Between You & Me

I can't decide if Mary Norris has the best job in the world or the worst job in the world. What would it be like to spend your life (more than thirty years of it) working in the copy room of The New Yorker, agonizing over whether to hyphenate a word or add a comma? Part of the fun is the who; Norris isn't checking spelling and firming up sloppy writing for seventh-graders, after all, but for the likes of some of our world's greatest writers. Part of the fun is also the puzzling through the sometimes contradictory rules, and reflecting on The New Yorker's stylish grammar choices amid the contradictions (always doubling the final consonant before adding a suffix, for example...interesting).