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.”
Lifestyle
‘Wait Wait’ for June 20, 2026: With Not My Job guest Caro Claire Burke
Alzo Slade and Peter Sagal on stage at the Studebaker Theater in Chicago
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This week’s show was recorded in Chicago with host Peter Sagal, judge and scorekeeper Alzo Slade, Not My Job guest Caro Claire Burke and panelists Karen Chee, Peter Grosz, and Shane O’Neill. Click the audio link above to hear the whole show.
Who’s Alzo This Time
Tourists Embrace The USA; The Wedding of the Century; Advances in Parenting
Panel Questions
Stolen Flavor
Bluff The Listener
Our panelists tell three stories about 80’s band A-ha making the news this week, only one of which is true
Not My Job: Caro Claire Burke, the author of Yesteryear, joins us to answer questions about yearbooks
This week, Caro Claire Burke, author of the book of the summer, Yesteryear, joins us to play a game called, “Yesteryear, meet Yearbook.” Three questions about yearbooks.
Panel Questions
Bookmarks and Beaches; One Man’s Trash
Limericks
Alzo Slade reads three news-related limericks: Jurassic Purse; Viper Visions; Humanity’s Tilt
Lightning Fill In The Blank
All the news we couldn’t fit anywhere else
Predictions
Our panelists predict, what would be the big surprise at Taylor Swift’s wedding
Lifestyle
Day 1,578 of WW3: The UN Security Council will meet on Monday to address Russia's latest strikes on cultural and religious sites, including the attack on Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. ANGH, of course. This is your Saturday Ukraine discussion
Day 1,578 of WW3: The UN Security Council will meet on Monday to address Russia's latest strikes on cultural and religious sites, including the attack on Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra. ANGH, of course. This is your Saturday Ukraine discussion
Lifestyle
How actress Laverne Cox became the woman of her dreams (CT+) : Consider This from NPR
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – APRIL 21: Laverne Cox attends the “Animal Farm” New York Premiere at Regal Theater on April 21, 2026 in New York City.
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In 2013, when the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black came out, the world met the character Sophia Burset — a Black trans woman serving as the resident hairstylist in prison.
For much of the audience, it was also the first time they met actress Laverne Cox — who landed the role of Sophia at the age 40, just when she was thinking of quitting acting altogether.
In her new memoir Transcendent, Cox talks about the challenges she faced long before Netflix came knocking: a mother who withheld love, a father who was never around and the brutal denigration she encountered growing up Black and trans in the deep South.
To unlock this and other bonus content — and listen to every episode sponsor-free — sign up for NPR+ at plus.npr.org. Regular episodes haven’t changed and remain available every weekday.
Email us at considerthis@npr.org.
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