Palimpsest — Essays & Criticism

Welcome to Palimpsest: What We Publish and Why

2017-07-27T10:00:00.000Z

Palimpsest is an independent magazine of essays and criticism on culture and technology. We are reader-funded: no advertising, no sponsored content. This post explains what we publish, how often it arrives, and what a subscription includes. The name comes from medieval manuscripts that were scraped clean and written over, with the earlier text still visible underneath. It describes our editorial approach: we return to subjects other publications covered once and moved past, and read them again, more carefully. ### Three things to know before you subscribe: 1. We publish two pieces a week: one long-form essay of 3,000 to 6,000 words, and one shorter review or commentary. Every piece is edited, fact-checked, and archived permanently on this site. 2. Our beats are culture and technology, with regular coverage of education, rhetoric, design, and short fiction. Each contributor has a defined beat and a byline you can follow. 3. Subscribing is free. Subscribers receive every new piece by email on the day it publishes, plus a monthly letter from the editors on what we are reading and commissioning. Palimpsest is written by six regular contributors and edited from Torino, Italy. You can read about each writer on their author page, linked from every byline. If you want a sense of our editorial standards before subscribing, read [How We Edit: The Palimpsest Editorial Process](/the-editor/), which describes what happens to every piece between draft and publication. Thank you for reading. If you find the work valuable, subscribe below and every new essay will arrive in your inbox.

How We Edit: The Palimpsest Editorial Process

2017-07-27T09:00:00.000Z

Every essay we publish goes through two full edits, a fact-check, and a final proof before it reaches subscribers. This post describes that process. We publish it because a reader-funded magazine depends on trust, and trust is easier to give when you can see how the work is made. A typical piece takes three to five weeks from commission to publication. Here is what happens in that time. ## The structural edit The first edit looks at the piece as a whole: the argument, the structure, the evidence. The editor and the writer agree on what the essay claims and whether the draft earns that claim. Questions we ask at this stage: - What is the piece arguing, in one sentence? - Does every section serve that argument, or is some of it a different essay? - Where does a general reader need more context, and where are we over-explaining? - What does the piece assert that we have not yet verified? ## The line edit and fact-check The second pass works sentence by sentence: cutting repetition, replacing jargon, tightening transitions. In parallel, a fact-checker verifies every date, name, quotation, and statistic against a primary source.

We do the line edit in a different format from the draft — printed out, or read aloud. A familiar page hides its own errors; changing the format makes them visible again. ## What we cut Most editing is cutting. Our working rules: 1. Cut the opening paragraph and check whether the piece still works. It usually does. 2. Cut every sentence that restates the sentence before it. 3. Cut any claim the writer cannot source. If the claim matters, we find the source; if it does not, the claim goes. ## Corrections > When we get something wrong, we correct the piece, date the correction, and note it at the bottom of the page. We do not silently edit published work. We keep every draft of every essay. The record of what changed between versions is how we hold ourselves to the standard above. --- For how pieces are formatted on the page, see our [guide to formatting conventions](/advanced-markdown/). For how the archive is organized, see [our guide to tags](/using-tags/).

How We Organize the Archive: A Guide to Tags

2017-07-27T08:00:00.000Z

Every piece on Palimpsest is filed by tag rather than by section. This guide explains how the system works, how to browse the archive by topic, and how the tags also drive the layout behind the scenes. ## One flat system, multiple tags per piece We use a single, flat tag system — no nested categories, no departments. An essay about the typography of gravestones is criticism, design writing, and cultural history at once; a strict hierarchy would force it into one drawer. Tags let a piece be filed under everything it actually covers. Tag a piece essays and it appears in the essays archive. Tag it essays *and* fables and it appears in both archives at once, so readers find it whichever subject they came for. Each tag gets its own archive page, its own RSS feed, and its own cover image. If you only care about one subject, you can follow that tag's feed alone. ## The primary tag Order matters. The first tag on a piece is its primary tag — the label the front page displays when there is only room for one word.

essays, criticism, field notes, typography

This piece is presented as an essay on the front page, while still appearing in all four tag archives. Choosing the primary tag is an editorial decision: of everything the piece covers, which subject does it cover most? ## Internal tags Some tags are for the production team, not for readers. Any tag starting with # is internal — it never appears on the page and never gets an archive, but the template can still detect it and act on it.

essays, criticism, #wide-images

Readers see an essay filed under criticism. The template, meanwhile, reads the internal tag and gives the piece a wider layout for its photographs:

if post has tag "#wide-images"
    ...use the full-bleed layout, edge to edge...
else
    ...use the ordinary column...
end

We use internal tags for layout variants, series groupings, and editorial workflow states — production notes that travel with the piece without cluttering the page. To see the system in use, open any tag from a byline or the front page and browse its archive. Each archive page describes what the tag collects.

Editorial Roles at an Independent Magazine

2017-07-27T07:00:00.000Z

People imagine a masthead as a hierarchy. At a magazine this size it works more like a relay — four roles, each defined by what it is responsible for delivering.

Contributors

Contributors write the pieces. They pitch, draft, and revise, and each one owns a beat — a subject they follow closely enough to notice what general coverage misses. We commission writers we can trust to research and argue without supervision; in our experience, most editorial problems start when that trust is missing.

Editors

Editors are the first people to read a draft the way a stranger would. They can do everything a contributor does, but their real work happens in the margin: cutting the throat-clearing, flagging claims that need evidence, asking the question the piece was avoiding. Editors also recruit — most of our contributors joined because an editor read their work elsewhere and wrote them a short, direct note.

The Publisher

The publisher handles everything that isn't sentences: the domain, the subscriber list, the archive backups, site performance, and the subscription billing that keeps the magazine independent. It is the least visible role and the one whose failures readers notice first.

The Reader

Every piece is written for one imagined reader: curious, busy, allergic to jargon, and under no obligation to finish. That reader cannot be outvoted or fooled twice, and every other role on this page ultimately reports to them. It is why we edit for clarity first, every time.

One practical note: everyone on the masthead keeps a short public bio with links to their other work. It feeds the site's bylines and author pages, and it lets readers check a writer's track record before deciding how far to trust them.

How We Use Private Posts for Works in Progress

2017-07-27T06:00:00.000Z

Before an essay is published, it circulates as a private post: a draft visible only to the editors and a small group of early readers who have the link. Nothing at that stage is indexed, announced, or final. Most pieces spend two to four weeks there. The private stage is where we test the argument. Early readers flag the passages they skimmed, the claims they doubted, and the context they were missing — feedback that is far easier to act on before publication than after.

It also protects the work. A draft read by five trusted readers can still change completely; a draft read by everyone starts defending its choices. Keeping that window closed until the piece is ready is part of how the finished essays earn their fact-checked, fully edited standard. One honest caveat: a shared link is access control, not security. It keeps drafts out of search results and casual view, but it is not encryption, and we never use it for genuinely confidential material. When a piece survives its early readers and the [editorial process](/the-editor/), it goes public — and out by email to subscribers the same day.

Markdown for Writers: Footnotes and Code

2017-07-27T05:00:00.000Z

Every essay at Palimpsest starts life as a Markdown file.

Markdown gives a draft just enough structure — headings, emphasis, links — without inviting you to adjust fonts when you should be fixing sentences. Most writers learn the basics in an afternoon. This post covers the second layer: the features our contributors and editors actually use in production, with working examples of each.

Special formatting

Beyond bold and italics, three marks earn their keep during revision, when a draft needs to show its own history:

~~strike through~~ — for a sentence marked for deletion but kept visible for review
highlight — for a phrase an editor wants the author to look at twice
*escaped characters* — for when you mean the asterisk literally

Writing code blocks

Even an editorial magazine quotes code now and then — a script under discussion, a stylesheet under review. Inline code is formatted by wrapping any word or words in back-ticks, like this. Larger snippets sit in their own block, fenced with triple back-ticks:

.my-link {
    text-decoration: underline;
}

If a piece leans heavily on code, syntax highlighting via Prism.js keeps it readable. Hold off until you actually need it, though — most quoted code, like most quoted prose, is better short.

Full bleed images

One useful trick for distinguishing between kinds of images is to add a #hash value to the end of the source URL, then target images containing the hash with special styling. For example:

which is styled with...

img[src$="#full"] {
    max-width: 100vw;
}

This creates full-bleed images that stretch past the text column to the edge of the window. Use them sparingly, and only when the picture carries information the prose can't: a landscape in a piece of reportage earns one, a book review usually doesn't.

Reference lists

The quick brown fox, jumped over the lazy dog.

Another way to insert links is with reference lists: the link labels sit in the prose, and the URLs gather at the end of the document, out of the way. For criticism that cites a dozen sources, this keeps the draft readable while you are still revising it — the sentence stays a sentence instead of becoming a thicket of brackets.

Creating footnotes

The quick brown fox^[1] jumped over the lazy dog^[2].

Footnotes hold the aside that would derail the paragraph but is too useful to cut — a source, a caveat, a definition. They collect automatically at the very end of the post, numbered and back-linked, so the reader can follow them or ignore them without losing the thread.

Full HTML

And perhaps the most practical part of Markdown is that you are never limited to Markdown. You can write HTML directly in a draft and it just works — embeds, custom markup, whatever the piece requires. Here's a standard YouTube embed as an example:

Foxes are red ↩︎
Dogs are usually not red ↩︎

The Design of Palimpsest: Typography and Layout

2017-07-27T04:00:00.000Z

Palimpsest is designed for one job: comfortable long-form reading. Most of our essays run 3,000 words or more, so every design decision is judged by whether it helps a reader finish a long piece on a screen. This post documents the main choices and the reasons behind them.

Readers form an impression of a page before they read a word of it, so the fundamentals matter more than any decoration: - **Margins** — generous white space around the text column, so the page reads like a book rather than a feed. - **The typeface** — a serif designed for continuous reading, set at a size comfortable for 3,000-word essays without zooming. - **Line length** — roughly 65 to 75 characters per line. Longer lines tire the eye; shorter ones break the rhythm of a sentence. - **Color** — a restrained palette. One accent color, used only for links and emphasis, so nothing competes with the text. > Readers judge whether a page is worth their attention within the first seconds of arriving. For a publication asking for a subscription, the design has to signal care before the writing can prove it. The specific palette: a warm off-white background instead of pure white, near-black ink for text, and a single oxblood accent for links. The combination meets accessibility contrast standards and stays comfortable during a forty-minute read — the length of our longest essays. The best test is the archive itself. Open any long piece — the [style test post](/a-full-and-comprehensive-style-test/) exercises every element — and see whether the page stays out of the way of the writing. That is the entire goal.

The Businessman and the Fisherman

2014-08-12T10:18:00.000Z

This month's fable is a retelling of a classic parable about work, growth, and knowing what wealth is for. Versions of it have circulated for at least a century; this one is set on the Ligurian coast. A management consultant, on holiday in a small harbor town, watched a fisherman tie up his boat in the late morning with a modest catch: enough for the market stall, a few fish for his family. "Why are you finished so early?" the consultant asked. "The sea is calm. You could go out again." "This is enough," said the fisherman. "I sell what the stall needs, I eat lunch with my wife, I sleep an hour, I play cards with my friends in the evening, and I mend the nets at sunset." The consultant explained, patiently, what the fisherman was leaving on the table. Fish the afternoons as well, and within a year he could buy a second boat. With two boats, hire a crew. With a fleet, sell directly to the restaurants, cut out the market, open a processing plant, move the operation to Genoa. In fifteen years, perhaps twenty, he could sell the company. "And then what?" asked the fisherman. "Then," said the consultant, "you would be free. You could retire to a small town on the coast, fish a little in the mornings, eat lunch with your wife, sleep in the afternoon, and play cards with your friends in the evening." The fisherman thanked him, picked up his nets, and went home to lunch. --- The parable is usually told as a joke at the consultant's expense, but it is worth reading twice. The fisherman is not lazy, and the consultant is not stupid; they simply disagree about which currency matters. The consultant measures the plan in revenue and treats the fisherman's afternoons as costless inputs. The fisherman has already priced his afternoons, and no offer on the table beats what he paid for them. Most of us are somewhere between the two — working toward a version of a life we could, with fewer steps, begin living now. That is the question the fable leaves with the reader: what are you deferring, and what is the deferral actually buying?

Style Test: Every Element This Theme Supports

2012-09-01T10:00:00.000Z

This is our style-test post: a single page that renders every element the theme knows how to set — headings, lists, tables, code, quotes, forms, and embeds. We use it to check typography and spacing after any design change; publishers evaluating the theme can use it to see exactly how their content will look.

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Heading 5

Heading 6

A paragraph is where the small elements hide, so here is one crowded on purpose: a test link sits mid-sentence, ready to be hovered. This is strong. It should read as clear emphasis without breaking the line's rhythm. This is emphasized — a lighter stress than bold. Superscripts have to survive an exponent, 5³ = 125, and subscripts a molecule, because water is still H₂O in any publication that covers science. When we cite a publication we set it as The Palimpsest Quarterly (that's a citation). Underline. Underline is the most commonly misread mark on this page — readers expect a link — so use it rarely and check how it renders against your link styling here.

HTML and CSS are our tools, and abbreviations like those should whisper their expansions on hover rather than interrupt the line. Editing leaves visible scars when you let it: to copy a file type COPY filename, where the variable stays italic inside the code. ~~Dinner's at 5:00.~~ Let's make that 7. This sentence has been struck. Strikethrough is deletion that stays visible — useful for published corrections, where readers should see both the original text and the fix.

Media

Images break up long text and need testing at more than one size. The theme handles two widths, shown below with the spacing each one gets.

Big Image

A full-width image spans the entire text column. Check that the paragraph after it keeps consistent spacing and picks the text back up cleanly.

Small Image

A smaller image sits within the text flow rather than interrupting it — useful for diagrams, portraits, and detail shots.

As shown above.

List Types

Definition List

Palimpsest: A manuscript page scraped clean and written over, the first text still faintly legible beneath the second — the source of this magazine's name.
Definition list: The element you are reading now: a term followed by its definition, useful for glossaries and reference posts.

Ordered List

Draft the piece in plain text
Send it to an editor for a second read
1. Structural notes come first
2. Line edits come second
Publish and notify subscribers

Unordered List

Essays
Criticism
- Books and fiction
- Culture and technology
Field notes

Table

Section	Published	Average length
Essays	Monthly	2,500 words
Criticism	Twice monthly	1,800 words
Field notes	Weekly	600 words

Preformatted Text

Typographically, preformatted text is not the same thing as code. A faithful rendering of a timetable, a transcript, or quoted plain text needs the fixed grid of a monospace face without being marked up as a program. Most browsers default to Courier, which is a reasonable choice for this kind of content.

Code

Code can be presented inline, like <?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>, or within a <pre> block. Because code has stricter typographic needs than prose, we specify Consolas and Monaco ahead of the browser's generic monospace.

Code blocks can also be inserted with the highlight tag as below:

    {% raw %}
    {% highlight language-x %}
    # some code
    {% endhighlight %}
    {% endraw %}

More information about code highlighting can be found in the Jekyll documentation, if you're publishing that way.

Here are a couple of examples showing the resulting highlighted code:

{% highlight css %} /* css code sample */ #container { float: left; margin: 0 -240px 0 0; width: 100%; } {% endhighlight %} {% highlight javascript linenos %} // javascript code sample $.ajax({ type: 'POST', url: 'backend.php', data: "q="+myform.serialize(), success: function(data){ // on success use return data here }, error: function(xhr, type, exception) { // if ajax fails display error alert alert("ajax error response type "+type); } }); {% endhighlight %}

Now you can also use highlight.js. For more on how to use it and on the available styles check their demo and documentation pages.

// Swift code sample
import Foundation

@objc class Person: Entity {
  var name: String!
  var age:  Int!

  init(name: String, age: Int) {
    /* /* ... */ */
  }

  // Return a descriptive string for this person
  func description(offset: Int = 0) -> String {
    return "\(name) is \(age + offset) years old"
  }
}

Blockquotes

Blockquotes set off quoted material from the body text, with a cite element for attribution. The citation matters more than the styling.

A room without books is like a body without a soul. — attributed, probably wrongly, to Cicero

And here is a bit of trailing text, to check the spacing between a blockquote and the paragraph that follows it.

Text-level semantics

The a element example
The abbr element and abbr element with title examples
The b element example
The cite element example
The code element example
The ~~del element~~ example
The dfn element and dfn element with title examples
The em element example
The i element example
The ins element example
The kbd element example
The mark element example
The q element inside a q element example
The ~~s element~~ example
The samp element example
The small element example
The span element example
The strong element example
The _{sub element} example
The ^{sup element} example
The var element example
The u element example

Forms

Embeds

Essays sometimes quote media directly — a film clip, a recorded talk, a song under discussion. The theme supports the standard embed formats below.

Video

A video embed should sit comfortably within the text column, neither cramped nor sprawling, and the prose should still make sense if it never loads.

Keeping the video inside the page saves the reader a context switch and keeps the surrounding argument in view.

Slides

Slide decks embed as paged viewers. They are useful when a piece discusses a talk or presentation directly.

Check that the deck's aspect ratio is preserved and that navigation controls stay usable at column width.

Audio

Audio needs the most vertical room of all — a player wide enough to scrub through a recording and tall enough to show the full waveform.

Test playback controls and comment overlays against your theme's colors before publishing.

Code

And occasionally a piece about software wants a live, editable demo running beside the prose.

var c = new Sketch.create({autoclear: false}),
    bigCircle = 50,
    littleCircle = 5,
    // The velocity value determines how much to move the spinner head (in radians).
    velocity = 0.105,
    hue = 0,
    // The alpha value below determines the length of the spinner's tail.
    bg = 'rgba(40,40,40,.075)';
    Spinner = function() {};

Spinner.prototype.setup = function() {
  this.x = c.width / 2;
  this.y = c.height / 2 - bigCircle;
  this.rotation = 0;
}
Spinner.prototype.update = function() {
  this.rotation += velocity;
  this.rotation = this.rotation % TWO_PI;
  this.x = c.width /2 + cos(this.rotation) * bigCircle;
  this.y = c.height / 2 + sin(this.rotation) * bigCircle;
}
Spinner.prototype.draw = function() {
  c.fillStyle = 'hsl('+hue+',50%,50%)';
  c.beginPath();
  c.arc(this.x, this.y, littleCircle, 0, TWO_PI);
  c.fill();
  c.closePath();
}
c.setup = function() {
  spinner = new Spinner();
  spinner.setup();
}
c.update = function() {
  spinner.update();
  hue = ++hue % 360;
}
c.draw = function() {
  spinner.draw();
  c.fillStyle = bg;
  c.fillRect(0,0,c.width,c.height);
}

See the Pen Simple Rotating Spinner by Rob Glazebrook (@rglazebrook) on CodePen.

If everything above renders cleanly, the theme passed. Rerun this page after any change to typography, spacing, or color variables.

Why Great Speeches Don't Work on the Page

1963-08-28T10:18:00.000Z

Take any transcript of a beloved speech and read it cold, as prose. It will strike you as overwrought: the same phrase hammered at the start of successive sentences, triplets everywhere, ideas restated three ways when one would do. An editor with a red pen would gut it — and the editor would be wrong, because oratory is not writing performed out loud. It is a different technology altogether, engineered for a crowd, and the page keeps only its fossil. I have spent the past several months listening closely to recordings of the great recorded public addresses, and this essay is an attempt to name what a speech knows that the page doesn't. There are four mechanisms, and each one explains a feature of oratory that looks like a flaw in print. ## The pause is the punctuation On the page, a paragraph break costs nothing. You, the reader, take it at your own speed; you can even skip it. A speaker's pause is different — it is spent in real time, in front of people, and it is a gamble. Pause too briefly and the sentence lands unheard under the echo of the last one. Pause too long and the silence starts to read as forgetting. Listen to any great recorded speech with your eyes closed and you notice the pauses are doing the work commas do in prose, except heavier. They are load-bearing. The speaker is not resting; the speaker is letting the crowd finish the thought first, so that when the sentence arrives it feels less like information and more like confirmation. The audience believes it thought of the idea itself, a half-second early. This is the core mechanism of spoken persuasion, and the page simply cannot reproduce it — a printed sentence cannot wait for you. There is an old story about Demosthenes practicing with pebbles in his mouth, shouting over the sea. It is usually told as a story about diction, but it is just as much a story about the sea: he needed something that would answer back, however indifferently, because the timing of oratory can only be trained against a response. ## Repetition is error correction Here is the asymmetry that explains why transcripts read badly. A reader who loses the thread can glance back up the page. A listener cannot. Wind, distance, a crying child, a bad loudspeaker: the channel between speaker and crowd is lossy, and the old rhetoricians engineered for it centuries before anyone had the vocabulary of signal and noise. The repeated opening phrase — the figure the handbooks call anaphora — is a carrier wave. Miss a sentence and the next one re-syncs you. The redundancy is not decoration; it is error correction, and rhythm is redundancy you can follow without effort. This is also why speeches survive memorization when essays don't. The features that make oratory seem purple on the page — the beat, the recurrence, the rule of three — are exactly the handles memory grips. Nobody has an essay by heart. Nearly everyone has a chant. ## The crowd is a co-author The recordings worth studying closely are the ones where the crowd is audible, because the crowd is not background. You can hear the speech being steered. A line lands harder than expected; the roar comes; and the speaker — you can hear this happen — abandons the planned transition and rides the wave instead, repeating, extending, improvising a variation on the phrase that worked. The famous set-pieces of American oratory are often exactly these moments: the prepared text set aside, the speaker improvising past the manuscript, navigating by the sound of thousands of people responding in the same rhythm. No other literary form is edited live by its audience. A novelist gets reviews after the fact; a speaker gets them mid-sentence and can act on them. Which means a transcript is not the speech. A transcript is one possible speech, flattened — the record of a collaboration with the collaborator removed. Reading one is like reading the white pieces' moves from a chess game and calling it the game. The historians of the great public addresses keep reaching the same conclusion in different words: the text alone under-explains the effect. The recordings only carry part of what happened in the air. ## Delivery is part of the argument There is a further layer the microphone misses. A speech is delivered by a body: hands, shoulders, the tilt of a head, the visible fact of a person standing in weather in front of other people. Classical rhetoric had a whole department for this — *actio*, delivery — and treated it as equal in rank to invention and arrangement. Modern writing culture quietly demoted it, largely because delivery feels like acting, and we want persuasion to be pure content. But watch footage of consequential oratory with the sound off and you will see argument happening anyway. Stillness where you expected motion. A hand opening at exactly the clause where the idea opens. The speaker's body is a diagram of the speech's structure, drawn in real time. Print gave us the fantasy that arguments are disembodied — that a claim is the same claim no matter whose breath carries it. Everyday experience says otherwise: a sentence from a friend can move you when the identical sentence on a billboard cannot. ## What survives in a recording So what remains, when a speech comes down to one listener, sixty years and a cheap speaker away from the event? More than you might expect. The pauses still pull. The rhythm still finds your pulse and argues with it. Silences engineered to stop a hundred thousand people at once still stop one distracted listener on schedule, every replay. But one thing is missing, and it can be named. In the crowd, the speech was evidence — not just of the speaker's conviction, but of everyone else's. Each person could hear, in the roar around them, proof that they were not alone in believing what they had perhaps been afraid to believe by themselves. That proof was the speech's deepest payload, and it cannot be replayed, because it was never in the sound. It was in the standing there, together. The page has its own strengths; an essay can whisper, qualify, and double back — everything a crowd would trample. But the two forms are not rivals or even close relatives. One is architecture for a solitary mind. The other is architecture for a temporary city of strangers, built out of breath, standing for one afternoon only. The recordings are what those cities left behind. ## A practical test for writers The old knowledge transfers, and here is a concrete way to use it. Take a paragraph of your own that isn't working and read it out loud to the empty room, at full public volume, as if two thousand people were listening and the back rows were straining to hear. The exercise is uncomfortable and immediately diagnostic. Every flabby clause announces itself; your breath runs out precisely where the sentence had no business continuing; the one good line turns out to want a silence after it that the page had denied it. When I ran this test on a stubborn paragraph of my own, I cut a third of it and added a pause disguised as a paragraph break — and the paragraph finally worked. You cannot smuggle the crowd back into prose. But you can smuggle back the breath. Listen for the place where an audience that doesn't exist fails to respond: that is where the edit goes.