Marginalia — Home
The newsletter. Biweekly-ish, on Ghost at marginalia.ghost.io. Started January 2024 — the month I decided I'd rather write badly on a schedule than perfectly, never.
What it's about: attention, memory, note-taking — how to look at things, and how looking is a way of keeping them. It is not a productivity newsletter. If anything it's the opposite: a standing argument for the slow, the fallow, the reread. The center of gravity is one idea I keep restating forever — Attention as love. Everything else is a footnote to it.
The numbers (that I refuse to worship)
- 2,847 subscribers (July 2026)
- ~61% open rate — people actually read it, which still undoes me a little
- Cadence: every other Thursday, in theory. See Published Issues for the honest version, gaps and all.
The ethos
Small and real beats big and hollow. I'm not growing this. No lead magnet, no "5 hacks to second-brain your life," no course funnel idling at the bottom of the page. I'd rather have 2,800 people who read to the last line than 80,000 who never open it. A newsletter is a room, not a stadium — I want to be close enough to hear people talk back. And they do; the good ones I keep in Subscriber Notes.
The only rule I stole from myself: write the issue I'd want to reread.
The rooms of this project
- Issue Ideas — the flood. Everything I might write, most of which I won't.
- Published Issues — what actually shipped, with the gaps annotated (guiltily).
- Subscriber Notes — who's out there, what lands, the replies worth keeping.
Standing tensions
- I keep a graveyard of half-drafts. The good ones haunt — see On the Almanac as a Form, which I have started roughly four times.
- I preach finishing and have a folder that proves I don't.
A newsletter is just a note you were brave enough to send before rereading it forty times.