Blog
Essays and notes, newest first.
3 min read
On Rereading
The first time through a book you read to find out what happens. Every time after that, you read to find out who you were.
1 min read
Notes, August
Four things from a month of not writing much: a misprint, a cheap notebook, a quiet chapter, and a letter that took nine days.
1 min read
A Due Date from 1987
A secondhand copy of Middlemarch still has its library card in the back. Someone renewed it four times.
3 min read
The Unhurried Newsletter
A note on writing to a schedule you set yourself, and why the best newsletters read like letters, not broadcasts.
3 min read
Footnotes Are a Form of Honesty
The footnote lets a writer admit doubt, digress, and cite a source without breaking the sentence that needed to stay clean.
3 min read
The Commonplace Book, Revisited
Before there were note-taking apps there were commonplace books, and the old method still beats most of the new ones.
7 min read
A Typography Sampler
One essay, deliberately overloaded: headings, quotes, footnotes, lists, a table, and some code, in service of a single argument.
2 min read
Marginalia and Other Small Rebellions
In praise of writing in books, underlining badly, and arguing with authors who cannot argue back.
3 min read
A Short History of the Serif
Why letters grew little feet, and what four centuries of stonecutters, scribes, and engineers did with them.
3 min read
On the Pleasure of Slow Reading
A case for reading fewer books more slowly, on the theory that speed was never the point of a sentence.