A Reader’s Guide to Doing Nothing
Reading looks like doing nothing, which is its oldest defense and its best disguise. In praise of the visible book and the invisible work.
Author: Iris Calloway
Writer and former bookseller in Providence, Rhode Island. I keep The Marginal Note as a place to think about reading, attention, and the odd durability of paper.
Against Summary
The machines will summarize anything now, instantly and adequately. Which is exactly why the summary is the wrong thing to want.
Two Years of The Marginal Note
Twenty-eight essays, one redesign, several hundred emails. An accounting of two years of writing in public, for the six of you who asked.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Voice
Editors ask for voice the way cooks ask for salt, and are just as vague about the amount. An attempt to say what the word actually means.
Libraries as Third Places
The library is the last room in the city where you can exist without buying anything. On third places, and what we lose when we lose them.
The Afternoon I Stopped Multitasking
It took a power outage to show me what a single task feels like. Notes on the afternoon the router died and the mind came back.
Rereading Woolf: The Waves at Forty
At twenty I read The Waves for the voices. At forty I read it for the interludes — the sun moving over a house where no one is home.
Marginalia of Strangers: A Field Guide
A taxonomy of the notes strangers leave in books: the Arguer, the Underliner, the Student, the Grief-Stricken. Eleven years of fieldwork, classified at last.
The Sentence as a Unit of Care
You can tell within a page whether a writer loves sentences or merely uses them. On prose style as a form of hospitality.
E-Readers, Ten Years On
I was wrong about the Kindle, twice. A decade-late reckoning with the device I swore I would never own and now own two of.