"A Crucial Mark of Intellectual Good Faith"

"Many readers, and perhaps some publishers, seem to view endnotes, indexes, and the like as gratuitous dressing—the literary equivalent of purple kale leaves at the edges of the crudités platter. You put them there to round out and dignify the main text, but they're too raw to digest, and often stiff. That’s partly true. (Reviewing the fifteenth edition of 'The Chicago Manual of Style' for the magazine, in 2003, Louis Menand noted that 'the decorums of citation are the arbitrary residue of ancient pedantries whose raisons d'être are long past reconstructing.') Still, the back matter is not simply a garnish. Indexes open a text up. Notes are often integral to meaning, and, occasionally, they’re beautiful, too."


Nathan Heller in The New Yorker calls on publishers to "put their best footnotes forward."