Memory
Should a City Be Allowed to Forget?
Archives cost money, and every one of them is a decision about what mattered. A plea for a more honest kind of forgetting.
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Contributing writer
Agata Kowalczyk
Agata Kowalczyk is a contributing writer who covers memory, language, and the history of reading, with a particular weakness for footnotes. She spent 11 years as a rare-books cataloger at the Halbridge Athenaeum and is the author of Other People’s Pencils, a study of the notes readers leave in secondhand books. She lives in Westmere, in a house with a damp cellar she calls “an archive with opinions,” and buys used books only if someone has already written in them.
3 pieces by Agata
Language
Against the ‘Untranslatable Word’
The listicles promise a single foreign word for a feeling you can’t name. The truth about translation is more interesting.
Reading
The Case for Footnotes
Notes are where a writer shows their working, argues with themselves and admits doubt. We should stop hiding them at the bottom of the page.