Novelist Cormac McCarthy has spent twenty years editing what feels like the opposite of a novel: scientific papers by faculty members and postdocs at the Santa Fe Institute. Some of the scientists he ...

If you’ve ever found yourself confused about the difference between a dash and a hyphen, and when to use a hyphen, you’re far from alone. When you handwrite them, they probably look exactly the same.

In the video from The New Yorker’s YouTube channel, Comma Queen Mary Norris breaks down the rules for all three dashes. They hyphen is the shortest mark and is used for making compound words (like ...