“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: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/UV…

Can reading make you happier? newyorkermag.visitlink.me/_q…

Whatever book you pick up, it’s likely to make you feel better—maybe even a whole lot better. “In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks,” Ceridwen Dovey writes, in “Can Reading Make You Happier?,” which was published in 2015. Dive into the research behind the therapeutic effect of books: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Wv…

My life in London, the life I had cobbled together with the barest of routines, grew thin and unconvincing. It now seldom felt real. newyorker.com/magazine/2026/…