In honor of Emdashes' new bloggy feature in which reader questions will be answered by real! live! New Yorker staff members, we asked you to voice some of your more pressing queries. A list of your need-to-know issues:

• Will they make the Cartoon Caption Contest die a slow death by moving it inside the magazine, or will they just silently pull the plug? Seriously, enough already.

• Why hasn't Sy Hersh done a piece about the horror and tragedy that is the cartoon caption contest?

• What vegetable does vegetable oil come from?

• When is Lou Cona getting canned?

• Is all fiction as boring as yours?

• Do I have any chance of getting a short story published that doesn't revolve around my parents' divorce or my own crumbling marriage?

• Who should and should not bother submitting to the departments that are nominally open to unsolicited work? Is there a secret handshake, Upper West Side residency requirement, etc?

• Is it a prequisite of publication that a short story be mind-numbingly boring and/or have characters who I don't really care about whose names I can't pronounce?

• Why would you write for emdashes (not that there's anything wrong with the site at all), seeing as how many people aspire to write for the New Yorker?

• How it is, that you, decide where it is, when writing, to insert, a comma. It seems, to me, that you put a comma, like the one I just typed, where commas do not really, belong. Is it that, simply put, your copy editor, is, perhaps, always drunk?

• Is the dieresis over the second vowel in words like "cooperate" really necessary? C'mon, people, let's modernize the typesetting machine.

• Does everyone giggle at the words "dieresis" and "penal system," or is it just me?


Got more? Keep them coming.

Earlier: Ask the 'New Yorker' and You Shall Receive. Maybe.