Illustration by Anthony Russo.

The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494. It was meant to signify a pause of a length somewhere between that of the comma and that of the colon, and this heritage was reflected in its form, which combines half of each of those marks. It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly. Texts (both handwritten and printed) record the testing-out and tinkering-with of punctuation by the fifteenth-century literati known as the Italian humanists. The humanists put a premium on eloquence and excellence in writing, and they called for the study and retranscription of Greek and Roman classical texts as a way to effect a “cultural rebirth” after the gloomy Middle Ages. In the service of these two goals, humanists published new writing and revised, repunctuated, and reprinted classical texts.

One of these humanists, Aldus Manutius, was the matchmaker who paired up comma and colon to create the semicolon. Manutius was a printer and publisher, and the first literary Latin text he issued was De Aetna, by his contemporary Pietro Bembo. De Aetna was an essay, written in dialogue form, about climbing volcanic Mount Etna in Italy. On its pages lay a new hybrid mark, specially cut for this text by the Bolognese type designer Francesco Griffo: the semicolon (and Griffo dreamed up a nice plump version) is sprinkled here and there throughout the text, conspiring with colons, commas, and parentheses to aid readers. Read More

Jamie Allen is the creator of the Squirrel Census, a data, science, design, and storytelling team. With the help of 323 volunteer Squirrel Sighters, the six-person team performed a count of eastern grays in Central Park in October 2018. In June of this year, they released the Central Park Squirrel Census 2019 Report.

When you put on a squirrel census, you get asked a lot of questions.

One of the most popular is, Why? In an era marred by gaslighting, climate change, and ill temper, it’s almost as if the act of tallying squirrels becomes the one hunk of gristle that people can’t swallow. But it’s time to answer the difficult questions.

“Wait a minute—why?” is the query that aims for the project’s jugular.

Though the Squirrel Census team had completed several counts of eastern grays in Atlanta, some observers couldn’t take us seriously when we set our sights on Manhattan’s Central Park in October of 2018. It may astound you, but there has never before been a comprehensive count of squirrels in Central Park. Squirrels are really common, of course, and paying close attention to their numbers, while other animals are going extinct, was an effort deemed a bit too twee and citified. On several occasions, our census was labeled a “quirky science project.” Maybe that’s at least partly true. But this is key: once you have filed the project into these categories, you have inhibited your view of it. For instance, we are conditioned by the media to assume that every legitimate research project must have an identifiable, singular purpose: why. You perform a controlled study to find out ___________. But this was a census, which doesn’t seek one answer. It gathers loads of data and stories. In that mosaic emerges a clearer overall picture of the species and the space it inhabits.

Further, most scientists and researchers I’ve encountered enjoy our project, in part because they appreciate any act of discovery that claims no other reason than “because.” Many scientists and researchers are poets at heart. Or maybe poets are scientists and researchers at heart. In the end, they are trying to answer the Big Questions in life: How did we get here? What is the meaning of all this? Why doesn’t he/she love me?

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In fifth grade, I picked Abigail Adams from a list of American history topics because I wanted to find out what this woman had done to land herself, nearly alone, on a list of men. I soon despaired to learn that she hadn’t actually done all that much, at least not in the ways that I understood “doing.” She ran the family farm and raised the kids while her husband, John Adams, was off signing the Declaration of Independence. She followed him to France, then Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., then back to the farm. I chronicled these relocations, while thinking that I must be missing the point. Defeated, I turned in my report, aware that it was, as grandiose as this sounds, my first intellectual failure.

I’d gotten plenty of spelling words wrong before, but those were failures of memorization, not comprehension. That a life might be valued in terms other than battles won or lost, institutions raised or razed, was alien to me. The “great man” kind of history was the only kind I’d been taught, and the only kind I knew how to value.

I unlearned that lesson gradually. In another American history class I reread some of Adams’s letters and could recognize their significance: “Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no Voice, or Representation.” She was one of the earliest advocates for the rights and education of women in the United States, although neither representation nor rebellion would came to pass until long after her lifetime. I learned that beyond great deeds, what people thought or said—or sometimes didn’t or couldn’t say—had value.

Or at least, I thought I had learned this. Then I found myself, years later, waist deep in a novel inspired by the life of the eccentric French composer Erik Satie, dully chronicling actions: first he did this. Then he did that. I showed the first chapter too early, to someone in whose opinion I placed too much stock. “Is there a reason you aren’t just writing a biography?” he asked, and I cringed.

What was I writing, and why? I’d been fixated to the point of paralysis on the question of what fiction owes to history, tangled up in the impossibility of knowing every single thing about Satie’s biography, his music, let alone the entire time span of 1866–1925. Then I started asking, what does fiction offer to the historical record?

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