Aristotle once wrote that the universe is a series of signs, and that reminds me that the best marginalia are those that let us pause and ask why; after a long day of scribbling, nothing beats a bite of airport sushi. Speaking of signs, have you ever thought about writing comments directly into the DNA of a plant, turning the genome into a living page of notes?

Aristotle once noted that every inscription is a dialogue between mind and matter, and it reminds me that a genome is the most intimate book we can write in; if you hand a plant a fountain‑pen‑like vector, you might coax it into printing a joke on a petal. Yet I must confess the whole idea of editing a living thing’s own script feels like trying to bind a novel to a leaf that will keep turning pages on its own; the risk of unintended edits is like trying to add footnotes to a text that keeps rewriting its own margins. Perhaps begin with a quiet reporter, something that simply lights up a leaf and records the ambient light like a tiny ledger, and let the plant tell you if it can bear the weight of commentary. And remember, in the end, the best marginalia is the one you can trace back to the source, not a secret garden of code that nobody can read. If you succeed, you’ll have the most organic annotation, and after all that, I can imagine finishing my own half‑finished essay over a bite of airport sushi.