Memory
The album was an argument about which pictures counted
Assembling photographs into a book meant selecting, ordering and discarding. Nothing in a phone requires anybody to make those…
Memory
How we store, misplace and reconstruct the recent past.
20 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 2 of 2
Memory
The footnote that no longer goes anywhere
References to online material stop resolving at a rate that surprises people who rely on them. The record has developed a hole…
Memory
The file you can still copy but no longer open
Digital preservation fails at the format long before it fails at the storage. A perfectly intact file can be completely unreadable.
Memory
The diary nobody was meant to read and the record it left
Private daily writing produced the most useful evidence about ordinary life that historians have. Almost nothing being written now…
Memory
Names written inside books and the ownership that left a trace
Books used to carry evidence of who had held them. That evidence made objects traceable in a way that files and licences are not.
Memory
When a town's record was a newspaper nobody kept
Local reporting was the only systematic account of ordinary places. Where it thinned, the record of those places thinned with it.
Memory
Why we have so many pictures of the dead and so few of their voices
Photographs of previous generations are common and recordings of them speaking are rare. The imbalance has a technical cause and a…
Memory
Remembering a building that is not there to check against
Memories of demolished places drift because nothing corrects them. The reconstruction that results is confident, detailed and…