President Trump’s racist remarks about four progressive Democratic members of Congress—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley—have unified the Party against a common adversary. On Tuesday, House Democrats passed a resolution condemning Trump’s “racist comments that have legitimized fear and hatred of new Americans and people of color.” But a divide regarding policy and strategy remains between the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, the four freshman Democrats, and other House members calling for the immediate impeachment of the President.

After the vote to condemn Trump, Representative Al Green, of Texas, filed articles of impeachment against the President, a move that will force Pelosi to table Green’s measure, refer it to the House Judiciary Committee, or proceed with a full vote in the House. Next Wednesday, the issue will arise again when the former special counsel Robert Mueller testifies before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees about his probe of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and obstruction of justice by Trump. Eighty-two of the House’s two hundred and thirty-five Democrats have said that they currently support impeaching the President.

To discuss the state of the Democratic Party, and Pelosi’s leadership, I spoke by phone on Monday with Barney Frank, the former congressman, who represented his district in Massachusetts for more than three decades in the House before retiring, in 2013. He is best known for his outspokenness and his role in crafting the eponymous Dodd-Frank Act, which sought to regulate the financial industry after the crash last decade. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why he thinks the criticism of Pelosi is unfair, whether there is a divide in the Democratic Party, and his belief that this dispute is not really a generational one.

What have you made of the internal split between Pelosi and some of her members?

I’m disappointed by it. I think the first thing to say is that it is not nearly as big a split as people think. They are a fraction, a splinter. The overwhelming majority of the Democrats agree with [Pelosi]. Frankly, I think there is a conspiracy among Ocasio-Cortez, the media, and the Republican Party to make her look much more influential than she is. Every time I debate a Republican, they want to talk about them. And I think, in fact, that there is not such a big splinter. There have always been, on the Democratic side—Howard Dean, etc.—people who are very passionate and are frustrated because reality isn’t as pliable as they wish. They are people who I think make the fundamental mistake—I often agree with them on substance—but they make the fundamental mistake of thinking the general public is much more in agreement with them than it is, and forget about or just reject the notion of trying to figure out how to get things done.

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I agree with you that Ocasio-Cortez represents a minority of the Party, even though I think she is probably fairly similar on politics to [Bernie] Sanders and [Elizabeth] Warren, who I think combined make up a somewhat—

No, here’s the fundamental difference. I said I agree with a lot of them on substance. The issue is not substance. I have worked very closely with Elizabeth Warren. The fundamental difference is that these people—certainly Ocasio-Cortez—they appear to think that the majority is ready to adopt what they want, and it’s a strategic and tactical difference.

Elizabeth Warren would never have had a sit-in protesting Nancy Pelosi. It’s a matter of how you go about things. It is their view that the only reason that their platform isn’t being adopted is the political timidity, maybe the malign influence of money. The notion that there is significant political opposition among many people, including maybe a majority on some issues, they disregard that and denounce other Democrats, saying they don’t have the courage. It’s not the courage. We don’t have the votes sometimes. Sanders did that a little bit more. Elizabeth never does that.

On the financial-reform bill, Elizabeth Warren worked closely with us. For example, when Russ Feingold said he was voting against it because it was not as good as it could be, she called him up and tried to talk him into it, unsuccessfully. On a number of issues when people made what I thought were unrealistic demands, Elizabeth joined in explaining to people why they were unrealistic. I think that’s the difference. It’s not substance. It’s political approach.

I don’t disagree with any of that, but I do think some of the critiques of Pelosi in the last few months may have something more to them.

What? I don’t think so at all. I think she—remember the critiques were originally that she was too far to the left. So what critiques do you think make sense?

I understand not wanting to do impeachment, even if you think the President deserves to be impeached. I understand—

By the way, two-thirds of the House Democrats agree with [Pelosi].

Yes. Let me just finish. I think she has seemed bored and uninterested in public about the idea of investigating Trump, and given off a vibe that she is just not even, forget impeachment, just—

Nonsense. Nonsense. It’s nonsense on stilts, as Jeremy Bentham said. The fact is that you have the Democratic House committees working very hard at it. She said he ought to go to prison. She is working very hard on the substance and has done a great job of getting things through, but she has also [been] working closely with the committees, Elijah Cummings and others. Part of the problem is what the TV chooses to run. They like controversy. So she is more often quoted when she is disagreeing on impeachment than when she is making her own critiques.

O.K., well—

If you monitor her statements closely, I find her—she has been very critical of Trump and she has got the Democrats doing oversight.

When she was asked about [the departing Labor Secretary] Alex Acosta being impeached, she said, “It’s up to the President. It’s his Cabinet. We have a great deal of work to do here for the good of the American people—we need to focus on that.” It’s comments like that which I feel like show—

What do you mean “like that?” That’s one comment on one issue. The fact is that I think, in part, what she’s trying to do is put the blame on him and put the pressure on him. But that was one comment on one issue. It just seems to me she’s had a barrage against him, including now this resolution they’re going to do criticizing him for the comments about “Go back where you came from.” Plus, that’s not been the basis of Ocasio-Cortez’s, that’s not been the basis of the complaints—that she doesn’t seem interested. That’s really reaching.

Look, you must have read her interview with Maureen Dowd. She says, “You can’t impeach everybody.”

Right! And you can’t. And she’s right about that. It’s more important, I believe, to talk about the substance.

O.K., but—

And, again, that happens, though, because she is being pressed by the media to respond to those arguments and she is explaining her answers. But she has certainly been hypercritical of Trump.

Whatever you think of the immigration deal that she agreed to after Senate Democrats cut out the ground from under her, I thought her publicly saying that she was going to rely on Mike Pence to update her on things was embarrassing. And—

It wasn’t embarrassing. She was trying to make the best of a bad situation. I agree with that. I think she did the best she could. The fact is that they couldn’t do better.

Let me just ask you a broader—

What do you think she should have done? I know it’s nice to always just be critical of what other people do, but what do you think she should have done?

I am not sure on the substance, but—

Of course not. Because it is hard and it gets criticized. Whatever.

I was talking about the way she has been acting publicly, but I see your point. But let me—

She said he should go to prison. She has made a lot of other very negative statements. You are just cherry-picking to make a point.

I will bring this back to our current conversation. What have you made of Joe Biden’s comments that, if he were to become President, he would and could work with Mitch McConnell—that you really can reach across the aisle and get things done?

Oh, I think that was a mistake. It reminded me of when [President Barack] Obama said he was going to be post-partisan, and I said he gave me post-partisan depression. I understand the political motive because that is, unfortunately, the message a lot of people say they want to hear. But I don’t think it works. And, by the way, I think it would evanesce very completely. It wouldn’t come to anything.

I’m curious whether you think part of the split we are seeing in the Democratic Party is kind of an age thing—

No, that’s ridiculous. You just cited two seventy-year-olds.

Well—

You just cited two septuagenarians!

Hold on, let me finish.

Jeez.

Wait, hold on. I cited two seventy-year-olds, and you pointed out very interestingly that those two seventy-year-olds have a different way of going about it than their younger ideological allies.

Four. You greatly exaggerate Ocasio-Cortez’s—there’s four of them. There aren’t very many, including many of the younger people. By the way, the Democrats that Pelosi is most concerned about are younger ones. She is working very hard with the thirty- and forty-year-olds who won the marginal seats. The difference is not age. It is your perception of the electorate’s position. If you believe the electorate is raring to go with all this left agenda—as I said, much of which I agree with, the difference I have with them is more strategic—then you take some of their positions. If you believe that it is a much harder sell, then you have a different approach. . . . But if you look at the freshmen, by definition the younger ones, overwhelmingly, they are on Pelosi’s side. But they won Republican or marginal seats.

So you don’t feel that in some of the different ways that different Democrats try to communicate, that people from a different age group sometimes come across differently?

No! Let me reiterate. Frankly, you have to do your homework. What are the age groups of the people she is defending? Sharice Davis, how old is she? [She is thirty-nine.]

I am not saying in all cases.

You are talking about four people. I am talking about forty or thirty . . . I am very clear what I mean. It is not age. It is your perception of the electorate. Your perception of how far left the electorate is and how willing they are to accept things. Do you think you have to do them in steps? Do you think you have to worry about opposition? Or do you think the public is with you and anybody who doesn’t go for the whole thing right away is a coward? That’s why the people who come from the tougher districts overwhelmingly disagree with them.

Are we in a time where you feel like normal political calculations might have to be changed, or maybe it’s worth being more risky or bold?

Yeah, my own view is that there should be more emphasis on substance. I think there are two people who have been forgotten about: James Michael Curley and Adam Clayton Powell. They were both very successful politicians who did very bad things, who violated the law and conventional morality. But the more they did that, the more support they got from their political bases, which consisted of people who thought the whole system was rigged against them. And the more they said “fuck you” to conventional morality, the more they were cheered on.

I think we should stop putting so much emphasis on showing people what bad things [Trump] has done from the legal and ethical standpoint—which is impeachment—and talk more about the fact that the tax bill was so unfair, that there is no infrastructure going forward, that he is attacking health care. The things that were successful in 2018. So I think we should be even tougher and call his bluff on the substantive things. . . . I am not talking about any concessions to him.

When you watch the [Democratic Presidential-primary] debates, do you not think there are ways that the Party is moving left in substantive ways?

Can I tell you for the third time that I agree with much of them on substance? I’m sorry, that’s frustrating to me. I agree with them on much of the substance. I said that several times! The Party is moving to the left and I think that it should move to the left. I just talked about some of these areas. But the point I am making is that the difference is not substantive so much as it is strategic and tactical. So I don’t know why you would ask me that. By the way, I also take exception to you saying that I think they are in the minority. They are overwhelmingly, statistically, clearly in a minority in the House.

For the record, I will state that they are in a minority in the House.

And even more so in the Senate. I mean, the Senate is different.

I don’t know if you remember, but I interviewed you many years ago, back when I was at The New Republic. Do you feel a sense of sentimentality talking to me again?

I honestly remember less and less now. You know, the synapses kick in. But I really urge you to go look at the ages of the members of Congress, because I think it explodes the generational argument.

One striking aspect of the oral arguments, last week, in Texas v. United States, a case that threatens the Affordable Care Act, was the suggestion, from two of the three judges on a Fifth Circuit appeals panel, that what politicians say to or promise the public needn’t be taken seriously—indeed, that it hardly matters if they lie. The case, which I wrote about in this week’s magazine, was brought by states led by Republicans, and in effect argues that, when Congress passed President Trump’s 2017 tax bill, it was, unbeknownst to the public, actually invalidating the entire A.C.A. One roadblock to this argument is that this is not what Congress said it was doing. Instead, the law simply set the penalty for not securing health insurance—the “individual mandate”—to zero, and nothing more. But why should anyone believe them?

“How do we know that some members didn’t say, ‘Aha! This is the silver bullet that’s going to undo the A.C.A.’ or ‘Obamacare,’ if you prefer?” Judge Jennifer Elrod asked Samuel Siegel, an attorney defending the law on behalf of a group of twenty-one states, most of them blue. “ ‘So we’re going to vote for this just because we know it’s going to bring it to a halt, because we understand the tax issue’?” (The “tax issue” is the theory that, because Chief Justice John Roberts once argued that defining the financial penalty as a tax made that penalty constitutional, its absence was fatal to the whole law—an argument that lawyers might want to keep secret not out of tactical slyness but out of embarrassment, because it doesn’t make much sense.)

“That would be imputing to Congress the intent to create an unconstitutional law,” Siegel said, though it’s actually more convoluted than that. Indeed, the hypothesis is that members of Congress passed such a law just to be busted—to sabotage a law that they had failed to change legislatively. (At another point, Elrod asked whether Texas, one of the lead plaintiffs, might have been waiting to say, “ ‘Hah—caughtchya! You just did something unconstitutional!’ ”) When the penalty was repealed, Siegel noted, several legislators “specifically came forward and said, ‘We are not repealing the preëxisting conditions, we’re not repealing the subsidies’ ”—elements of the A.C.A. that are widely popular. If they did have a “silver bullet” plan, “that would mean they were misleading the American public and their constituents.” Senator Orrin Hatch, then the Republican chairman of the Finance Committee, was among those offering such reassurances in 2017.

“I’m not a fan of using quotes from elected officials, who say a lot of things for a lot of reasons,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt said. Engelhardt, whom Trump named to the court, came across as a silver-bullet kind of guy. An issue in the case is “severability”—how much of a large, multi-part law courts should invalidate if one element of it is found unconstitutional. The basic standard is that courts should be cautious and keep what they can. Engelhardt asked why it wouldn’t be easier to just throw out the whole thing and let Congress start over. “I mean, can’t they put together a sort of cafeteria-style package with all of these individual features that are so attractive . . .  They could vote on this tomorrow!” he said to Douglas Letter, a lawyer for the House of Representatives, who was also defending the bill. “Couldn’t they put them together and vote on them like that?” Engelhardt asked, snapping his fingers.

“And obviously the President would sign that, right? No, obviously not,” Letter replied, provoking laughter.

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In the health-care case, the public reassurances from legislators simply reinforce the most obvious reading of the law, namely that Congress had decided that the mandate could go and the rest of the law could, functionally, survive without it. But an interesting phenomenon, in the jurisprudence of the Trump years, involves attempts by the Administration’s lawyers to get the courts to ignore a disjunction between what the President says in public and the legal justifications that his Administration offers for his actions. In the litigation over the various iterations of Trump’s travel ban, for example, lawyers for the Administration argued that judges should ignore what Trump said on the campaign trail about instituting “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” as well as his tweets disparaging Muslims. Instead, the judges should believe the lawyers’ claims that the ban was not targeted at any religious group and was not at all discriminatory: the ban was just a reflection of concerns about national security. It took a few tries, major revisions, and the inclusion of North Korea on a short list of proscribed countries for the Administration to come up with a limited ban that the Supreme Court, by a 5–4 vote, would accept.

Similarly, the Administration, in its attempts to add a citizenship question to the census, first claimed that the aim was to protect the voting rights of minorities—a rationale laughably at odds with the President’s warnings of an immigrant invasion. The question of how courts should interpret the meaning of legislative and executive actions has always been complicated; Trump’s tendency both to dissemble and to incite, both to deny his motives and to bray about them, all at high volume, can make it trickier still. In the census case, though, the President lost: the Supreme Court found that his Administration had not offered a good-faith explanation for adding the question. The ruling meant, practically, that the question would be omitted; the task of having to justify its actions in an honest manner was apparently too daunting for the Administration to accomplish in the time left before the forms had to be printed. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, wrote (citing an earlier decision), “We are ‘not required to exhibit a naiveté from which ordinary citizens are free.’ ” The Court wanted the Trump Administration to tell the truth about what it was doing. Or, at least, the Court didn’t want the President to force it to pretend to believe his more obvious lies.

“The Hills: New Beginnings” reconvenes the cast of “The Hills” as if undertaking a case study in the dysfunctions of self-exploitation. It is a haunted sequel to the original series, which aired between 2006 and 2010, and remains both a decadent summit of summertime reality soaps and a glowing ill omen of spiritual rot. “The Hills” was itself a spinoff of “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County,” and presaged the dramatic methods and presentational styles of “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” on Bravo, and of vast tracts of reality programming across basic cable. Most crucially, “The Hills” furthered the profession of reality-TV stardom: the moment when it stopped being a thing one did in the spirit of a gap year, or a turn on “The Price Is Right,” and started becoming a show-business calling and a path to the Presidency.

The dramatis personae of “The Hills: New Beginnings,” legends of the game, were barely adults when we met them. Now they are approaching the cusp of a “Real Housewives” ripeness and “evolving” in their interpersonal lives and entertainment careers. Mostly, they are chatting about attempting to evolve. The new show retains the original’s Warholian purity of inaction and its languid tension: nothing much happens, and it is not happening at a soothing pace, under a glazy gaze. The castmates communicate in lucid plot summaries, upspoken gossip, small-talk complaints about L.A. traffic, passive-aggressive ultimatums, devastatingly accurate behind-the-back analyses of other people’s problems, and exchanges guided by an approach to psychology espoused in group sessions at Passages Malibu. A prelude to the new series caught these people primping in their mirrors, putting on their faces. The camera was up in their pores like a dermatologist’s magnifier.

“Time changes everything,” Audrina Patridge says, and she is only half right. It is true that she is now a divorced woman and an openly terrified single mother, but her taste in men remains deeply unfortunate, as attested by her renewed flirtation with Justin Bobby. “New Beginnings” muses upon the passage of time often. It is a show about kindling old flames and stoking aged beefs. Each of the most dynamic castmates is returning from some sort of exile. They touch down at LAX, speaking about patterns of avoidance and confrontation, wheeling designer baggage copped from gifting suites. They reckon with their past mistakes, which often are plentiful, owing to the producers’ need for dramatic conflict and the players’ personal inventories of chemical and emotional dependencies. Take the moment when the arch-villain Spencer Pratt becomes distraught that his old friend Brody Jenner, of the Calabasas Kardashian-Jenners, is now married and presumed henpecked. Jenner, who has mitigated his partying ways over the years, set Pratt off by declining to join him and a pod of young models in any of several rounds of tequila shots downed around lunchtime on a Tuesday.

Pratt and his wife, Heidi Montag, are a couple whose bond was forged in the crucible of a paparazzo’s flashtube. Pratt is a savant of the reality-TV form, and he was, back in the day, skilled at inhabiting a nasty character, with his muscular tantrums and tremendous ego trips. But it went to his head; seemingly addled by the off-gassing of his notoriety, he became a monstrosity. He looks back at the boom of money and fame and says, “We were living the dream. But it was just a dream. It wasn’t real. That’s the problem.” A montage establishing the flavor of his home décor includes a shot of the saddest chalice in the history of commemorative cups: a trophy honoring Pratt and Montag’s joint entry, under the checkout-line portmanteau “Speidi,” in the Reality TV Awards Hall of Fame, in 2015.

Montag, looking back at her ascent, says that she regrets her impulse purchases of plastic surgeries, but that she is at peace with those regrets. Pratt, too, has mellowed into self-knowledge and moderation, while retaining enough spiciness that he still inspires his closest friends and family to storm out of night clubs. The two of them have a son now. Some of Pratt’s fans will attribute his new stability to the grounding effects of fatherhood, others to his dedicated regimen of crystal healing treatments.

One major plotline concerns whether Pratt will reconcile with his sister, Stephanie, who has returned to California from London, where she plied her craft on “Celebrity Big Brother” and the like. The siblings’ feud—with its snubs and counter-snubs, with its profound energies manifesting as petty spats—combines the substance of an interfamilial Facebook drama with the verbal sparring style found on a bad night at a bar on the weekend of Thanksgiving.

Whitney Port, calm and chic, rolls her round eyes at such drama, but neither Lauren Conrad nor Kristin Cavallari has deigned to grace this revival. In recompense, the new series fills out its cast with faces including the actress Mischa Barton. Here is a twist: Barton—a legitimate actor, derailed It Girl, and erstwhile gossip-column character—settles among the performers who only play themselves. In keeping with the theme of reckoning, “New Beginnings” contrives an opportunity for Barton to speak her mind to Perez Hilton, the erstwhile Walter Winchell of WordPress, who was misogynistically rude to her back in the day. “I think he talked a lot of shit about her weight and stuff,” Port explains to a colleague.

“New Beginnings” also brings us the celebrity scion Brandon Thomas Lee, introduced as the twenty-two-year-old son of Mötley Crüe’s drummer and “Baywatch” ’s undying pinup. His role is to be a wise man and a lucky boy; he is clean and sober and levelheaded, focussed strictly on studying scripts and on hanging out with flocks of Instagram bikini models, whose indistinct chatter fills the back of the soundtrack like an excitement of songbirds. Lee views Pratt and Jenner with detachment: “They’re like bickering exes now.” His mom makes a cameo that puts the show in its proper context. Lee has bought himself a house, and Pamela Anderson has come to see it. She frowns at his pantry briskly. “Lucky Charms,” she says, with a resigned sigh, and burns some sage to bless the space, for the house must be clear of bad energy, especially if it is to be a home studio.

Among my fellow punctuation nerds, I have a reputation as someone who has no use for semicolons. I don’t hate semicolons; I hate writing about semicolons. Fortunately, now I don’t have to, because Cecelia Watson, a self-identified “punctuation theorist” who teaches at Bard College, has written a whole book about them: “Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark.”

At first, I thought Watson was doing with the semicolon what Simon Griffin did with the apostrophe in “Fucking Apostrophes” (2016). Both are slim volumes about an element of language that gives people endless grief. But whereas Griffin, an adman, provides straightforward rules, albeit with a bushel of exceptions (and a running joke: every use of the word “apostrophe” is preceded by a profanity), 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. She is delighted with the “springy little semicolons” of Irvine Welsh in “Trainspotting” (“The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling”) and she has a special fondness for the rare semicolon in Raymond Chandler, whose hardboiled private detective, Philip Marlowe, is not given to periodic sentences. In “The Big Sleep,” for instance, Marlowe describes his room: “In it was everything that was mine, that had any association for me, any past, anything that took the place of a family. Not much; a few books, pictures, radio, chessmen, old letters, stuff like that.” In Watson’s perception, that choice of a semicolon after “Not much” creates a reflective silence. “The semicolon reads as Marlowe having to stop to think.”

A sentence from Wittgenstein contains a “fantastically vague semicolon”: “Der Philosoph behandelt eine Frage; wie eine Krankheit.” (“The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.”) This has been translated by G. E. M. Anscombe thus: “The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.” But, in removing what Erich Heller, an expert in German philosophy, calls a “profound” semicolon, one that “marks a frontier between a thought and a triviality,” the translator has reduced a deep thought to a bland one. Watson writes, sounding like the “punctuation therapist” she sometimes plays, “Ambiguity can be useful and productive, and it can make some room for new ideas.”

Watson is especially thought-provoking on the topic of semicolons and the law, where ambiguity can lead to trouble. In Massachusetts, a semicolon that should have been a comma would have prevented hotels from selling liquor after 11 P.M.; it had the effect of making people buy a lot of drinks before last call. Worse, in a New Jersey murder trial in 1927, sloppy punctuation caused one of the defendants, Salvatore Rannelli, to be sentenced to life imprisonment while the other, Salvatore Merra, was sentenced to death—for the same crime. Legal cases are often built on precedent, and a judgment based on flawed punctuation sets a bad precedent, which can perpetuate injustice.

The semicolon’s two main detractors, the antiheroes of Watson’s book, are Donald Barthelme and Kurt Vonnegut, with Chandler complaining about a proofreader at The Atlantic (one Margaret Mutch) and Mark Twain weighing in on the ignorance of proofreaders in general. Barthelme found the semicolon “ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.” Vonnegut wrote that semicolons are “transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing,” a statement that makes me feel only more sympathy for the semicolon. What’s wrong with hermaphrodites?

Henry James, who would have been my choice for Master of the Semicolon, turns out to have been famous during his lifetime for his use of dashes. Watson writes that the dash “cutting a path” through any page of James is “an arm outstretched as a barrier to keep one thought from tumbling into the next.” She has unearthed an interview, from 1915, that James gave to a reporter for the Times, in which the Master (who did not do interviews, and on this occasion insisted that the reporter note “his punctuation as well as his words”) remarked that dashes “strike both the familiar and the empathic note . . . with a felicity beyond either the comma or the semicolon; although indeed a fine sense of the semicolon, like any sort of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood . . . seems anything but common.” Watson observes, “We live in the Era of the Dash”—which is probably just as well.

Both the dash and the semicolon are put to brilliant use in a page-and-a-half-long sentence from “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which Watson quotes in full. In it, Martin Luther King, Jr., details the miseries of a black man, a victim of injustice, who is asked to wait patiently for change. King piles up clause after clause, each describing a more harrowing, frustrating event than the last, and each lofted by the semicolon that concludes the one before: “when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’; . . . when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness.’ ” The litany rises to a crescendo delivered with a dash: “—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.” Watson concludes that “this is mimesis at its finest”; the semicolons hold the prose “in suspension,” and the reader in suspense, waiting, along with King, for justice. Of course, King’s letter is about much more than punctuation, but here is an instance in which the semicolon did its small part for civil rights.