No matter how insane the act or ridiculous the statement , everything has a vanishing point. At some point in the future, most everything you know will have been forgotten or relegated to the recesses the history books. To be quite honest, I relish that fact. There's something comforting about the idea that everything I do and say will eventually be forgotten. I like the idea that while my mistakes may seem glaring and unforgettable in their own time, it's incredibly likely that, at some point in the future, only I will remember them. In some ways, I have a free pass. It's not carte blanche to do and say whatever suits me, but the fact that everything is apt to be forgotten does give me a great sense of freedom. I'd imagine that this fact is the central reason why people are so fond of cameras, journals and diaries. Each allows an individual the opportunity to take a single moment, frame it in whatever way he sees fit, and preserve it, while also allowing the person the ability not to preserve that which they hope not to remember. There is a distinct disconnect between people and their memories – not only in the specifics of time, but even more so in the idea that people can choose to remember, or, just as easily, choose to forget. While this disconnect is one of an individual with himself, a markedly different type of disconnect is readily apparent in the interaction between the reader and Found Magazine – that of exhibit and voyeur.

Personally, I despise cameras, dislike journals, and the mere mention of the word “diary” makes me squeamish. There are those, though, who love the anachronistic nature that everything will eventually possess when an object becomes so far removed from its time and place as to be an alien intruder. Everything, when taken out of context , can be incredibly entertaining. To the people at Found , this idea is both the source of their entertainment and the limitation on its final effectiveness.

Found Magazine , and its corresponding Web site , was started in June 2001 by Davey Rothbart and Jason Bittner with the help of some friends. Found is an amalgam of pictures, notes, math tests or anything else that was formerly important, but has since been lost or thrown away. Everything that appears in the pages of Found has been, well, found, on the street, in a trash can or in the hallway at school, for example. This is the intrinsic value of Found - everything you are shown was never intended for your eyes, which very well may be the secret to the magazine's success.

“ Most writing we see is created by professional writers and artists who consider their medium and write for a particular audience,” Bittner says. “ Found publishes stuff that wasn't intended for all these extra eyes. We get to read things that are much less crafted and much more immediate. It's reality played out on lined paper .” While I agree that there is definitely a sense of immediacy in the publication, the case could be made that more important to Found is the lack of polish in the objects it features and the resulting sense of intimacy.

Bittner's appetite for found objects started at age 16, when his job called for him to sort through piles of trash . “I was hired at the local recycling center,” he says. “One of our tasks was separating the glossy ads from the rest of the newspaper. It started out as a really tedious job, until we started reading all these other notes and handwritten scraps included in the piles. We'd grab anything that looked interesting and set it aside for our breaks.” He met Rothbart while playing basketball, found that the two shared the same odd interest and Found was created. It would not exist, though, without the support of its readers, who send in their own finds for use in the magazine and on the Web site.

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