Lifestyle
The New Yorker Updates Its Style Guide for the Internet Age
This week, the top copy editor of The New Yorker announced that the magazine had completed a “reëxamination” of its house style.
A few things were changing. But its dedication to the dieresis — those two little dots that float above certain vowels, beloved by New Yorker editors and almost nobody else — was not.
“For every person who hates the dieresis and feels like it’s precious and pretentious and ridiculous, there’s another person who finds it charming,” Andrew Boynton, the head of the copy department at the magazine, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.
The magazine, which doesn’t look a day over 100, is famous for its attachment to heterodox spelling and punctuation rules. So Mr. Boynton’s decision to announce changes to the style guide in The New Yorker’s daily newsletter on Monday was noteworthy. The revolution arrived in two squat paragraphs containing two diereses, three em dashes and four pairs of parentheses.
The magazine will abandon “Web site,” “in-box,” and “Internet” in favor of the more familiar “website,” “inbox” and “internet.” “Cellphone” will be one word, rather than two.
“Welcome to 1995, you may be thinking,” Mr. Boynton wrote in the announcement, providing an example of another new rule: Thoughts will be italicized in an effort to differentiate them from other text.
The keepers of the magazine’s house style have been purposely slow to make concessions to the internet age. “We don’t want to make a change and then change it back,” he said. “We want to make sure it’s a lasting change that is elsewhere in the world and that people are familiar with and comfortable with.”
Potential changes were crowdsourced from a group of current and former editors and copy editors in January at the suggestion of David Remnick, the magazine’s longtime editor. Mr. Boynton and a colleague came up with a list of proposals in February.
He was tight-lipped about which ones had been rejected. “I don’t want them to become, you know, objects of fetishization in the outside world,” he said.
The New Yorker’s style rules provoke strong reactions in the mostly civil realm of grammarians. In opinion pieces and on social media, critics have long accused the magazine of snobbery, inelegance and overzealous use of commas.
They take issue with its doubled consonants in “traveller” and “focussed.” They obsess over its diacritic flourish on “reëlection.” Mr. Boynton once felt the need to mount a defense of the way the magazine punctuates the possessive form of “Donald Trump Jr.” (It requires three punctuation marks in a row.)
Benjamin Dreyer, the retired copy chief of Random House and the author of “Dreyer’s English,” has his quibbles with the magazine’s house style. (For one, he called the Donald Trump Jr. punctuation rule “unspeakably hideous.”) But he praised the most recent round of updates in a phone call on Wednesday.
“I’ve been making a joke for years that you shouldn’t necessarily have a house style that is visible from outer space,” he said. “But that’s what The New Yorker is about: They want to be The New Yorker.”
He said he was relieved the magazine had not done away with diereses. He was happy its editors had stood by its outlier constructions of “teen-ager” and “per cent.” But other updates were long overdue.
“Finally shrinking ‘website’ to a lowercase, single word — I think we did that at Random House, I don’t know, two decades ago?” he said.
The magazine’s writers and editors have so far seemed pleased with the changes, Mr. Boynton said. Plus, he knows they will break whatever rules they cannot stand.
Sometimes he lets them. “That’s something that I think a lot of people don’t understand about The New Yorker,” he said. “For as many rules as we have, we’re making exceptions all the time.”
Warner Bros. Discovery said Thursday that it prefers the latest offer from rival Hollywood studio Paramount over a bid it accepted from Netflix.
Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Bloomberg
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Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Bloomberg
The Warner Bros. Discovery board announced late Thursday afternoon that Paramount’s sweetened bid to buy the entire company is “superior” to an $83 billion deal it had struck with Netflix for the purchase of its streaming services, studios, and intellectual property.
Netflix says it is pulling out of the contest rather than try to top Paramount’s offer.
“We’ve always been disciplined, and at the price required to match Paramount Skydance’s latest offer, the deal is no longer financially attractive, so we are declining to match the Paramount Skydance bid,” the streaming giant said in a statement.
Warner had rejected so many offers from Paramount that it seemed as though it would be a fruitless endeavor. Speaking on the red carpet for the BAFTA film awards last weekend, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos dared Paramount to stop making its case publicly and start ponying up cash.
‘If you wanna try and outbid our deal … just make a better deal. Just put a better deal on the table,” Sarandos told the trade publication Deadline Hollywood.
Netflix promised that Warner Bros. would operate as an independent studio and keep showing its movies in theaters.
But the political realities, combined with Paramount’s owners’ relentless drive to expand their entertainment holdings, seem to have prevailed.
Paramount previously bid for all of Warner — including its cable channels such as CNN, TBS, and Discovery — in a deal valued at $108 billion. Earlier this week, Paramount unveiled a fresh proposal increasing its bid by a dollar a share.
On Thursday, hours before the Warner announcement, Sarandos headed to the White House to meet Trump administration officials to make his case for the deal.
The meetings, leaked Wednesday to political and entertainment media outlets, were confirmed by a White House official who spoke on condition he not be named, as he was not authorized to speak about them publicly.
President Trump was not among those who met with Sarandos, the official said.
While Netflix’s courtship of Warner stirred antitrust concerns, the Paramount deal is likely to face a significant antitrust review from the U.S. Justice Department, given the combination of major entertainment assets. Paramount owns CBS and the streamer Paramount Plus, in addition to Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and other cable channels.
The offer from Paramount CEO David Ellison relies on the fortune of his father, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison. And David Ellison has argued to shareholders that his company would have a smoother path to regulatory approval.
Not unnoticed: the Ellisons’ warm ties to Trump world.
Larry Ellison is a financial backer of the president.
David Ellison was photographed offering a MAGA-friendly thumbs-up before the State of the Union address with one of the president’s key Congressional allies: U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican.
Trump has praised changes to CBS News made under David Ellison’s pick for editor in chief, Bari Weiss.
The chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, told Semafor Wednesday that he was pleased by the news division’s direction under Weiss. She has criticized much of the mainstream media as being too reflexively liberal and anti-Trump.
“I think they’re doing a great job,” Carr said at a Semafor conference on trust and the media Wednesday. As Semafor noted, Carr previously lauded CBS by saying it “agreed to return to more fact-based, unbiased reporting.”
‘The Wire’ Star Bobby J. Brown
He’s Trapped Inside Barn Fire!!!
Listen To Dispatch Audio
Published
Broadcastify.com
Here’s the dispatch audio from the fatal barn fire that killed “The Wire” actor Bobby J. Brown … and you hear dispatchers saying he’s trapped in the building after trying to start an old Cadillac.
TMZ obtained the dispatch audio, which also reveals Bobby’s wife called for help. It sounds like a huge inferno, the barn is 50-feet-by-100 and — by the end of the call — it’s all up in flames.
We broke the story … Bobby died Tuesday from smoke inhalation. The deadly fire started after Bobby entered the barn to jump-start a car. His wife suffered severe burns trying to save him.
Bobby played Officer Bobby Brown on the hit HBO series “The Wire” … and his other credits include “Law & Order: SVU” and “We Own This City.”
He was 62.
Ryland Brickson Cole Tews in Hundreds of Beavers.
Hundreds of Beavers
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Hundreds of Beavers
The streaming service Tubi has become a repository for a wild assortment of movies, TV shows, and original properties. They’re all free to watch, provided you’re willing to sit through some ads. So we asked some Tubi-philes to recommend some great movies that you can find on the service: Hundreds of Beavers, Color Out of Space, Petey Wheatstraw, and Mambo Italiano.
Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture
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