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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 th... See more

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 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.

Lists of destroyed buildings posted by the L.A. Conservancy and USModernist offer a ghost map of a past that extends far beyond living memory.

The term poetic infrastructure has stuck with me. I consider myself someone who thinks almost exclusively in reference. Lines from movies, song lyrics, pages of books, that thing someone said, a picture I took. One thing is always another—a mental web flickering into both well-worn and bright new constellations—so much noise perhaps coalescing itse... See more

Yes, a lost house itself is a tragedy, but there is an entire universe in the items inside, an entire universe in the single page of a book that drifts away while you’re running to catch a flight. There is an entire universe in a quote, an entire universe in interpretations of a book that begs for humanity to find a way to survive when our environm... See more

I grieve for many things; the engine of my grief changes, sometimes hourly. I grieve for our increasingly hostile and uninhabitable world, and I grieve for the cruelties that make it so, both structural ones and ones that individuals inflict on one another. But today I am grieving because I struggle to fathom all of the material loss of meaningful ... See more