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Emily Gordon is the managing editor of Print magazine in NYC. But in her off-hours, she's at the helm of Emdashes, a fascinating site devoted to The New Yorker.

We sang the praises of Emily's blog only a week ago, and in writing and researching the site, we knew we had to chat with the amazing woman behind it.

We talked at length with the eloquent editor about her blog, the Web, and the magazine she loves so dearly. Here's what she had to say...

Hey Emily, when did you start Emdashes and why?

I started Emdashes in December 2004, while working at a truly terrible magazine job, where all the people there were saints—writing about health care and science for a boss who knew nothing about either science or journalism.

I'd just been to grad school for three years and after spending all my college years and then all the years subsequently as a journalist and book critic, suddenly I had fallen somewhat off the map.

So I was reading about magazine publishing online all day, but feeling increasingly apart from it, and meanwhile still writing book reviews and other freelance pieces.

My colleague had a blog, though, for illustration and general thoughts, and I asked her how to start one—I picked emdashes as a name because of the pun, of course, but also because originally it was going to be about punctuation.

A grammarian blog?

Yeah! A really dorky site about ellipsis points and serial commas and stuff. But then I realized there already were blogs like that. So I had lunch with a friend and floated the idea of a New Yorker blog and this guy was so enthusiastic. I thank him for that!

I started it, and for a few months it was just me. Then I started hearing from readers. It was great—all of a sudden I had a community of people who weren't depressed and/or insane and it was like a little window of light and air into the world!

So I started building a readership without having any idea what I was doing. I just wanted to be the kind of fan everyone knows—the person who really notices how they've put together every page, from typeface to tiny ad, and compares it to issues past, and eras past, and other magazines, but mostly to itself.

So it filled a gap?

Yeah. I found a dearth of this kind of intimate, tender attention to the magazine and the history and culture surrounding it on the web. Sometimes I'm on the subway and I just want to read something aloud, and of course I can't! So I write a blog instead.

What's the response been like?

There have been very few haters. Those haters have been very hate-y, though! Oh well, screw 'em.

Agreed. What's to hate on? Your site looks good, reads well, and is thorough.

Thanks! Gradually I started learning the technology, from RSS feeds to editing the HTML template, to Statcounter, to figuring out how to get stuff into the very cramped design, to de.licio.us tags to about three dozen other things I'm so happy to have learned, but it took tons of time over the past three years. It's something a lot of people who think "Oh, start a blog! It's so easy! There are no barriers to instant self-publishing!" don't realize.

So this was your first crack at keeping your own site? You had no Web presence before Emdashes?

No Web presence, but in 1996 I helped the guy, David Perrotta, who totally designed and ran The Nation magazine's website, not a project that—then—met with a lot of enthusiasm, but now of course they have a great and profitable web presence, an awesome community, and some of our code and scaffolding is still in there! Of course, that means my web skills date to 1996, but that seems to serve me pretty well. Mostly. Of course, now I have an actual programmer, thank God.

Your HTML skills may be dated. But there has to be something else in your background that's made a difference...

Well, being a very social person, and a person who enjoys social systems on the Web (from MOOs back in the day to the lindy-hop community on yehoodi.com, to the Comics Curmudgeon now), that helped, too. Building up a community by finding like-minded folks.

It's weird. When most people think bookish, they think introvert...

Well, I do prefer writing to speaking, because I'm a terrible interrupter! But yeah, I'm really social in life, too, and yet somehow this particular detailed scrutiny of The New Yorker doesn't seem to fit into regular conversation mode.

So I tried to call out those things on the blog. Things you notice almost like a naturalist, the subtle changes of the landscape, the seasons shifting. That kind of thing. The rare bird sighting.

Right, the gradual changes in the magazine...

Yeah, who would ever mention those things at a dinner party? You've forgotten about them by the time you get there. The little things—Goings on About Town redesigning, or some new cartoonist you don't recognize, or the best Talk of the Town in months, or the spots changing from the age-old misc. drawings to a sustained narrative throughout the issue. These are the things the dedicated reader sees, but no one mentions.

We hear you loud and clear. A nit-picky magazine deserves a nit-picky blog for nit-picky readers...

Yeah! There's a huge, huge team of people at the magazine who strive as hard as it can be striven for to get the facts, editing, copyediting, design, layout, everything right. It is an unparalleled level of perfectionism and I admire the hell out of that in a weekly magazine.

Well, who's on your huge Emdashes team?

Well, I have Deputy Editor (and "Between the Squibs" columnist) Martin Schneider. It is great having him especially, and the other contributors—Quin Browne, Brian Sholis, John Bucher, occasionally others—they're invaluable to the current incarnation of the site! My friends at House of Pretty are responsible for how the site works now and are totally dedicated to making the site great.

How do you feel about The New Yorker website?

Basically I like it. It also gets better all the time—they have a comparatively small team there and they're adding features almost daily. I love the audio interviews and the slide shows. The blogs are good, too. The writers still need to find a looseness of voice that goes well online without compromising the standards of fact and coherence of the mag.

How much contact do you have with people who work on The New Yorker?

I knew a couple of people at the mag before I started the blog, inevitable from living in NYC and working in magazines and newspapers since 1989, but now I know a good deal more of them and socialize with them as well.

It took a while for people to build up the trust to let me into their confidence. But just as in life I work hard to maintain the reputation of not spilling secrets, I am faithful in being discreet about the rather many details I hear about life at the magazine and its inhabitants.

Of course, meeting people invites some dilemmas, like, do I write about them more, or less, or what? And some staffers I like a lot more having met them. Some, slightly less.

It is a very self-protective society there. Once people realize I'm not a kamikaze blogger who's out to publish Malcolm Gladwell's boxer size, they relax.

Should they ever ask, would you consider working there?

Ha, well, that's so many people's lifelong goal. Mine, too. But I have a wonderful job that I love with plenty of responsibility and opportunity to create my own stories and develop authors—with a small staff there are fewer people above me to discourage those things—and frankly I feel like I'm still getting back into the editing and office-dwelling groove.

I would love to write for them. I like so many of the people there and their editors, for instance Daniel Zalewski, are really gods of the process. I know that sounds hyperbolic but I know only a few editors who work at that level of sophistication and author challenging, and many of them are near retirement. They develop young editors who are just as good.

What's your favorite section or recurring feature?

I love John Lahr's writing on theater. It is wonderful, light and masterful, and I like David Denby as well. I think they need a woman film critic again, specifically Stephanie Zacharek from Salon, though I know she loves Salon!

I think the Talk format is terrific, especially when it's about genuinely fascinating local people and quirky events and not about Fashion People and Society.

I like the pieces about science, since it's a way into that world that I don't really follow.

Do you read every issue cover-to-cover?

I read the entire magazine. It's a fair time commitment but it is possible. And I don't want to skip things. OK, sometimes I do, but then when I come back to them (like the hard SAT question) I'm always grateful that I have!

I get the magazine on Sunday. I'm very privileged, it took like 2 years to get to that point. It's very nice of them to send it to me.

This leads into a question we struggle with. We always end up behind in our reading. Will there ever be a section on emdashes about the backlog problem?

It's written about on blogs a lot. I think I had a post about it somewhere, in which, I'm afraid, I took the guy to task for not trying hard enough. But let me say now that I always had that problem before the blog. But as a book reviewer of a decade now, I couldn't turn in a review without finishing the book, in good conscience, and I feel the same way about reviewing the magazine. Reading the entirety of TNY is a commitment of a big chunk of time, that is undeniable; I am usually just wrapping it up on the 7th day. No resting for me!

Wow! Even the fiction?

I used to skip it. Now I read it and find myself rewarded at least 3/4 of the time. Am not a fan of all of it, by any means. But I have found some pieces incredibly moving and surprising. And there's quite a good representation of women and non-Americans, non-white people, etc. in the fiction.

And the poetry...?

I'm a poet so I read the poems. I'm enjoying the new direction since Paul Muldoon took over.

Tell us more about that sneaky Sunday delivery...

So... other New York editors will probably firebomb my office if they find this out. But after many moons of getting the mag Brooklyn-style, that is to say Thursday, I finally got on the magic list for messenger delivery Sunday.

Lucky you! When did you start reading The New Yorker?

I started looking at it whenever I could reach the coffee table, we had the kind of household where it papered a room in our house, and then I started looking at the cartoon collections my grandparents had, notably the 1925-1950 anniversary edition, which has those fantastic full-page cartoons they don't have space for anymore, very racy, lots of bimbo flappers etc. I started reading the mag sometime late elementary school maybe, who knows. By high school, I was a very passionate Pauline Kael fan.

Dang. You've been devoted for years...

Seriously, in my family it's a religion. There's no escaping it. Not to read it would have been to declare non-allegiance and atheism.

So what took you so long to start the blog?

Ha! They had to invent the technology first.

Do you enter the caption contest?

I entered once or twice at the beginning, but it stopped being fun, and I decided to start interviewing caption-contest winners instead for the site. They're all so awesome! So funny and interesting, in every case. I love reading the Daniel Radosh Anti-Caption Contest, too.

Who would you love love to see profiled in The New Yorker?

Jesse Thorn, who does the Sound of Young America podcast (and now radio show) in L.A. He is an astounding young talent, a gifted interviewer who started from scratch and made a name for himself in a remarkably short time.

Cynthia Hopkins, (who, in the interests of full disclosure, briefly attended school with me) who heads the band Gloria Deluxe and is an avant-garde theatrical and musical performer who, I think, has no equal in her generation.

And more businesswomen. If I'm going to read thousands and thousands of words about hostile takeovers and deals gone wild, I want at least some of them to be about interesting women CEOs. Inventors, scientists, programmers, archivists, art dealers, publicity mavens, doctors? Some of them are women, no?

What are your thoughts on David Remnick?

I think Remnick is a worthy heir to the vision of Ross, Shawn, Gottlieb, and Brown, and I include them all deliberately. He is a truly erudite man who's also sensitive to real life in America as lived through, especially, outsize dreams. His coverage of boxing is superlative because he understands what these fighters represent to American men and he is resolutely an American man, despite his Russophilia.

Anyway, Remnick answers the question of "What about that crazy Tina?" with the right answer, which is that she brought in a lot of very positive changes, people, and new perspectives, although I think it's safe to say that he's glad, as are we all, that she's no longer editor.

He honors the past editors without being slavish to their models and is respectful of the traditions and mythologies they created as he should be while at the same time emphasizing that, as he's said, "This is the golden age of The New Yorker."

What's your favorite era of the magazine?

I feel keen affection for the period I discovered it in as a kid, but then again, I was also discovering old issues at the same time, especially the cartoons of the first few decades of the mag.

But honestly I really like it now. I love the Tina Brown-era introduction of photographs. They continue to be very good after Avedon's death, though they could do even more with them. I like the changes to the front of the book.

Do you have a favorite cover that stands out?

Some of the '70s and '80s covers are gorgeous. I really like the recent Steig cover as well as countless old ones. Spiegelman's covers were terrific. I love Chast's magazine-stand cover. I prefer the "art" covers over the "joke" covers. I like covers that are funny, but I prefer if they're funny in a universal way or the-way-we-live-now way, not just in a news-of-the-week way.

I think the jokey covers—always by top-notch artists—are funny, well done, etc., but I want the kid nosing around the attic in 25 years to think it's good even if he doesn't get it. Which is how I feel about, say, WWII-era covers.

Has Gawker poked fun at you and your obsessive devotion?

They have only poked mild fun at me, for which I feel lucky. I should disclose that I got Gawker commenter privileges in the first round or so, but after a bout of commenting, I decided to take a step back. It was bringing out my mean side. As Satchel Paige once said, it angried up the blood, and I realized I would rather be pleasant, most of the time, and bitch to my friends.

That said, I read Gawker every day of course!

What other blogs do you read?

Design Observer, Speak Up, Design Your Life, the Times City Room blog, Gothamist, the Comics Curmudgeon, Go Fug Yourself, Minor Tweaks, and James Wolcott.

OK. So we know you are into the minutiae of grammar as well as the minutiae of the New Yorker. Have you always been into the smaller things?

Yes. As a child I could never see, had terrible vision from the get-go, but cleverly avoided getting glasses till I was about 13, so my childhood was spent in an Impressionist fog complete with pretty smudges of color everywhere except the book I was reading, or, in this case, the magazine. So I held it up close to my face, and studied those things.

I'm only now actually learning anything substantive about typography, but I always loved looking at how the typefaces (Caslon, Irvin, etc.) were used within the magazine, in their various sizes, etc.

What's been the most gratifying thing about running the site?

I think the reassurance that there is this kind of devotion to print magazines, to being intellectually and culturally informed, to reading political analysis that troubles itself to go way beyond the yapping. The reassurance that there are people who care about responsibility to language and to each other.

Well put. Thanks, Emily! Your devotion is dazzling and we truly appreciate the work you do. Now if only we could get Sunday delivery in California...

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