The Many Designs of David Foster Wallace’s “Host”
When David Foster Wallace’s heavily footnoted and annotated “Host” was originally published in The Atlantic it looked like this:
.. The colored footnotes were a unique challenge to present online, but The Atlantic web team did a pretty decent job by using hyperlinks and pop-up boxes (archived link here):
.. And then later, for the print collection Consider The Lobster, the footnotes lost their colors and were replaced with arrows and boxes:
.. The Atlantic has recently redesigned “Host” so that the footnotes expand within the piece like so:
.. It works particularly well with footnotes-within-footnotes:
.. This is one of the rare times that I think reading a piece online is now actually easier andmore delightful than reading it in print.