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Underdubbed
When my brother Pete and I were kids, and our parents were out of town, we ditched school for a week and cut an “album” by recording backing tracks to my dad’s reel-to-reel, then live overdubbing on different instruments and capturing the whole mess on a cassette recorder. We didn’t know what we were doing,…
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Remembrance of zeldman.coms past
Look back in anchor tags: a partial review of my site’s 31-year visual history before diving into the new design.
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She’s the Boss.
She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance.
Design
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Required reading: “The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything”
Cameron Cummins-Smith’s grand unifying theory connects the far right’s seemingly disparate obsessions—from trans panic and great replacement theory to anti-feminism and white birth-rate anxiety—into a single ideological system fueled by pornographic narratives: In physics there is this idea of a theory of everything: a single, unified model that can describe all physical phenomena in the…
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The Courage to Stop
Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.
My Glamorous Life
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My UX Superpower: Nothing Works!
Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me. After stints in academia, journalism, advertising, and music, I poured myself into web design in…
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Pete’s Presence
It was a spring that felt more like winter last week in New York; suddenly it feels like summer. After my air-conditioned bedroom, the living room and kitchen was like a walk-in oven. A weirdly…
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Too Many Notes
Lately, in work conversations, I find myself fighting a lifelong tendency to provide way more context than is absolutely required. If you ask me to okay your work, for example, I may respond with an…
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My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist
Remembrance of beats passed.
the Daily Report
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Lest we forget
“GIs in Paris” by Floyd Davis. Davis served as a Life Magazine artist during WWII, where he was stationed in Paris, France.
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Jimmy Carter was right
What Carter did in his speech was something rare in the annals of democratic government: he confronted the people with the truth—about his own failings, about the reality of the world around them, and most…
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Handwritten notes in the time of AI note takers
The best project management tool is still a pen, plus the discipline to notice what the machine cannot. Wisdom from Lucas Radke.
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Dine ’n em-dash
The best defense is to write humanly.
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RSS creator on Bluesky & AT Proto
Bluesky can’t abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give the protocol to a standards body while catching up on UX.—Dave Winer
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A die-cut above
Cover art for the 1971 prog-rock LP “Fearless,” by British band Family features a distinctive, die-cut cover design depicting the five band members gradually morphing into a single entity combining features of them all. Tom…
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