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…
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
The Anxious Generation is best understood as a three-act tragedy. Act I begins in the mid-20th century, when new social and entertainment technologies (e.g., air conditioning and television) set in motion a long, gradual collapse of local community. Act II begins in the 1980s, as the loss of local community weakened social trust and helped erode the play-based childhood. Act III begins in the early 2010s, with the arrival of the phone-based childhood that filled the vacuum left behind.
This post, written by Andrew Trousdale and Erik Larson, goes deep into Act I. Andrew is a psychology researcher and human-computer interaction designer who is co-running a project on the psychological tradeoffs of progress. Erik is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, writes the Substack Colligo, and is completing the MIT Press book Augmented Human Intelligence: Being Human in an Age of AI, due in 2026. Together, they show how the isolation we experience today did not begin with smartphones but began decades earlier, as Americans, often for good and understandable reasons, traded connection for convenience, and place-based relationships for privacy and control.
Tracing these trade-offs across the twentieth century, Andrew and Erik help explain the problem of loneliness we face today, and offer some guidance for how we can turn it around and reconnect with our neighbors. Robert Putnam, who read a recent draft, described it as “easily the best, most comprehensive, and most persuasive piece on the contemporary social capital conundrum I’ve yet read.”…
Trousdale and Langer trace the social, cultural, economic, political, and technological forces that have played out from the the late 1940s to today. It is, at once, familiar and shocking. They conclude…
When we asked Robert Putnam what gives him hope, he pointed to history. In The Upswing, he reminds us that Americans faced a similar crisis before. The Gilded Age brought economic inequality, industrialization, and the rise of anonymous urban life. Small-town bonds gave way to tenements and factory floors. Trust collapsed. By the 1890s, social capital had reached historic lows — roughly where it stands today.
The Progressive reformers found this new world unacceptable, but they didn’t try to turn back the clock. Cities and factories were here to stay. Instead, they adapted, creating new forms of connection suited to their changed reality, from settlement houses for anonymous neighborhoods to women’s clubs that built networks of mutual aid. They didn’t reject modernity; they metabolized it, showing up day after day to create new institutions and communities suited to the industrialized world.
Decades ago Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death that we haven’t been conquered by technology — we’ve surrendered to it because we like the stimulation and cheap amusement. More recently, Nicholas Carr concludes in Superbloom that we’re complicit in our loneliness because we embrace these superficial, mediated forms of connection. Like Postman and Carr, the Progressive Era reformers understood where they had agency when technology upended their world. It isn’t in demanding that others fix systems we willingly participate in, nor is it in outright rejecting technologies that deliver real benefits — it’s in changing how we ourselves live with and make use of the tools that surround us.
There are already signs that people are willing to do this. In a small, three-day survey, Talker Research found that 63% of Gen Z now intentionally unplug — the highest rate of any generation — and that half of Americans are spending less time on screens for their well-being, and their top alternative activity is time with friends and family. And they found that two-thirds of Americans are embracing “slow living,” with 84% adopting analog lifestyle choices like wristwatches and paper notebooks that help them unplug. Meanwhile in Eventbrite’s “Reset to Real” survey, 74% of young adults say in-person experiences matter more than digital ones. New devices like the Light Phone, Brick, Meadow, and Daylight Computer signal a growing demand for utility without distraction.
Unplugging isn’t enough on its own. The time and energy we reclaim has to go toward building social connections: hosting the dinner party despite the hassle, staying for coffee after church when you’d rather go home, sitting through the awkward silence, offering or asking for help.
Ultimately, we can’t expect deep social connection in a culture that prioritizes individual ease and convenience. Nor is community something technology can deliver for us. What’s required is a change of culture, grounded in a basic fact of human nature: that authentic connection requires action and effort, and that this action and effort is part of what makes connection fulfilling in the first place.
We can form new rituals and institutions that allow us to adapt to technology, ultimately changing it to our liking. But it starts with the tools we use and the choices we make each day. If we all prioritize the individual comforts and conveniences we’ve grown accustomed to, no one else will restore the community we say we miss. No one else can. If we want deeper relationships and better communities than we have, we’re going to have to put more of our time, effort, and attention into the people around us.
History shows that we can adapt, building communities suited to changing times. The question is: Will we stay in and scroll? Or will we go out and choose one another?…
In the spirit of the call for forward-looking determination, pair with “The Displacement of Purpose” from Peter Adam Boeckel (“If AI automates production, then humanity must automate compassion. Only then will progress remember what it was for.”)
* Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone (in which he also observed: “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”)
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As we get together, we might spare a thought for Aldus Manutius; he died on this date in 1515. A printer and humanist, he founded the Aldine Press. In the books he published, he introduced a standardized system of punctuation and use of the semicolon. He designed many fonts, and created italic type (which he named for Italy).
And apropos the piece featured above, we might note that on this date in 1965 “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,” the first major hit for the Righteous Brothers, simultaneously reached #1 on both the Billboard and Cash Box charts in the US as well as the UK singles chart. The song was produced by Phil Spector (who had discovered the duo at a San Francisco show) for his own label, Philles Records. All the songs previously produced by Spector for Philles featured African-American singers; the Righteous Brothers were his first white vocal act– they had a vocal style, blue-eyed soul, that suited Spector.
One punctuation mark in particular is having a moment… a not-altogether-welcome one…
Of the many tips and tricks people are coming up with to determine whether a piece of writing has been written with a little help from AI, the world seems to have homed in on the use of one particular punctuation mark: the em dash.
Though some writers have rushed in to defend the dash — the overuse of which sits alongside pizza glue and bluebberrygate in the pantheon of things people laugh at AI about — perhaps a key reason the prevalence of the punctuation mark seems so bot-like to readers is that, as writers, Americans hardly use it.
Indeed, per a recent YouGov survey, dashes are some of the least used pieces of punctuation in Americans’ arsenals, ranking just ahead of colons and semicolons, per the poll.
As you might imagine, the survey revealed that American adults who describe themselves as “good” or “very good” writers are more likely to use the rarer forms of punctuation on the list. However, for the majority of Americans, marks like the semicolon and the em dash remain mostly reserved for esteemed authors and English teachers… or those who aren’t above enlisting a chatbot for a little help to jazz up their communications.
Interestingly, the vast majority of Americans said they do little writing outside of sending texts and emails, with journaling, nonfiction and fiction writing, and other forms of creative or academic writing all falling by the wayside in 2025, according to YouGov’s research…
As we muse on marks, we might that it was on this date in 1956 that Fortran was introduced to the world. A third-generation, compiled, imperative computer programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Developed by an IBM team led by John Backus, it became the go-to language for high-performance computing and is used for programs that benchmark and rank the world’s fastest supercomputers.
In a 1979 interview with Think, the IBM employee magazine, Backus explained Fortran’s origin: “Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so, when I was working on the IBM 701, writing programs for computing missile trajectories, I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”
To the item at the top, it’s worth noting that Fortran is a language with four uses for the dash– subtraction operator, negative sign, line continuation symbol, and range separator (in data processing)– but no em dash.
For a piece of Fortran’s pre-history, see here; and for an important extension, see here.
Matthew Zipf on how– in the hands of a true literay stylist– the humble comma is a matter of precision, logic, individuality, and music…
… The most conspicuous mark of Renata Adler’s style is its abundance of commas. In her two novels, Speedboat (1976) and Pitch Dark (1983), there are a few sentences that edge on the absurd: “For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman, a painter, whom he had met, one afternoon, outside the gym, and whom he was trying to introduce, along with Simon, into his apartment and his life.” A critic tallied it up, counting “40 words and ten commas—Guinness Book of World Records?” Each of those commas had its grammatical defense, but Adler’s style did not comply with the usual standards of fluent prose. She cordoned off phrases, such as “on the phone,” that other writers would just run through. One reader, responding to a 1983 New York magazine profile of Adler, wrote in a letter to the editor, “If the examples of Renata Adler’s writing … are typical, Miss Adler will never make it to the road. The way is ‘jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption’ blocked by commas.” The reader was quoting one of Adler’s own comma-laden critical phrases against her. The editors titled the letter “Comma Wealth.”
Adler’s comma usage differs from the balanced rhythms of 18th-century essayists, as well as from the breathless lines common among American writers after Hemingway. Her punctuation jars, and turns abruptly, like a skater’s blade stopping and sending up shards of ice. She likes to leave out conjunctions in chains of adjectives, as in her film review of “a leering, uncertain, embarrassing, protracted little comedy.” Certain lines of hers work almost entirely by carefully placed commas, which tighten the style, each one a rivet on the page: “But this I know, or think I know, that idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel.” A hesitation, a stutter, and then a swing into the qualification (“unless they sleep a lot”). Interestingly, no comma in “bored and bored people”: grammar sacrificed for rhythm and speed.
Not everyone saw the elegant precision in how she pointed her sentences. After one of her books came out, a critic wrote that “virtually every sentence is peppered with enough commas to make the prose read like a series of hiccups.” Another letter writer complained of her “muddled syntax and wandering, endless sentences.”
But Adler’s style had its admirers, too. “Nobody in this country writes better prose than Renata Adler’s,” a critic wrote in a Harper’s review of her first novel. New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman recently said that she could not think of a living stylist she admired more. But the most insightful comment might have come from a man splitting the difference. At The New York Times, where in 1968 Adler had become the daily film critic, editor Abe Rosenthal addressed a concerned colleague by first conceding that Adler was no great stylist, and then suggesting a metaphor: She’s olives. The readers will grow to like her…
… Adler sang of punctuation. In Pitch Dark, there is an associative run, typical of her novels, that reads: “And this matter of the commas. And this matter of the paragraphs. The true comma. The pause comma. The afterthought comma. The hesitation comma. The rhythm comma. The blues.” I wonder if everyone hears the music in that “riff,” as she calls it, with the rhythm of the short fragments and the satisfaction of the last monosyllable. There is also, within the musical list, a legitimate sorting of functions. The afterthought comma, Adler said, was when you wanted to add something, and there was no obvious way to do it. The true comma was the grammatical one, separating phrases or clauses. When spoken, it could function differently from other commas. To read out loud, “For some time, Leander had spoken, on the phone, of a woman …” you should not rest at each phrase. The true comma does not always require a pause.
Punctuation controls two things: logical separation and breath. In Adler’s words, “part of it is meaning, and part of it is cadence.” Writers weigh each role differently. Didion wrote that grammar was a piano she learned to play by ear, and she seems to have given priority to breath. Adler learned grammar in school, where she diagrammed sentences, and then at The New Yorker, which gave far more weight to logic. The magazine, where she began working at age 24, was alternately beloved and deplored for its commas. If a phrase was not essential to the sentence, the editors wanted it enveloped: thus “on the phone,” a wrapped-up appositive. (“May I offer you a comma?” the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, used to say to Adler in editing sessions.) Punctuation grew into a dogmatic inheritance, a passion, and a trademark of the magazine. E. B. White wrote that “commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim.”
Knives are an apt metaphor. The first systematic survey of English punctuation, published in 1785, recorded that the Greek komma means “a segment, or a part cut off [from] a complete sentence.” The word comes from koptein, to cut. Precision, too, is a kind of cutting, a drawing of lines. It has a coincident etymology in Latin: praecidere means “to cut off.” Adding commas does not necessarily make your work precise, and you can write clearly without much punctuation. Precision might come, for example, in short declarative sentences. It relies on other things, too, such as diction, the mot juste. But the wish to separate accurately, to put different things into different cells, connects, at least in Adler’s case, to an actual grammatical usage. When she launches into one of her riffs, when she begins listing, or when she describes a phone call, her work suggests the old definition of thought as collecting and dividing: cutting between concepts as a good butcher slides his knife along the natural joints…
… In Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes described the “loneliness of style.” It is “the writer’s ‘thing,’ ” he wrote, “his glory and his prison, it is his solitude.” Adler is meticulous about her style. During her time as a film critic, she lost days to dealing with New York Times editors, who kept changing her prose, making edits that she had already thought of and decided against (“there was rarely the conception that in doing sentences a writer chooses among options,” she wrote about the experience). Her pieces for the Times sometimes appeared without her having seen the final version. She was happier at The New Yorker, where, though they might propose significant changes, the magazine’s editors made sure “not to attribute to the writer a single word, or a single cut, or a single mark of punctuation, which the writer had not seen and, in some sense, approved.” She has always cared about those things. For without the grand plot of a detective novel, without the large, vivid characters of Austen or Dickens, what Adler has is style. It is her solitude, her glory, her thing…
As we punctuate with passion, we might send farsighted birthday greetings to (a somehat more parsimonious, but still deft, user of commas) Alexander Herzen (Aleksándr Ivánovich Gértsen); he was born on this date in 1812. A Russian thinker and writer he was a key inspiration for agrarian populism and Russian socialism. With his writings, many composed while exiled in London, he attempted to influence the situation in Russia, contributing to a political climate that led to the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Perhaps most notably, he published the important social novel Who is to Blame? (in 1845–46) and his autobiography, My Past and Thoughts (written 1852–1870), is considered one of the best examples of that genre in Russian literature.
… Watson, a historian and philosopher of science and a teacher of writing and the humanities—in other words, a Renaissance woman—gives us a deceptively playful-looking book that turns out to be a scholarly treatise on a sophisticated device that has contributed eloquence and mystery to Western civilization.
The semicolon itself was a Renaissance invention. It first appeared in 1494, in a book published in Venice by Aldus Manutius. “De Aetna,” Watson explains, was “an essay, written in dialogue form,” about climbing Mt. Etna. Its author, Pietro Bembo, is best known today not for his book but for the typeface, designed by Francesco Griffo, in which the first semicolon was displayed: Bembo. The mark was a hybrid between a comma and a colon, and its purpose was to prolong a pause or create a more distinct separation between parts of a sentence. In her delightful history, Watson brings the Bembo semicolon alive, describing “its comma-half tensely coiled, tail thorn-sharp beneath the perfect orb thrown high above it.” Designers, she explains, have since given the mark a “relaxed and fuzzy” look (Poliphilus), rendered it “aggressive” (Garamond), and otherwise adapted it for the modern age: “Palatino’s is a thin flapper in a big hat slouched against the wall at a party.”
The problem with the semicolon is not how it looks but what it does and how that has changed over time. In the old days, punctuation simply indicated a pause. Comma, colon: semicolon; period. Eventually, grammarians and copy editors came along and made themselves indispensable by punctuating (“pointing”) a writer’s prose “to delineate clauses properly, such that punctuation served syntax.” That is, commas, semicolons, and colons were plugged into a sentence in order to highlight, subordinate, or otherwise conduct its elements, connecting them syntactically. One of the rules is that, unless you are composing a list, a semicolon is supposed to be followed by a complete clause, capable of standing on its own. The semicolon can take the place of a conjunction, like “and” or “but,” but it should not be used in addition to it. This is what got circled in red in my attempts at scholarly criticism in graduate school. Sentence length has something to do with it—a long, complex sentence may benefit from a clarifying semicolon—but if a sentence scans without a semicolon it’s best to leave it alone.
Watson has been keeping an eye out for effective semicolons for years. She calculates that there are four-thousand-odd semicolons in “Moby-Dick,” or “one for every 52 words.” Clumsy as nineteenth-century punctuation may seem to a modern reader, Melville’s semicolons, she writes, act like “sturdy little nails,” holding his wide-ranging narrative together….
As we punctuate punctiliously, we might recall that it was on this date in 1990 that CBS aired the final episode of Bob Newhart’s second successful sitcom series, Newhart, in which he co-starred with Mary Fran through a 184 episode run that had started in 1982. Newhart had, of course, had a huge hit with his first series, The Bob Newhart Show, in which he co-starred with Suzanne Pleshette.
Newhart‘s ending, its final scene, is often cited as the best finale in sit-com history.
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