Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

A fun part of editing this stuff is the offhand reminders of progress. I just came to "Atoms, for example, can only be seen with the most powerful microscopes."

When I was in eleventh grade, we couldn't see them directly at all.

ETA: I suspect that, as rysmiel suggests, it depends in part on how "see" is interpreted. Kip, I don't actually remember where I was when President Kennedy was shot, but I suspect my mother could tell me.

As I've mentioned, I'm doing some freelance research.

At the moment, it involves looking things up in magazines published over the last year. For the most part, that means going to a friendly librarian, and saying "May I have thus-and-such magazine back to last September?" The friendly librarian then hands me a large stack, with the most recent issue on top.

The simplest thing to do is go through them in the order I get them.

This has some weird effects. Not for the stuff I'm looking for, especially. But being dropped back into things that were national press obsessions at some point in the last year, then vanished--and getting the endpoint first. Like the whole Andrea Yates thing, but starting with the post-trial discussions. There's also going back in time (or Newsweek) and finding a few post-September 11 articles in this issue, and then lots of stuff about Giuliani, and then suddenly having all those photos staring at me again. And then picking up the magazine below that in the stack, and it's from Before, a stark difference.

But the work is getting done--the current piece is done--and in the meantime I have become quite fond of both Jefferson Market library (a branch in Greenwich Village) and Room 108 of the library with the lions. Both are comfortable, and the staff are more helpful than in the room with the periodical collection at Mid-Manhattan. Jefferson Market, oddly, has stuff that Mid-Manhattan doesn't (although MM is a larger library), and will give me things in hardcopy that Room 108 only offers on microfilm.