Notebook Stream
6 Entries
Essays
Essays
‘Attention is a resource’ is a useful lie
The economic metaphor gets the shape roughly right and the mechanism completely wrong, which matters.
Essays
Why keep this as a blog instead of somewhere else
The dull, practical reasons a plain website still beats every platform I tried instead, none of them idealistic.
Essays
A library is furniture before it is a collection
Public libraries do most of their real work as a piece of civic furniture, long before anyone opens a book.
Essays
Rereading is not reading again
The second reading of a book happens between a different reader and a different book than the first one did.
Essays
The commonplace book, before it was a metaphor
Before 'commonplace' meant ordinary, it named a specific kind of notebook — and a specific kind of reading.
Essays
What the word marginalia actually covers
Not just underlining. The word covers a much wider habit than the pencil marks most people picture.