Ben Dolnick muses about his writing style in today’s New York Times. He often and purposefully uses parentheses and likens them now to the time we are in. Hope we get that coin and surface soon.

A clause set off by em dashes is like dropping underwater while swimming breaststroke — just a quick dip before popping back to the sentence’s surface. A parenthetical clause is more like diving down to the pool bottom to pick up a coin. And a footnote is a full-blown scuba dive — you have strapped on equipment and left the surface behind and you had better, after going to all that trouble, see something interesting down there.