In 1915, near the end of his life and just two years after Niels Bohr had applied quantum insights to propose a new model of the atom, upending contemporary scientific understanding and resetting it on a mathematical footing, the renowned British chemist and physicist William Crookes, who had himself made earlier elemental discoveries into the atomic structure of the physical world, wrote that chemistry would thereafter “be established upon an entirely new basis. . . . We shall be set free from the need for experiment, knowing a priori what the result of each and every experiment must be.” Reading Crookes’s pronouncement some three decades after it was penned, the young Oliver Sacks, as he neared the end of the “chemical boyhood” he so engagingly describes in his memoir Uncle Tungsten, was filled with foreboding:
Did this mean that chemists of the future (if they existed) would never actually need to handle a chemical; might never see the colors of vanadium salts, never smell a hydrogen selenide, never admire the form of a crystal; might live in a colorless, scentless mathematical world? This, for me, seemed an awful prospect, for I, at least, needed to smell and touch and feel, to place myself, my senses, in the middle of the perceptual world.
As I type prompts into ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI interfaces with bemused apprehension, casting my supplications into its reservoirs of data superstitiously, hoping to ward off by such petitions the worst worries that the inscrutable power of machine learning evokes, I sense something akin to the presentiment of Sacks’s chemical anxiety. The facile self-assuredness with which the letters come scurrying across the screen gives me pause, even as the words chase after one another with only slight hiccups in their progress. Before I even assess the content it conveys, the prose proffered seems too easily won, the phrases that compose it lacking the weight and texture one comes to judge through handling words, assaying their combinations of sound and sense, the way the youthful Sacks handled his chemicals. It’s the lack of this tactile sensation, this palpability, that seems to me an awful prospect in the automatic summoning of sentences, rather than the elimination of effort per se. Good writing needs to smell and touch and stumble its way into the world to find purchase in it. There is a feel to expression, as to luck and love (learning, too).
This excerpt comes from an essay by James Mustich on his newsletter A Swaying Form. He considers the use of the em dash and toward the end of the essay moves into consideration of ChatGPT and the invasion of artificial intelligence technologies into human writing and thinking. Mustich sees the perils of handing over writing and thought to mere machines, but he also emphasizes the uniqueness and the fire of human creativity. Indeed, “[g]ood writing needs to smell and touch and stumble its way into the world to find purchase in it.”
Mustich’s writing itself is to savor. He is often “Ciceronian” in his prose, as I think I recall him mentioning sometime a while ago. You can see that in the excerpt. I have been accused of “sounding Ciceronian,” too. The piling of clauses, the long sentences that probe and test along their way, the elaboration (and even ornamentation?) of description and discovery—these all can combine into delectable reading. It’s reading that requires leisure, rest of mind, and a certain flexibility of thought. A certain anticipatory patience, too. But the form also delights by its manner of exploration; it meanders but you know it’s never lost. Mustich has mastered the form (and, yes, Ciceronian prose is, or should be, a form unto itself).
The whole essay is worth reading. I know I could never give up the em dash—especially since someone somewhere decided it was a sure-fire signal for ChatGPT-prose.1 Such signals are often stupid, and they kindle mistrust in readers and paranoia in writers. As a matter of fact, I’ve not read an essay from James that flops. His newsletter is worth the subscription (which, you should know, is free).
Mustich wrote 1,000 Books To Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List (2018), which might be described as a bookstore in pages where readers drop in to find something and end up intrigued and interested in a book on a nearby shelf. Some readers might know James Mustich from his earlier work in The Common Reader: Books for Readers With Imagination, which has been described as a mail-order catalog for books, but it had a life beyond mere sales. Mustich started the business in 1986 and carried it on until 2006. He’s referred to himself as a bookseller, which The Common Reader certainly was evidence for, but he probably is better described as a lover of books, a devourer and sharer and enthusiast for books. The Common Reader also had its own imprint, Arkadin Press, which published scores of out-of-print books. He worked with Barnes & Noble, establishing the BN Review (now available in an archive from Barnes & Noble) before moving to podcasting with Barnes & Noble.
Image credit: Slowking4, James Mustich, May 18, 2019, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_mustich_5182993.jpg. Rights: CC BY-SA Generic (2.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode.en
Links, cited and not, some just interesting
His tagline for this article is “The question concerning the em dash—or, writing that worries.” That sums it up well! James Mustich, “A Line for Thinking,” Newsletter, A Swaying Form, November 14, 2025, https://aswayingform.substack.com/p/a-line-for-thinking.
Adam Cohen, “Q&A: An Acclaimed Bookseller, on What 1,000 Books You Should Read Before You Die,” The National Book Review, August 23, 2019, https://www.thenationalbookreview.com/features/2019/8/22/qampa-an-acclaimed-bookseller-on-what-1000-books-should-you-read-before-you-die.
Goes from 2007-2018, apparently. If you want to see The Common Reader, at least in part (1999-2006) and only on the web, search the Wayback Machine. “BN Review Archives,” B&N Reads, accessed November 15, 2025, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/category/reads/bnreview/.
Footnotes
- “ChatGPT favors dashes–over commas. This is the easiest tell–really.” Charlie Fink, “Seven Deadly Tells Of AI Writing,” Forbes, June 12, 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/charliefink/2025/06/12/the-seven-tells-of-ai-writing/. ↩︎
