09/29/2026
“The purpose of punctuation is to make writing easier to read,” Louis Menand writes, “and making writing easier to read means giving greater and greater numbers of people access to the written word.” A new book by Florence Hazrat, celebrating punctuation in all its forms, makes the striking claim that the history of punctuation is the history of humanity itself. It has entered into a class of books about the mechanics of writing—to which Sarah L. Kaufman’s “Verb Your Enthusiasm” belongs. But how do we think about these sentences, words, and marks amid a current evolution in the phenomenology of reading? Authors like Hazrat and Kaufman want us to understand reading as a bodily experience, one which can transmit an author’s state of mind, or set of emotions, to our own. Menand considers the strange power of, among other things, punctuation: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/UVJBIr
