The Uncut Pages — On Invisible Mentors and the Debt That Cannot Be Repaid
In 1990, at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, there was an IEEE magazine in the library whose pages had never been cut. This was not metaphor. Before the era of perfect-bound paperbacks and digital everything, some periodicals arrived folded, signatures intact, and you had to run a knife or a finger along the edge to open each section. If the pages were still sealed, it meant no one had read it. Someone had received it, shelved it, and forgotten it. The information inside was technically available and practically inaccessible — a kind of knowledge in suspension, waiting for someone to care. …