I have always trusted the margins more than the main text. The main text is so confident. It has structure. Someone decided what belonged there. Someone polished the sentences until they looked almost inevitable. Margins are different. They’re where the reader shows up. It’s the place where the pencil hesitates for a moment before writing “Really?” next to a paragraph. Where a small star appears next to a sentence that feels important but not yet fully understood – yet. Where a question mark lives for years because the reader hasn’t decided what to think. Margins are where thinking leaves fingerprints.
When I read non-fiction, I almost always have a pen in my hand. Writing in the margins is how I slow myself down enough to actually engage with the text. It forces me to pause between sentences and ask a very simple question: Do I believe this? To me, that small pause matters.
Hannah Arendt once described thinking as the silent dialogue between oneself and oneself.1 Reading properly often feels like exactly that. A argument unfolding across pages. The author speaks first. Then the reader replies, in small handwritten comments next to the printed words. Without those interruptions, reading becomes something else entirely. Something closer to pure consumption. And consumption is easy now.
We live in a moment where text arrives faster than attention can follow. Articles summarize other articles. Threads summarize books. AI systems summarize everything. The result is a strange form of intellectual smoothness: ideas pass by us constantly, but very few of them actually stay. My margin notes interrupt that flow. They mark the exact place where the text met resistance. Or curiosity. Or disagreement. In other words, they mark the place where thinking happened. This is also why I’ve always liked footnotes.
Footnotes are, in a sense, the author’s margins. The place where the writer admits that the argument didn’t appear out of nowhere. Someone else thought about this before them. Someone else asked the same question earlier. Someone else’s book is sitting underneath the paragraph you are reading right now. Neil Postman argued that print culture disciplines thought because claims must be supported, referenced, and sustained across pages rather than merely performed in the moment.2 Footnotes are part of that discipline. They slow things down, and they invite the reader to follow the trail. A margin note does something similar, but from the other side of the page. It records the reader’s reaction to that trail. And that is the small idea behind this section.
Margin Notes is where I’ll publish my reflections on books I read about technology, AI, philosophy, and occasionally things that don’t quite fit any category at all. Some will be reviews. Some will be disagreements. But they will never just be summaries. The internet already produces more summaries than any of us can realistically read. What I’m interested in instead is the moment where a book actually pushes back. Where it forces the reader to think a little harder, reconsider something, or follow a reference that leads somewhere unexpected. Those are the moments that deserve a margin note.
And over time, if you collect enough of those small notes, you’ll start to see something interesting: a map of your own thinking forming in the margins of other people’s books. Which is, if we are truly honest, where most ideas actually begin.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Viking Penguin, 1985