Jonathan Taylor writes:
In other Egyptian news:

“With a budget of LE56 million, the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), in collaboration with Egypt’s Sound and Light organization and French lighting company Architecture Lumière, succeeded in installing 922 lighting units in different locations along the city’s west bank mountains, offering a new service to Luxor’s visitors, stated Culture Minister Farouk Hosni.”

At night, the darkness was total.
Fields of tall, deep-green cornstalks ended abruptly, forming a clean border with the desert. Behind you, the river was just out of sight, behind distant groves of palms. Far beyond this band of green was a creased swelling of mountain. Ahead of you here, too, on the west bank: another sand mountain, dazzlingly white in the sun, like a scrubbed bone. At its foot—nestled? cowering?—a village, whose lights glowed when the sun whent behind the hill, casting sudden shadow the shallow valley. Those lights, too, turned dark before too long.
You’re alone in a shabby, colorful hotel where the road that stretches from the river ends, right at the corn-desert border. You’re the only guest. Tired of answering questions about whether you’re married, and why not, you retire from the courtyard with the pool table, where men drink Stella—the Egyptian beer.
You emerge later at a safe hour. Ten P.M.? Midnight? The darkness is total, beyond the glare of a lone street lamp, so you go beyond the street lamp to where the darkness is total. The stars are emphatically present, yet not “bright,” they only confirm the darkness. The invisible cornstalks rustle maniacally in the wind as you walk down the road vanishing into the darkness ahead, to where the seated colossi rise on your left. Are they illuminated at night, like the great temples of the east bank? Or can you make them out dimly, knowing where they are from your daily journeys to and from the river. Don’t worry about it; in 15 years, you won’t remember anyway. You’ll be able to summon up either memory with equal convincing clarity.
This darkness, this silence harried by the whispery shrieks of the corn and the madcap howling of a disembodied jackal, this scrap of fertile soil in the shadow of a mass grave of kings and queens, this ocean of desert beyond, these thousands of years—who could fill it all, but gods reaching down from the sky?

Five years ago today, I sat in the appropriately named Williamsburg bar The Lucky Cat (now Bruar Falls), enjoying tea and free wifi, and began this blog. One was far from a lonely number; from the beginning, Emdashes had friends, commenters (though as a readership, dear readership, you tend to be shy, preferring to send me thoughtfully composed emails rather than shout to the public square), supporters, and exactly one member of the peanut gallery, whose small legumes haven’t scarred.
But Emdashes today is a lot more than a gal in a bar feeling warm toward a heartbreakingly flawless Donald Antrim essay. It’s an honest-to-Irvin team, a clan of kindred spirits, a gathering place for like-minded New Yorker-philes for whom a casual read and a quick look will never be enough. It’s the blog’s core group of friends and collaborators, Martin Schneider and Pollux and Jonathan Taylor and Benjamin Chambers, about whom I can’t say enough, and I hope they know how thoroughly I treasure their winsome and steady posts, essential ideas, and intercontinental companionship. It’s the many excellent guest writers and artists, and smart and generous interns, who’ve contributed to the blog over the past five years.
I’m almost too emotional to write this, and it’s almost New Year’s Eve, so, for once, I’m at a loss for words. What can I say but thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you? To Patric King and Su from House of Pretty, illustrators Jesse Ewing and (righteously lupine) Carolita Johnson, and the New Yorker librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, whose clever minds are only outdone by their open hearts, and who have taken their fabulous Emdashes Ask the Librarians column all the way to The Big Show. To David Remnick and the New Yorker staff, from 1925 on out, for being there week in and week out, in the best and worst of times–proving that the life of the mind, the world of the page, and the shimmering pixels of the screen can be noble, beautiful, truthful, and funny causes to which to dedicate oneself. To you, reader. Stay with us; we’ll be here.

_Pollux writes_:
For the economist Paul Krugman, the years 2000 to 2009 may have been “The Big Zero”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28krugman.html, but for me, thanks to Emdashes, the last couple of years have been an Era of Plenty. I mean the kind of “Plenty” that matters, the kind that is less about material acquisition and more about gaining access to new thoughts and ideas.
To be a part of Emdashes is truly a great privilege and honor, and to work with Emily, Martin, Benjamin, and Jonathan is to be amongst intelligent and congenial company.
2009 marked the first year that I was able to attend The New Yorker Festival, and I hope to attend many more.
2009 was also the year I began writing my “Sempé Fi column”:http://emdashes.com/sempe-fi/, which covers _New Yorker_ covers, and which has been an enjoyable and rewarding experience. And I continue to enjoy drawing “The Wavy Rule.”:http://emdashes.com/the-wavy-rule/
Not only do we celebrate the beginning of a new year and new decade, we also celebrate the anniversary of Emdashes. Five years of Emdashes!
I often wonder how Harold Ross, _The New Yorker’s_ first editor, would have reacted to the existence of our little website. Probably in this manner:

In any case, once blogging, the Internet, and computers had been explained to Mr. Ross, perhaps by either a patient E.B. White, Katherine White, or Rea Irvin, I think the editor would have been tickled pink by our online offering.
Ross would have encouraged us to move forward and do more, more, more. And so we shall. Here’s to a prosperous and productive 2010!
Thank you all! And drive safely tonight! The Internet Superhighway is a dangerous place (“Internet Superhighway” is a term you don’t hear much anymore).

Emily writes (I’m the only person who contributes to the “Personal” category, but it’s always safe to specify):
I’m incredibly pleased to announce that the panel I proposed for the next South By Southwest Interactive has been accepted out of more than 2,300 submissions–and was in the first batch of the first day of announcements, no less. The lineup of speakers is likely to change slightly, as will the nuances of the discussion, but the longhorn and short of it is, I’ll be in Austin come March in my first official role as a content strategist, or critic of content strategy, or strategic content provider, or online publisher, or maybe just–editor/writer.
If you’re planning to be at SXSW, I’d love to hear from you, and if you have any more suggestions about what I should cover at this event, please let me know!

Emily Gordon writes:
This is the panel proposal I submitted for potential inclusion in next March’s South by Southwest Interactive festival. If you click on the PanelPicker, sign up in a flash, and click on the little thumbs-up button, you’ll be helping me get there! Voting ends Friday, so if you do it now while you’re thinking about it, you’ll be helping out a lot. Thanks so much!
Here are all the details:

**Why Keep Blogging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple**

**Organizer:**
Emily Gordon, Founder, Emdashes.com; Editor-in-Chief, Print magazine

**Description:**
Now that we think in 140-character strings and live through Facebook, it’s tempting to throw out the blog baby with the bathwater. These seasoned bloggers explain the vitality of this still-revolutionary medium–the resources, community, continuity, and space for real ideas that only blogs can provide–and its infinite future potential.

**Questions Answered:**
1. Why blog when there are newer, shorter, quicker mediums to express myself in?
2. If there’s no barrier to blogging, what makes any blog special?
3. Which blogs are going to be worth reading in 2, 5, 10, and 50 years?
4. What can blogging do for my life–creatively, socially, professionally, and intellectually?
5. What techniques do the bloggers with the most staying power use to keep their readers–and themselves–informed and inspired?
6. Why blogging during a recession is the smartest thing you can be doing with your time
7. What works as a blog post and what works better as a tweet or status update, and why?
8. How do veteran bloggers avoid the 10 blog traps that rookies always fall into?
9. Why is it so important to keep commenters happy and engaged–and how do I do it?
10. Is it worth it to revive a dead blog–and should I kill the one I don’t love anymore?

So far, the people I’ve asked to be on the panel if we make it to the show are:
• Daniel Radosh, blogger, radosh.net; contributing editor, The Week; author, Rapture Ready! Adventures In The Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture
• Book-writer and blog-writer Lizzie Skurnick, who writes the blockbuster Fine Lines column at Jezebel, which turned into her new book, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading; her book blog, The Old Hag; and, of course, www.lizzieskurnick.com.
• Scott Rosenberg, author, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters; blogger, www.wordyard.com
• Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan; bloggers, Go Fug Yourself; authors, Go Fug Yourself: The Fug Awards
• Ron Hogan, blogger, Beatrice and GalleyCat; book critic; author, The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane! American Films of the 1970s
• Paddy Johnson, blogger, Art Fag City
• Josh Fruhlinger, blogger, The Comics Curmudgeon
And if we do make it–and you’ll be in Austin for the festival–come on by and I’ll thank you in person!

Emily Gordon writes:
Can I imagine life without the cartoonist-writer-painter-animator-multimedia artist-graphic designer-comrade-confidante-friend known to Emdashes readers as the daily comic commentator Pollux? No, I cannot.
Paul Morris arrived at my virtual doorstep in January 2008 like an encyclopedia salesman, except that the encyclopedia he was selling was himself, and he asked for no down payment. He soon became my co-conspirator in the quest to reinstall founding New Yorker art director Rea Irvin in the collective mind as the uncompromising impresario he was.
Not long after that, I started reading Paul’s online comic, “Arnjuice,” noting how the drawings’ elegant angles and intense conservation of line mirrored the dialogue’s dreamy humor and sharp insight into the vagaries of the human animal. As I dug deeper into his oevre, which is not a word you can use for the output of every twentysomething, and caught a glimpse of its fine art (like these recent portraits of jazz musicians—that’s “The Banjoist,” above), I further observed how Paul’s Spanish and British heritage expressed themselves in all his work in linguistically limber, deeply colorful, and agreeably dissonant ways. I was impressed.
So I asked on a whim if he was willing to draw a comic for Emdashes. He was. We named it “The Wavy Rule” after Irvin’s famous wiggly dividing lines. I was thinking of some sort of regular contribution; Paul made it daily. We needed someone to fill in on a few written posts for the blog; he did it so charmingly that he now writes a weekly column just about the cover art of The New Yorker. He stands at the essential center of the Emdashes tapestry along with Martin Schneider, Benjamin Chambers, Jonathan Taylor, Erin Overbey, and Jon Michaud, all of whom I applaud daily, if not hourly. How this all happens every day—often, these days, without me even clicking my mouse—is a never-ending source of wonderment. Paul, like everyone I name above, is (as Dylan Thomas would say) the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.
In short, we are in awe. That this is going to make him radish-red with embarrassment is one of the reasons he is so beloved to us. We here at the disparate dots on Google Maps known as Emdashes HQ celebrate all that is Paul, Pollux, and everything he is set to become. We couldn’t do without him, and we wish him a very happy birthday indeed.

Founder and frequently meddling publisher Emily Gordon writes:
In blog years, we’re very mature: Emdashes turns four today. I began it in a red-floored Chelsea loft as a labor of love, an antidepressant, and a scratch for my irrepressible itch to sample new technology. Happily, these days, Emdashes reflects the hard work and enthusiasm of many others besides me. Since my first post (about Donald Antrim’s monumental essay “I Bought a Bed”) on December 31, 2004, Emdashes has grown and progressed in innumerable ways. The site looks the way it does because of my collaboration with House of Pretty, about whose whip-smart and big-hearted proprietors, Patric King and Su, I can’t say enough. Every week, you also see the elegant creations of Inkleaf Studio’s Jesse Ewing, chic cartoonist Carolita Johnson, our own Pollux, and my best pal, designer Jennifer Hadley, who adapted a 1943 Dorothy Gray ad into the Emdashes logo you see there above (referred to in-house as “pencil girl”).
What’s more, we now have a genuine staff of editors and regular contributors—including, though not limited to, current editor and total mensch Martin Schneider, ace literary columnist Benjamin Chambers, my scholarly old friend Jonathan Taylor, and my humblingly humble, multitalented new friend Paul Morris, a.k.a. Pollux (whom you can credit for the drawing of me as a prehistoric proto-blogger at right).
I’ve loved editing, and getting to know, the kind, witty, and meticulous New Yorker librarians, Jon Michaud and Erin Overbey, who write the indispensable column “Ask the Librarians.” (Look forward to a fresh installment soon!) The virtual and real-life conversations that the blog has inspired have enhanced my life immeasurably. I’ve soaked up more of the New Yorker Festival and New Yorker Conference, and more readings, lectures, gallery shows, conversations, softball games, histories, anthologies, and other things New Yorker, than I’d ever imagined experiencing (even in my previously acute state of preoccupation). Last year, the site won the coveted distinction of being a Webby Awards official honoree. Four years later, my personal affinity for The New Yorker, and the sometimes cryptic ways in which I try to express it, is only a part of the picture.
This isn’t a blog that had any model, particularly. It’s driven by the collective bees in our bonnets, who are erratic drivers. We write about pigeons. (A lot.) We do whatever we can to make Rea Irvin a household name. I’ve banned a number of words and phrases and pontificated on punctuation. We were entertained and pleased by a large number of submissions to our rename the upside-down question mark contest. We explore the “Best American” series like there’s no tomorrow. We’ve had crazy spikes we couldn’t have predicted—at one time, this site has been the #1 world resource on both the Ricky Gervais cult sensation “I Could Eat a Knob at Night” dance remix and iPod security, not to mention a surprising magnet of commentary on Knocked Up, tacos, and Brandenn Bremmer—while equally spirited analyses are met with baffled silence. We don’t mind a bit. We’ve had fascinating comments from friends and relatives of departed New Yorker writers and artists, all of whom we try to recognize when they pass away.
And we’ve had so much fun. Here’s to the next year—is that five or ten in blog years?—whatever it may bring! Happy new year, dear readers. And to Jasmin Chua and Ashby Jones, you were there when the twinkle met the eye. Thank you.

Emily writes (once again):
As longtime readers will know, I sometimes ban words and phrases. Though I find many non-standard uses of the language to be useful, lyrical, fascinating, or all three, others are just irksome. Here’s one that’s on the rise, and at the top of my current list of irritants (aside from the economy, short-sighted capitalists generally, and the futile war against our brute natures): abbreviations of the short, concise, one-syllable word “thanks.”
I’m used to (but that doesn’t mean I accept) the sign-off “thx.” To me, it conveys a lack of complete thanks, a partial, lackadaisical hiss. The sound it makes in my mind is the insincere, singsong “thinkssss” that workmates we’ve all known like to say with a scrunched-up smirk and bad intentions. I have a feeling that the brilliant David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, whose book Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better I read recently and loved, would not approve of “thx.”
Now I’m seeing “thnx.” “Thanks” has only six letters. Even the silliest abbreviations are fine with me in instant messaging; that’s a fun puzzle of a medium, time is of the essence, and within it I require neither punctuation nor official spelling. But in email, especially business email, seriously, spell out “thanks.” Thanks!