’s creative team and co-stars, Mark Ruffalo and Christopher Thornton.
Andrew Bujalski, who wrote and directed Funny Ha Ha; Greta Gerwig, who starred in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg; and Joe Swanberg, who directed and co-wrote Hannah Takes the Stairs, will discuss the mumblecore generation with Richard Brody.
A panel, Natural Disasters, moderated by David Grann, will feature Susan Hough, a seismologist with the Southern California Earthquake Center; Charles Mandeville, a volcanologist, geochemist and senior research scientist in the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences; Joshua Wurman, an atmospheric scientist who studies tornadoes and hurricanes; and Don Yeomans, the manager of the Near-Earth Object Program at NASA.
Verses/An Afternoon of Poetry will feature New Yorker contributors John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Cynthia Cruz, Jorie Graham, and Tracy K. Smith, who will read from their work; the event will be hosted by Paul Muldoon.
Book signings at McNally Jackson will include Dick Armey, Peter Carey, Roz Chast, Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian Frazier, Atul Gawande, Paul Goldberger, Jorie Graham; David Grann, Mary Karr, Jaron Lanier, Jill Lepore, Paul Muldoon, Joyce Carol Oates, Alex Ross, Zadie Smith, Michael Specter, and Wells Tower.
Tickets will go on sale on Friday, September 10th, at 12 noon E.T., and may be purchased at newyorker.com/festival or by calling 800-440-6974. Ten per cent of tickets to all events will be available at the SVA Theatre, 333 West 23rd Street (between Eighth and Ninth Avenues). These tickets will be sold on Friday, October 1st, from 12 noon to 4 P.M. A limited number of tickets will be sold at the door to each event one hour before start time, with the exception of Morning at the Frick, Come Hungry, Inside the Artist’s Studio, A Visit to the Glass House, The Cartoon Caption Game, and Tugboat Manhattan.
Download the New Yorker Festival app and get the complete program, ticket information, neighborhood guides from the editors of Goings On About Town, and more; for iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android devices. Follow us on Twitter (@NewYorkerFest) throughout the weekend to receive updates, tips, and information about last-minute tickets. Check in to Festival events on Foursquare, and follow The New Yorker (foursquare.com/newyorker) for tips about the Festival and other sites about town. And visit the Festival blog (newyorker.com/online/blogs/festival) for recaps, announcements, and amusements.
HSBC is the presenting sponsor of The New Yorker Festival. The Festival is sponsored by American Airlines, Acura, The Canadian Tourism Commission, Delta Faucet, Health & Disability Advocates, LU, Champagne Louis Roederer, and Westin.

Martin Schneider writes:
It’s not easy to out-Festival Emdashes—I always thought that I took the most exhaustive notes of anybody bar Rachel Sklar—but dang if Rozalia Jovanovic of The Rumpus didn’t display as much enthusiasm, interest, and wit as a pack of Emdashers.
Her exquisitely detailed account of five New Yorker Festival events is a must-read for anyone who wants to relive or vicariously soak in the events of that wonderful weekend. Her use of full names at every conceivable juncture is mesmerizing and hilarious.
The papercut illos by Sybille Schenker are a perfect supplement to the text.

Marin Schneider writes:
In 2000, the first year of the New Yorker Festival, Mark Singer interviewed Ricky Jay in the Milton Berle Room at the Friar’s Club; on the Festival’s tenth anniversary, the programmers had them recreate the experience in the much larger space of City Winery. The two men, palpably friends, have a kind of fraught rapport; Singer self-consciously leery of stumbling into secretive terrain, with Jay apparently willing to plumb same. Jay noted that Singer’s 1993 profile did so much to elevate—and, in some sense, ruin—Jay’s career as a cultish practitioner of sleight of hand and historian of same.
Jay cannot help but carry an air of mystery with him. Singer mentioned that his profile of Jay is the only one of his long career in which he did not know the subject’s age or real name at the time of publication. As he put it, such information was irrelevant to the purposes of the profile, and “somehow it got past the fact-checkers.” (Wikipedia says that “Max Katz” is in his 61st year or thereabouts.)
Endearingly, Jay revealed that he had only two outlandish goals when he started out. One was to appear in a James Bond movie, and the other was to write a New Yorker article. And he did both!
One of my favorite quotes from the session came when Jay discussed the tension between the secrecy inherent to magic and the openness required to attract new practitioners. Jay has always been more about spreading the word, to the consternation of one of his mentors, Dai Vernon, who asked him, “Professor, why give animals tools?”
Jay is one of the most informed people in the world on magicians of the past; as his working partner Michael Weber once observed, “Ricky remembers nothing after 1900.” In that spirit, I turn over the rest of this post to the masters mentioned during the session. I’ll just put the bare information; after all, the Internet is available for further exploration. I think Jay would appreciate the gesture, even if it involves no digital (in the sense of “fingers”) trickery.

The first magician on record was “Dedi,” who lived in ancient Egypt under King Cheops. Among other things he did the Cups and Balls trick and one involving the apparent substitution of a goose’s head from one body to another. (Attention ASPCA: I don’t think the geese survived this trick.)
Daniel Wildman, the “equestrian apiarist”—what an amazing turn of phrase.
Bartholomeo Bosco, 19th-century master of the “cups and balls” trick.
Chung Ling Soo, whose death while attempting the tricky maneuver of catching a bullet in his teeth was ruled “death by misadventure.” Oh my.
Toby the Sapient Pig, also known as the “Philosopher of the Swinish Race.”
Rabbi Hirsch Dänemark, who could watch as an audience volunteer poked a pin through the first few pages of the Talmud—and then not only identify which words the pin had pierced but extemporize a sermon using those words!
Chabert the Human Salamander, who would enter an oven with a raw steak in his hand. Jay: “He emerged tartare, the steak was cooked to perfection.”
Matthias Buchinger, who became a world-class practitioner of magic and calligraphy despite having no arms or legs and attaining a stature of 29 inches tall. This fellow sounds like one of the most fascinating people of all time—a sentiment Jay was quick to express.

Jay’s evident love for these crazy characters was something to behold. It was very touching to hear him talk about the quixotic task of researching these men without easy access to sources; in the meantime, his efforts have been supplemented by countless others, and much of it is available on the Internet.
Thus does the scholar, bringer of light, trump the magician, exploiter of darkness.