“The art of the parenthesis is one of the great secrets of eloquence in society”*…
Florence Hazrat, with an adapted excerpt from her recent On the Mark- From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World…
On October 16, 1586, a young man writes a desperate letter to his friend: “My dear Weyer: Come. Come. My life is in danger and I long to see you.” Weak from the festering wound in his thigh, he scribbles those few lines in a shaky, hardly legible hand. Will the famous doctor be able to save him? When Weyer arrives the next day, the letter writer is already dead. Sir Philip Sidney [here], courtier, poet, and fervent Protestant soldier under Queen Elizabeth I, had been fighting Catholic Spain in the Netherlands when a bullet struck him, burying itself deep in the flesh of his thigh. The life of the superstar of Tudor high society was cut short, at the age of thirty-one, in a way mirrored by his own writing: Just before leaving for his holy war, Sidney interrupted the epic story about errant knights [The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia or simply Arcadia], which he had been working on for years, in the middle of an exciting battle. He left the action hanging on a parenthesis.
Anaxius lept away. Whereat ashamed (as having never done so much before in his life)
Readers, like the sentence and the plot, are on tenterhooks about what comes next. The work, of course, remains unfinished. Even so, Sidney was merely following a common composition practice of pausing mid-sentence or mid-matter, and using the parenthesis as a memory springboard when it was time to pick up the pen again. Yet considering how his own life was cut short at the height of his social and literary success, it’s hard not to entertain interpretations of the interrupted sentence as an eerie omen…
… When Coluccio Salutati invented the parenthesis, nearly 200 years before Sidney perfected it, he rendered visible an age-old rhetorical practice of inserting a particle of a sentence into a greater whole. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian called it interpositio, drawing attention to putting something in the middle of something else. But one suspects that there is a limit for how long the mini-digression can become without hijacking the main sentence (or story). There was no rule on the length of a parenthesis; it was up to the discretion of the writer to adjudicate appropriate delay. It makes sense, then, that Sidney’s near-contemporary, the schoolmaster John Hoskins, writes in his Directions for Speech and Style (1600) that “all parentheses are in extremities, either graces or disgraces to a speech”…
… Parentheses, turning the inside of a sentence out and the outside in, ask readers to shuttle back and forth, exercising mental agility that nurtures a flexible set of thoughts and feelings. Sidney’s brackets include qualifications of the thrust of the main sentence, comparisons, doubts, metaphors, and examples, all of which dilate the narrative into a complex, three-dimensional woven tapestry, accommodating innumerable opinions and interpretations. The parenthesis in word and deed is an ethical way of life: We pause for thought.
There’s something mysterious about the “little moons”, as Erasmus called them. The moon has represented, in various traditions, creation and destruction, rebirth, eternity, the feminine, time, marking time, mystery, the night, and secrets. And so has the parenthesis. The convex-concave curves of the open and closed parentheses cup something said by the way, whisperings, secrets mouthed into the reader’s ear, mumbled under the author’s breath. For Renaissance writers, punctuation belonged to the visual-grammatical and the spoken-rhetorical. Headmaster and pedagogical author Richard Mulcaster categorizes parentheses as “creatures to the pen and distinctions to pronounce by”. They’re amphibian in striking out a precarious existence as belonging to both the water of the spoken and the land of the seen. The (two) visual walls make meaning discrete, even as they remain permeable enough for the eye to slip in and out. You can’t overlook a bracket. Yet you can also read right through it. How does one read a bracket? How does one read it out? Mulcaster suggested that “the words enclosed by them are to be pronounced with a lower and quicker voice than the words either before or after them.” Both visually and aurally, then, what’s inside nestles safely between parenthetical palms, protecting tender expressions of intimacy.
Brackets establish a special magic between reader and writer. Perhaps that’s why Sidney used them to dedicate his work to his sister Mary, a gifted translator and accomplished poet in her own right:
Here now have you (most deare, and most worthy to be most dear Lady) this idle work of mine: which I fear (like the spider’s web) will be thought fitter to be swept away, than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks, were wont to do to the babes they would not foster) I could well find in my heart, to cast out in some desert of forgetfulnes this child, which I am loath to father.
Sidney is hedging his words in ever more delaying parentheses. He adds comparisons (“like the spider’s web” and “as the cruel fathers”), classical allusions to Greek myth, and appeals to the reader (“most dear Lady”). Parentheses encase words, keeping vulnerable admissions safe and visually private. An open bracket is always twinned with a closed bracket — the words inside are never left out in the cold…
The uncontested early modern king of brackets and the place of the parenthesis: “Philip Sidney and the Extreme (Dis)graces of the Parenthesis,” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
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As we interrogate interpositions, we might note that today is Ship in a Bottle Day.
Ship in a Bottle Day was first celebrated in 2013. October 4 was chosen in honor of Jack Hinkley, founder of the Ship in a Bottle Association of America, who helped promote and preserve this unusual maritime craft.
The tradition of building ships in bottles became especially popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. Sailors often made small models during long voyages, using their knowledge of ships, rigging, wood, thread, and simple tools.
The secret is not that the bottle is cut open. In traditional ship-in-a-bottle construction, the model is built so the masts and sails can fold down. The ship is carefully inserted through the neck of the bottle, and then the rigging is pulled to raise the masts into place. The process requires patience, steady hands, and careful planning. – source
“Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people”*…
As we float awash in the debate over who/what is conscious (only humans? animals? plants? AI? everything?), we might take a moment to ponder the role of consciousness. For example, in science.
Harald A. Wiltsche argues that physicists, and scientists in general, attempt to paint an objective picture of reality. Consciousness, experience, and subjectivity are forcibly pushed out of the picture. Indeed, even where science is empirical, this empiricism rarely involves a consideration of human consciousness, but rather the readings of some mechanical measuring device, or some hypothetical abstracted sum of all perspectives – a God’s eye view or view from nowhere.
A phenomenologist of science, Wiltsche paints a different picture. Physics, even in the form of quantum mechanics, has its origins in the phenomenology of human consciousness. No matter how hard scientists try, it can never escape those origins, and to truly move forward, it must understand and embrace them…
Physics and phenomenology are usually taken to inhabit different worlds. Physics aims at a description of objective reality in mathematical terms. Phenomenology—the philosophical movement inaugurated by Edmund Husserl—is an a priori investigation into consciousness and into the ways things appear in experience. Physics deals with equations, invariants, and symmetries, aiming to represent reality minus observers; phenomenology seems to concern precisely what physics leaves out: subjectivity, consciousness, meaning. If the two meet at all, it is only in polite, but ultimately inconsequential, interdisciplinary dialogue.
My claim is that this picture is mistaken. Physics does not stand outside phenomenology. It presupposes the very structures phenomenology seeks to analyse—above all, the structured correlation between subject and object through which objectivity first becomes intelligible. The task, therefore, is not to unite two distant domains, but to recognize a relation that has been there from the beginning…
[Wiltsche makes his point first with reference to spacetime physics, then to quantum mechanics. He concludes…]
… The question, then, is no longer whether physics and phenomenology should be united. As physics confronts its own conceptual foundations, the challenge is to bring into view the structures phenomenology has analyzed since its inception—and to explore how they can illuminate the meaning of objectivity in modern theory.
Eminently worth reading in full.
Physics cannot escape its roots in phenomenology: “Consciousness is the hidden architecture behind fundamental and quantum physics” (or archived version here) from @haraldwiltsche.bsky.social in @iai.tv.
Bonus question: if Wiltsche is right that consciousness is essential to advancing our understanding of reality, and consciousness is something that other things, living and “inanimate,” (do or can) possess, what does that mean for our quest to understand realit(ies)?… Or does a question like this simply (albeit implicitly) affirm anthropocentrism? How will we know?
See also: “A physicist is just an atom’s way of looking at itself“
* Edmund Husserl
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As we contemplate consciousness, we might note that it was on this date in 1977, at the High Wyncombe Town Hall in England, that the Bunch of Stiffs tour kicked off. It featured Nick Lowe’s Last Chicken in the Shop, Elvis Costello and The Attractions, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Wreckless Eric and The New Rockets, and Larry Wallis’ Psychedelic Rowdies– acts managed by Dave Robinson and Jake Riviera before they formed the Stiff Records label, which released a live album of the festivities in February of 1978.
“A public trial is the best security for the pure, impartial, and efficient administration of justice, the best means of winning for it public confidence and respect”*
We have all, understandably, been paying a great deal of attention to what the U. S. Supreme Court has been deciding. But as Joe Patrice reminds us, it’s important to attend to how they are making their decisions as well…
Conservative justices have spent years at war with two words. I know you’re thinking it’s something like “equal protection” or “reproductive rights,” or “basic ethics,” but let’s be serious — they already won those wars. The two words that get the conservatives riled up these days are “shadow docket.” Samuel Alito blasted the media for using the term to create the impression that the Supreme Court “is deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way in the middle of the night, hidden from public view,” just because the Supreme Court is, in fact, deciding important issues in a novel, secretive, improper way in the middle of the night, hidden from public view. Brett Kavanaugh even channeled his inner Gretchen Wieners seeking a “fetch”-esque rebrand, hoping the term “interim docket” might catch on to make the flurry of consequential constitutional decisions rammed through without briefing or written opinion seem less… shady.
Well, maybe they’re right! Maybe it is time to drop the shadow docket. Not because the Court’s aggressive abuse of the procedure is any more legitimate, but because the metaphor broke. A shadow needs something real to stand in the light, while the shadow is the smaller, murkier thing trailing behind.
But now, the shadow docket is the Supreme Court’s preferred way of doing business. The outlier is when the justices deign to respect transparency.
ProPublica set out to put numbers behind the shadow docket. Analyzing the Court’s records, and excluding simple administrative requests and capital cases that have long lived on the emergency docket, ProPublica found back in July that the shadow has overtaken the merits docket:
I discovered that in the term that ended in 2025, the justices issued more substantive decisions on their emergency docket than in cases argued in open court. Experts told me this was likely the first time this has happened in the court’s modern history.
The Supreme Court issued 63 shadow orders in the term ending last year, to only 56 with argument and real, written and signed majority opinions. This year isn’t looking much better.
When the kitchen door handles more traffic than the front door, it’s just the front door now. The briefing-argument-signed-opinion routine everyone learned in school — and which underpins the judiciary’s entire claim to legitimacy — is now the side project. We shall henceforth dub the merits docket as the “transparent docket,” a quaint exhibition the justices run from October through June in between unbriefed and unexplained rulings to rewrite constitutional order.
ProPublica’s Ken B. Morales put the numbers to the Supreme Court itself:
Representatives from the Supreme Court did not respond to my questions.
You have got to hand it to the justices for their commitment to the bit.
ProPublica notes that “Every decision the court has made since July has been on its shadow docket.” Which is always true during the Court’s summer break — but historically the summer break was a “break” and not business-as-usual. These days, the Court doesn’t take summers off from deciding things, just from explaining them.
Oh, remember back in the day when Amy Coney Barrett whined about the public needing to “read the opinion.” That was before she decided well, you can’t expect us to put ourselves on the record when we blow up constitutional order!
The surge in these under-the-table orders have mostly inured to the benefit of the Trump administration. Like the Court greenlighting the president’s power to blow up and then squander millions in taxpayer funds to build vanity projects — a power we hope to see applied to One First Street soon. But Trump has suffered his share of losses through the process too, notably this month’s block on Missouri’s new gerrymander and the order upholding the injunction on Trump using the Postal Service to steal mail-in ballots.
But as much as it warms the heart of anyone who cares about constitutional order to see the Trump administration lose, this is about more than the outcome. We should have arguments and signed opinions. The Court’s power derives from its power of persuasion, as Judge J. Michael Luttig has said. An emergency stay is all well and good if issued to give the justices time to set up a proper, transparent process.
But too often these days, as Professor Vladeck notes, the supposedly “interim” order slides into de facto permanence without the Court bothering to follow up…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Supreme Court ‘Shadow’ Docket Is Now Bigger Than The Real, ‘Transparent’ One,” from @joepatrice.bsky.social in @abovethelaw.com.
Update: After publication, I received this response from an old friend…
As a retired lawyer with time on my hands, I follow the Supreme Court fairly closely. To add some context to Joe Patrice’s article, lower federal courts have issued roughly 300 preliminary injunctions/temporary restraining orders against the Trump administration. The Supreme Court has considered 32 emergency appeals (the “shadow docket”) of those orders. It has stayed 24 of the PIs/TROs. The Court has explained most of those stays, particularly over the last year, and for the rest the reasons for the Court’s action are fairly obvious.
I have been reading Supreme Court opinions for 54 years now. The old opinions were more concise, elegant, and sweeping. They often ignored counterarguments and stayed out of the weeds. The current opinions & dissents are more thorough, rigorous, and legally sophisticated. They read more like law review articles. They address the other side’s arguments. They are more tedious to read, but do a better job of explaining decisions. The Court is more transparent today than it has ever been.
Your correspondent is not (like Joe Patrice and my old friend) a lawyer, retired or otherwise. I find that, while I take my friend’s points, I still prefer a return of the balance to the more open, on the merits docket… even as I appreciate that the Administration’s “flood the zone” approach is making this difficult… In nay case, even if we look past how the Court is operating, we’re left with what they are deciding…
* Robert Reid, 1st Earl Loreburn
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As we agree with Louis Brandeis that “sunlight is the best of disinfectants,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first African-American justice of the United States Supreme Court. Appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, Marshall had been a storied civil rights attorney and jurist (Federal Court of Appeals); he served on the highest bench from 1967 until his retirement in 1991.
Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.
— Thurgood Marshall
“Now I will tell the captains of the ships, and all the ships together”*…
Ethan Mollick has created a new site that’s fascinating in two different ways. First and most overtly, it’s a beautiful (and thorough) visualization and explanation of the ships used by the protagonists of The Iliad.
But at the same time, it is a powerful demonstration of (at least one of) the ways that AI might be useful in scholarship and education: Mollick spun up the site last month, using Claude…
In the second book of the Iliad the poet pauses on the brink of the first battle, calls on the Muses, and counts the fleet: twenty-nine contingents, forty-six captains, some 178 place-names, 1,186 ships [and by Thucydides’ reckoning, around 100,000 men]. This site puts every entry on the map, rebuilds the ships from the archaeological evidence [pictured on this site], and lets you read the lines beside the ruins they describe…
“The Catalogue of Ships” from @emollick.bsky.social.
* Homer/The Poet, The Iliad, Book 2, lines 492-3
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As we set sail, we might recall that it was on this date in 331 BCE (long, long ago– but hundreds of years after the action described in The Iliad) that Alexander the Great and the Army of Macedon defeated King Darius III and his Persian Army in the Battle of Gaugamela, effectively the final blow to the Achaemenid Empire, resulting in its complete conquest by Alexander.
“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it”*…
The line between life and death has never been clear—and, as Amanda Heidt reports, modern technology blurs it further…
Jimo Borjigin never intended to study death. Back in the mid-2010s, the consciousness researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor was instead interested in circadian rhythms, the internal cycles that regulate our physical, mental, and behavioral states throughout each day. The circadian clock is a bit of a black box, Borjigin says, so to study it she and her team developed an automated system to continuously monitor neurotransmitters that regulate circadian rhythms in rats.
Over the course of her research, the scientists tracked the animals for weeks at a time, and Borjigin began to notice something unusual. A few of the animals died while under observation, and when they did, the researchers’ sensors recorded a massive and unexpected spike in serotonin for up to 30 seconds after their hearts stopped beating. In humans, serotonin dysregulation has been linked to intense hallucinations, but Borjigin didn’t know what to make of such a finding in the context of rats. Or in death. Like any good scientist, she looked to the literature.
“I was sure we must know everything there is about the death process already, but when I went looking for evidence of this serotonin spike, I found nothing,” she says. “Looking into the research on death more broadly, I was shocked at how little we truly understand about this thing that happens to every one of us.”
The experience prompted a shift in Borjigin’s research focus, and today she studies consciousness in relation to death and near-death experiences. In 2023, she and her colleagues published a contentious finding: that humans, like her rats, also experience a dramatic shift in brain activity when we die. The team monitored four comatose patients as they were taken off life support, and in two cases, detected a spike in gamma waves—the fastest type of brain wave, most active during periods of intense focus or problem solving—in a part of the brain correlated with dreaming, visual hallucinations, and altered states of consciousness. “To me, this suggests a covert consciousness that is not usually observed by bystanders who might otherwise look at a person and think they are unresponsive,” she says. “If that’s true, it definitely makes me think we need to revisit our definition of death.”
While Borjigin acknowledges that her work is preliminary, her observations and others like them show just how blurry the line between life and death has become, and how much science still stands to learn about such a pivotal event. As technological advances increasingly allow researchers to study death—including interventions that now allow for the use of so-called living cadavers in scientific research—so too have they necessitated new, oftentimes fraught conversations about the nature of death, its biological and societal underpinnings, and whether existing legal definitions are in alignment with current medical standards.
“The somewhat contentious space that we’re in right now is that we have different ways that we can say that someone is dead, and not all of them agree with each other. There are legal definitions and medical ones, social definitions, and many different religious interpretations,” says L. Syd M. Johnson, a neuroethicist at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. “It’s a surprisingly complicated question, but that also makes this an exciting time to be considering it.”
Read on to consider whether this work is a breakthrough, “a bane for bioethicists,” or both: “How To Tell If You’re Dead” (or here) from @scattercushion.bsky.social in @nautil.us.
* Haruki Murakami
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As we (attempt to) understand undoing, we might spare a thought for someone who crossed the threshold on this date in 1955: James Dean. An actor, he appeared in just three major films: Rebel Without a Cause (1955), East of Eden (1955), and Giant (1956), but became one of the most influential figures in Hollywood in the 1950s, and had a profound impact on cinema and popular culture.
Dean died in a traffic accident, when his 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder collided with a Ford near Cholame, California.
Actor Alec Guinness later claimed that, in a chance encounter with Dean at the Villa Capri a week before the crash, he had predicted the young actor’s death in his newly purchased sports car. In his autobiography, Guinness wrote that when Dean proudly showed him the vehicle, he found it “sinister” and recalled saying, in a voice he barely recognized, “Please, never get in it.” He then added, “It is now ten o’clock, Friday the 23rd of September, 1955. If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week.” Dean reportedly laughed and replied, “Oh, shucks! Don’t be so mean! “Author Jason Colavito argues that the story is “almost certainly Guinness’s ex post facto fabrication,” noting that at the time Guinness merely said Dean had told him that friends had begged him not to buy the car because they feared he would drive it too fast. – source
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