outpost

Last year (uh, 2014; read on) this thing in The Atlantic – culled, apparently, from an episode of Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible, which itself leans on this thing in the Smithsonian magazine by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie – happened across my desk on the same day as this thing (h/t Ingrid Burrington), and I thought that, to respond to the coincidence, I should dust off something apropos from a decade ago...

but before I got around to it (half a year flits past) FOLD was rolled out (h/t Ethan Zuckerman)...

and now, months and months and months after that (it's not called belated for nothing, folks!), the dusting-off has happened as a FOLD experiment:

the dusting-off has been completely abandoned, and you will not be invited to read "'Reach out and touch someone,' 1868-69," my 2005 essay on spiritualism, Planchette, the Ouija Board, and the telephone. But here are the epigraphs:

Ghost: Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.
Hamlet: Speak; I am bound to hear.

On errands of life, these letters speed to death. –Melville, “Bartleby”

Strange, that my first passionate love letter should
have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I
wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?
Sibyl! Can she feel, or know, or listen? –Dorian Gray