In the New Yorker...

[serious crayons]

Elmore Leonard has inspired some great movies, including Get Shorty and Out of Sight. Also Jackie Brown, which I haven't seen but which my son insists is the best Tarantino movie -- better than Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he says, if such a thing is possible.

And one of my all-time favorite TV series is based on Elmore Leonard: Justified, about a U.S. marshal in Harlan County, KY, a real place known for coal mines and crime.

I haven't read any Elmore Leonard, but I've heard he's good. The movies and TV based on his work mix suspense with laid-back humor.

[Jeff Wrangler]

OK, I completely give up trying to understand The New Yorker's "rules" for capitalization and punctuation.

Here are two samples from the Aug. 25 article about the football coach Bill Belichick.

(Boldface mine)

"In 2013 Holliday became president of the newly created Bill Belichick Foundation, which supported youth-sports organizations."

"Belichick asked a member of the athletics-communications staff to include her in all his e-mail correspondence."

Those hyphens are absolutely not necessary.

[serious crayons]

True, but according to my understanding a hyphen is not forbidden in that context, either -- it can be used for clarity but it's kind of a judgement call. The only time to absolutely omit a hyphen is when the first word ends in ly.

I might use it in the first example myself. In the second, the hyphen seems to almost make it less clear. I'm not sure I can explain the difference, even to myself! 

[Jeff Wrangler]

I wouldn't in either case. Those hyphens strike me as rather old-fashioned and, well, New Yorker-ish. 

I think they're both open compound nouns used as adjectives and don't need to be hyphenated.

I don't have the hard-copy grammar sources that I had when I was still working, and I just spent maybe 20 minutes or so trying to find information online; I found lots of information on compound nouns but nothing that addressed a compound noun used as an adjective.

It's a judgment call.

[serious crayons]

It's a judgment call.

Agreed. Here's a Merriam-Webster entry that addresses the subject but leaves it kind of iffy.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/spelling-using-compound-words-guide

I tend to err on the side of hyphenating and wouldn't put them in the same category as stodgy New Yorkerisms like putting an umlaut over the second E in reelection.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I really enjoyed Zach Helfand's article on fact checking at TNY in the Sept. 1 and 8 issue.

Who knew? Ben McGrath and Jay McInerney were once fact checkers.

And I was particularly interested by this:

"I once took part in a closing meeting during which we debated, for ten minutes, whether Michael Schulman's use of the phrase 'assless chaps' was redundant and meaningless; technically speaking, all chaps are assless."

I just wish he had said what the final decision was.

[serious crayons]

Who knew? Ben McGrath and Jay McInerney were once fact checkers.

[*raises hand*] I didn't know that about Ben McGrath and in fact didn't know who he was. But I definitely knew that about Jay McInerny. I believe he mentions it in Bright Lights, Big City.

[serious crayons]

I of course went immediately to the Minnesota State Fair foods article in the most recent issue. It was only OK -- seems like a lot more could have been said about the various foods available, their history or popularity or strangeness or whatever -- and a lot less said about the woman behind Sweet Martha's Cookies, which are very popular so of course did deserve a mention but not much more than that.

For example, they often come out with a new ice cream flavor; sweet corn was a hit about 10 years ago and is now available in some ice-cream shops. This year's was beer-flavored soft serve -- not sure that did as well.    The writer mentioned the "all the milk you can drink" booth now charges $3 -- I remember when it was all the milk you could drink for 25 cents (conveniently located near Sweet Martha's Cookies). A simple turkey sandwich provided by a turkey farmers association is apparently extremely delicious, though I've never tried it.

I used to have to write a cover feature every year for our paper's State Fair visitor's guide -- and the catch was, it had to be something I could write before the fair had actually opened. So one year it was most popular fair items (the turkey sandwich was one of them).Another year I wrote a history of pronto pups when they opened a big pronto-pup factory with windows all around it so you can watch them get made.

According to Google's AI, the Minnesota State Fair offers nearly 300 different food concessions providing over 1,600 menu items (some may be duplicates).