Rob Walker says: "A proposal for a new punctuation mark that would be somewhere between the deadpan period and the excitable exclamation point. I think the digital-text era would benefit."

I can recall coming across advice when I was in college in the late 1980s suggesting that it was permissible to use an exclamation mark once every twenty years or so. Today I probably type one every twenty minutes. I’m not doing so in published work, naturally, but rather in email: “Thanks!” “Congrats!” “See you soon!” It’s not just me. Even as I was writing this paragraph, I got a note from a highly erudite editor of a widely respected literary/cultural journal: “You are too kind!”