Technically, the group of 100 or so was at McNally Jackson Books Seaport on this snowy Thursday to hear Emily Nussbaum interview her New Yorker colleague Susan Morrison about her Lorne Michaels biography. The side chat, though, was all about the email invitation, which had inspired dozens of famous recipients to not just reply but reply-all, causing inbox havoc among the publishing and comedy elite. By that evening, the thread had slowed to “more of a trickle as opposed to the fucking hailstorm it was,” as the comedy writer Bill Scheft put it. Everyone from Graydon Carter (“Honestly, I have my own life. I cannot devote any more time to Lorne”) to Aaron Sorkin (“How did I get involved in this?”) had chimed in, as had a fed-up Tina Fey, who sent a link to an instructional YouTube video on how to use Gmail, and a loving-it Colin Jost, who followed up with “Guys, the video Tina sent is malware. Make sure to keep hitting Reply All or the virus can infect your computers.” Et cetera.
Fey and Jost weren’t part of the McNally crowd, which included a sprinkling of SNL alumni among a more serious bunch probably best characterized by its collective mmm-ing at a Henry James reference. Apparently, though, the email hadn’t gone to everyone at The New Yorker, “and there’s been infighting about it,” joked Holden Seidlitz, a fact-checker at the magazine.
Morrison wouldn’t elaborate on the email mess, saying only, “I have more events coming up, and I’m gonna make sure that this gets debugged before we hit send,” but Nussbaum said she’d never think to mute it: “There is nothing I love more than digital chaos.” The writer Eric Alterman, who had griped in the thread about not receiving a galley, was among the attendees and still without a book. Was he planning on buying one of the hundreds that were piled around us and Morrison was signing a foot away? He looked at me, incredulous: “Buy? ”
