Two academics are really letting our whole group down in a big way. The leader of the group has been sending politely worded but clearly enraged emails for weeks. Today, he finally snapped and closed his email with “Thank you for your attention to this matter”, and I’m weeping in my office.

The sacred nature of the em dash gets hammered into every American academic. I resisted an initiation into the em dash cult for years but getting accused of being French eventually got to me and I joined the em-dashers. Since then I’ve been indoctrinated into the cult and radicalized. I don’t care about any newfangled fads. You’ll have to pry my em dashes our of my cold dead hands. I don’t care what ChatGPT does. I was there first and peed in a circle to mark my territory.