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The End
ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment. The cause of death was heart failure. No autopsy was performed. Morrison was 27. A year before, a teenaged me had watched the Doors play live at Pittsburgh Civic Arena. Tension at the concert was…
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The Human Story of the Open Web
STOP ME if you’ve heard this one: The members of an extended family spend years curating a shared online photo album. Then the website they posted on vanishes, flushing their collective memories away forever.
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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…
Design
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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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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…
My Glamorous Life
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She’s the Boss.
She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance.
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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…
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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The Courage to Stop
Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement.
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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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