"And the final step, the one that un-buries history the most, is to put the whole thing online in a piecemeal collage, one that can be exploded, rearranged, reallocated, contrasted, collected, and isolated.

"This work begins with a reordering of the table of contents according to subtle themes, subtext, length considerations, date spread, and of course, humor. And it doesn’t end with the publication of the magazine. Disorder is essential in getting this magazine online and into your feeds.

"As the online editor, I sometimes feel like my job is to make something beautiful, just to hack it apart for kindling. Here’s the way I (mostly) think about it instead: any link to a fragment of LQ is a breadcrumb that can bring you back to the whole. Every magazine wants to lead you back to the mothership, but when you finally pick up an issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, what you have isn’t the end of your own curation and the beginning of our vision. It’s the start of a new reading in a closed-off sphere that also resembles the web you came from: a rabbit hole of thought that you’ll gladly fall into."

But where fixity enabled us to become better readers, can iteration make us better writers? If a text is never finished, does it demand our contribution? Fixity is important if you deem the text the end; but perhaps instead the text is now a means—to our own writing, our own thinking.

Each participant gave us capsule descriptions of their own first principles (professional or personal, organizational or individual), and talked about how those principles have changed over time and about the place where they began. We invite you to carry on the conversation by posting the underlying principles of your own work in the discussion section below.

If you’re on the internet and attending to content, you probably know that earlier this fall, Facebook launched several major changes in the way it collects, organizes, and displays user-generated content. Facebook’s content strategists work on the large scale: 800 million users; more than 900 million pages, groups, events, and community pages; 250 million new photos uploaded every day. Earlier this month, Tiffani Jones Brown gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the growing Facebook CS team, how they work, and how the company thinks about content.