In which the staff of Emdashes reviews the high points and discusses the particulars of the previous week’s issue (or, occasionally, another edition).

Did anybody else notice the astronomical Proust quotient in this year’s Style Issue? (Why the Style Issue for so much Proust, anyway?) I sure as hell noticed the ribald Proust reference in Francine du Plessix Gray’s Onward and Upward about Marie-Laure de Noailles, boy howdy! (For the record, ladies, I’ve never read Proust.)

Henry Alford’s Annal of Technology about the solar-powered jacket amused me very much. I do confess to being puzzled (nay, alarmed) by his unabashed use of the veddy British word “whinging,” though.

Finally, I hereby nominate Nancy Franklin for Parenthetical of the Year. Here it is, from her fine negative review of Ken Burns’s PBS documentary The War: “(There will also be, in some places, no swearing; local stations worried about F.C.C. fines for offensive language are being offered a version of the series which removes the four instances of tangy language that unaccountably made their way into a documentary about what it’s like to kill, to see your friends be killed, and to spend endless days and nights in unrelieved fear of being killed yourself.)” Thank you for that. —Martin Schneider