All Essays & Marginalia
I finally measured how fast I actually read
The number I'd always assumed for my own reading speed turned out to be off by a wide margin.
A short history of complaining in the margins
Readers have been leaving grumpy notes in books for as long as there have been margins to leave them in.
‘Attention is a resource’ is a useful lie
The economic metaphor gets the shape roughly right and the mechanism completely wrong, which matters.
A year I mostly didn’t write here
The gap on the calendar below has an explanation, of a kind, and it isn't a dramatic one.
The middle of any piece of writing is supposed to feel like failure
A short note on the specific despair of the unfinished middle, and why it is not, in fact, useful evidence of anything.
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.
A page of quotations I keep coming back to, without a theme
No organizing theme, on purpose — just the passages that stayed, copied out roughly as Locke would have wanted.
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.
The specific kind of loss in translation
Not the vague loss people invoke, but a specific, describable kind: the loss of a choice the author didn't get to make…
I have tried every note-taking system and none of them stuck
A partial, embarrassing inventory of the systems I've adopted and abandoned, and what finally worked instead.