Living Margin

The Problem
Reading research papers is two jobs at once: understanding the page, and looking up everything you need to understand it. Every time you leave the page to do the second job, you flush the first. The people who most need research — newcomers to a field, students learning foundations, anyone evaluating a claim — are the ones doing the most leaving. Living Margin keeps them on the page.

What we built
A reading workspace for research papers — highlight what you don’t understand, and the margin generates the context you need.

How it works
The reader drops in a paper, reads naturally, and highlights anything they don’t understand — a term, an equation, a citation. The right margin instantly grows the right interactive component for that selection: a plain-language definition with sources, a rendered equation with intuition, or the cited paper’s actual claim verified through OpenAlex with a working link. No chat, no typing — the intelligence comes to the reader, beside the words. The page becomes a reading workspace: comprehension on the left, lookup on the right, sharing a visual anchor so the thread is never lost. Understanding shouldn’t require leaving the page.

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