I used the footnotes like clues in a mystery. You build out from the article, making a web of relationships and then work your way back in. At least that’s how it works for me. When I didn’t understand something, I looked it up. There was a lot I didn’t understand. There is so much I don’t understand.

Now I can’t imagine writing anything without reading a bunch PDFs about it first, to get a sense of the history of the idea and what conversations and discourses I’ll be entering. It feels a bit disrespectful and also irresponsible to do otherwise.

I read things, and if I like them, I want to understand them better. So I go and read articles about it. Then, I look up things I don’t understand, which leads me to other articles, down and down until I find the foundational texts for the thing I want to know, and then I read those, and work my way back up through the development of the idea or... See more

I love PDFs. I love my huge heap of documents. I have bought a large plastic trifold folder to store them. I dream of rolling around on my PDFs like Scrooge McDuck diving into his vault of gold and swimming around.