Is Writing Just Technology? (Contra Louis Menand)

Louis Menand, in his absorbing “The Curious Power of Punctuation” (newyorker.com, September 21, 2026), says, “In the end, writing is just technology. There is nothing magical about it.” Is Menand just being provocative, or does he really mean it? His piece is a review of two books – Florence Hazrat’s On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World and Sarah L. Kaufman’s Verb Your Enthusiasm: How to Master the Art of the Verb and Transform Your Writing. It moves from a witty discussion of punctuation (“But she doesn’t seem to know the semicolon’s correct usage. She thinks it’s a big comma, when it’s actually a small period”) to a consideration of the future of writing (“These books are reminders that we are in the middle of a revolution in the phenomenology of reading, a major change in what it is like to consume writing”). Menand predicts, “Soon, people will no longer make a distinction between writing made by a human and writing made by a machine. It will all simply be writing.” It’s here that he makes his extraordinary statement: “In the end, writing is just a technology. There is nothing magical about it.” 

To which the only possible response is “Oy!” Writing is not technology; it’s communication – communication of stories, events, ideas, actions, sorrows, pleasures, reflections, observations, journeys, battles, arguments, explorations, on and on. It’s the art of representing life in words. I love reading great writers, not just for what they say, but how they say it – the rhythm, tone, texture of their prose, their choice of words, their use of metaphor, their point of view, the way they structure their narratives. They use all the tools in their extensive tool kits. It’s a treat to watch them do it. And yes, there is something magical about it – the transmutation of world into words. 

Menand himself occasionally works that magic. One of my favorite pieces by him is “Drive, He Wrote” (The New Yorker, October 1, 2007). It’s a consideration of Jack Kerouac and the Beat Movement. Most of it is cultural history – the background to On the Road, how it came to be written, the road trips, the celebrated scroll, Neal Cassady, Alan Ginsberg, a comparison of On the Road with Lolita (“Nabokov showed writers how to squeeze a morality tale inside a Fabergé egg; Kerouac showed how to stretch a canvas across an entire continent”), and so on. But in the last paragraph Menand shifts gears. He describes a personal experience. There’s feeling in it; the piece suddenly flares to life. Here’s the passage:

Books like “On the Road” have a different kind of influence as well. They can, whether we think of them as great literature or not, get into the blood. They give content to experience. Many years after my encounters with Ginsberg around the department water fountain, I took a job in Boston, two hundred miles from New York, and I ended up commuting there by car. I drove at night, so that the trip would not eat up the workday, and I often stopped for gas at a service area on the Mass Pike about fifty miles from Boston. It’s fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac’s novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road. Then I would get in the car, and, bent over the wheel, while the trucks beat on past me, and the radio crackled, the sound going in and out, with oldies from the seventies, I began the long drop down to the lights of Boston, late in the night, late in my life, alone.

It’s an extraordinary passage. On the Road is no longer just a cultural artifact – something interesting to write about. Menand gives it personal meaning. It’s an inspired way to end his review, and I doubt Generative AI could ever “write” it. The passage is personal to Menand. Only he could conceive it. 

Credit: The above illustrstion by Abraham Lule is from Louis Menand's "The Curious Power of Punctuation" (newyorker.com, September 21, 2026).