A Permanent Home 29 Jul 2026, 7:20 am

Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control.

Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like Tumblr. Then it was Medium. More recently, it’s been Substack.

Platforms promise us an eager audience, built-in monetization, a smooth user interface, and a supportive community. As a writer who just wants to focus on writing, it’s incredibly tempting to hand over the keys to our creative kingdoms and let these portals handle everything. (Believe me, I gave in at one point. For years, I just stopped blogging altogether and even gave up a domain that had high traffic! But I got back in 2012 and never left.)

However, this is the truth that has not changed since the dawn of the Internet: When you build your audience entirely on someone else’s platform, you aren’t a homeowner. You are a tenant. Or worse, a digital sharecropper.

And corporate landlords always change the rules eventually. It’s not personal, it’s just business.

—Elizabeth Tai, Substack writers, you need a website!

Photo: Jeffrey Czum, ℅ pexels.com.

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You lost me at “infielder.” 24 Jul 2026, 6:38 am

The instant a business guy uses a sports metaphor to make his most important strategic point, I am lost. If you want me to understand your business idea, try wrapping it in Wendy Carlos’s secrets of synthesis or quotations by Orson Welles or the punchline to an old joke.

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The name of this LP is “Side One.” 21 Jul 2026, 9:57 am

On Sunday, I published Side One of my album on Bandcamp. The name of the album is also “Side One.” It is instrumental music with roots in Soundtrack, hip-hop, funk, jazz, 19th Century Romantic classical, ambient, electronic, and art rock. You might wonder if those divergent genres belong together, but the proof is in the listening.

For complicated reasons, I haven’t composed, produced, and released music since the late 1980s, back in the multi-track reel-to-reel and early MIDI days!

A few months back, a friend bought me Apple’s Digital Audio Workstation. I’m teaching myself this entirely new (to me) way of producing music by creating music—like I taught myself HTML and CSS by making websites.

It feels like there is no end to the music that has built up inside me over the past decades when I silenced this part of myself. I am thrilled to be creating and sharing music again.

I have no commercial expectations for these tracks; I just want people who might like my music to be able to give it a listen. If you object to Bandcamp, you can also listen on Sonica, although the mixes there are slightly different.

(I published to Sonica one track at a time; once I had sufficient material to sequence into a proper LP-style side, I remastered the tracks—in some cases also adding parts, and in other cases, taking them away. BTW, if you create music and are looking for a place to share with other creators, Sonica is a great place for it.)

Sonica is also where the curious can hear some of the music I created in my studio during the late 1980s, as well as some initial rough drafts of the newer music that has now found its way into Side One of Side One.

Side Two of Side One will be out as soon as I finish creating it. Meantime, grab a pair of headphones and enjoy Side One of Side One.

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Stalin decided what was good science. Millions starved. 11 Jul 2026, 4:46 am

[Soviet pseudoscientist Trofim Denisovich] Lysenko’s supposed innovation … was based on a disproven idea in evolutionary biology called Lamarckian inheritance. French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his followers thought that things an organism experiences in its lifetime can be handed down to the next generation. The classic example is a giraffe that has to stretch to reach leaves producing offspring with long necks.

This idea ran counter to Mendelian genetics, which holds that genes — not environmental influences — control traits and are passed to offspring. Mendelian geneticists thought it would take five years to breed more cold-tolerant crops. Lysenko said he could do it in two to three years.…

Lysenko was put in charge of a prestigious genetics institute and forced his scientifically unsound farming practices on the collective farms. His methods were disastrous.

Soaking seeds in freezing water hampered germination, leading to crop losses. Millions starved. Meanwhile, Mendelian genetics was branded a “whore of capitalism,” and geneticists were forced to renounce their views or lose their jobs. Many were jailed, and almost a dozen were executed or died in prison. — Tina Hesman Saey, “Here’s what happens when you put politicians in charge of science”

See also:

Trump administration proposal would all but end scientific merit in grant funding, critics say—Los Angeles Times, 10 July 2026

Researchers say this new Trump rule could destroy American science as we know it. They’re fighting back, CNN, 4 June 2026

What does Trump’s call for ‘gold standard science’ really mean? —Science, 27 May 2025

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The Secret 8 Jul 2026, 10:32 am

If I learned one thing in 25 years of running design and education companies, it’s that idealism isn’t a business strategy.

If you wonder why my partners and I had to shut down organizations we and lots of you loved, refer to the previous sentence.

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Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web 6 Jul 2026, 10:07 am

We used to worry about fire. A house fire could claim the photo albums, the letters, the dusty box of cassette tapes in the closet. We knew exactly what we were protecting, and from what. The threat was not only visible, but olfactory: you could smell smoke.

Now the threat is something else entirely: not loss through destruction, but loss through indifference. The server shuts down. The startup pivots. The platform “sunsets” a feature you’d spent years filling with memories. And just like that, a decade of your life becomes a page of 404s.

The economics of attention

I’ve been publishing on the web since 1995. I’ve watched links I wrote, links I cherished, slowly turn to dust. Not because the ideas were bad, or the writing was thin, but because someone decided a database was too expensive to maintain, or a domain registration lapsed, or a CMS migration “couldn’t prioritize” backward compatibility. 

The fragility isn’t in the medium—it’s in the economics of attention. Digital memory is fragile not because bits decay (though they do), but because someone else owns the shelf.

And it’s not just the web. Think of the photos you’ve “saved” to a cloud service that changed its terms. The videos you uploaded to a platform that no longer exists. The notes you carefully organized in an app that got acquired and shuttered. Each time, you were told you were “backing things up.” You weren’t. You were relocating them—moving your memories from your own bookshelf to a rented storage unit with a demolition clause.

The cruelty of digital loss

There’s a cruelty to the way digital loss sneaks up on you. A flooded basement announces itself. A dead hard drive grinds and whirs in protest. But a cloud account that quietly vanishes? A social graph that’s “replatformed” into oblivion? That’s a disappearance in broad daylight. You don’t even get a funeral. One day you click a link and it’s just… gone. No explanation, no elegy, just a redirect to a marketing page.

The Cloud is not a place

We need to stop pretending that “the cloud” is a place. It’s not a place. It’s a promise—and promises are only as good as the entity making them. The web was supposed to be decentralized, resilient, a network of nodes that could route around damage. But in practice, we’ve spent the last decade centralizing our lives into a handful of walled gardens, each with its own exit strategy and its own definition of “forever.”

So what do we do? We own our own domains. We keep local copies. In triplicate. We choose open formats over proprietary ones. We treat every platform as temporary, because it is. We archive not out of paranoia but out of love—love for the things we’ve made, the conversations we’ve had, the small, stubborn act of leaving a mark.

Be gardeners, not just tenants

The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not just tenants. To plant things in soil we control, and to tend them. Because if we don’t, the only record that we were here will be someone else’s ad inventory, and when the ads move on, we’ll move with them—into the quiet, unmarked graveyard of the deleted.

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The End 3 Jul 2026, 7:23 am

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 high, as Morrison was already in trouble with the law for having grabbed his own crotch during a performance in Miami a few months before. (A decade or two later, Michael Jackson’s self-crotch-grabbing would be considered a cool dance move, and enormous photos of Marky Mark grabbing his Calvin-Klein-clad crotch would cover city buses and billboards, unremarked by passing grandmothers and similarly square civilians. By then, male self-crotch-grabbing was a non-story. But back in 1970, in Nixon’s America, a long-haired boozer who sang “Back Door Man” was a threat to Southern Womanhood or whatever racist cops thought they were protecting us from when they weren’t busy beating and arresting Black men. But I digress.)

So there sat teenage me, excited to see a band I idolized—and whose keyboard parts I’d taught myself to play—but also sad and frightened, because Morrison was visibly drunk and unsteady, and my sheltered self had never before seen a real alcoholic stumble around on the street, let alone while spotlighted on a stage in front of thousands of witnesses. I was afraid for Jim Morrison. Afraid he would hurt himself. Afraid the cops would bust him again.

I was not alone in these fears, and the audience began catcalling the intense police presence at the show. So Morrison stopped the band and spoke to the audience, hoping to prevent a riot.

“Just remember, their motto is Protect and Serve,” Morrison said.

“Fuck ’em!” shouted a kid sitting in the row behind me.

The kid’s shout was so loud the band could hear it; so loud you can hear it on the Doors LP Absolutely Live, released later that year. The live shout is quiet on the record, which—after all—was recorded through a portable mixing board and not a live mic in the row behind me. Quiet enough that Elektra Records felt safe releasing the disc despite the puritanical speech restrictions of America in the 1970s. You have to listen closely to hear it. But it is there. Whoever the kid from Pittsburgh in the row behind me may have been, he is now an anonymous immortal footnote in rock history.

That story ends there and Jim Morrison’s ended soon after.

The next year I was taking Driver Training when the announcement of Morrison’s death came over the radio, which my high school driver training teacher always left on to keep himself entertained while teaching teenagers how to parallel park.

“Morrison died of a heart attack,” the news guy on the car radio said.

“Yeah, right,” my driver training teacher snickered—implying that the 27-year-old had almost certainly OD’d, like Jimi Hendrix and Brian Jones before him. He gazed at me meaningfully. Me with my long hair and weird ways. I didn’t play sports. I smelled of patchouli.

Coward that I was, I faked a small smile at my teacher’s remark, but inside, that day, I died a little.

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The Human Story of the Open Web 2 Jul 2026, 6:43 am

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.

Or this: A Queer kid growing up isolated in Nebraska discovers a welcoming community on MySpace; then, one day, MySpace is no more, obliterating that carefully built community—with no chance of recovery.

Or an author who’s spent years building a following on Twitter finds their posts there suddenly going unseen after a new owner with a radical political agenda biases the algorithm against their type of content (or even just against them personally, if that new owner is feeling particularly petty and peevish).

If you’ve used the internet for more than a few days, you’ve experienced losses like these, along with the frustration and disillusionment that come when our favorite digital walled gardens become more and more about extracting financial value from us while providing less and less actual value to us.

The new digital landowner class can also take away our favorite software, or change it in ways to which we never consented.

The answer to this destruction of our shared digital commons by a handful of billionaires is the same as it has always been: own your content on the open web (your domain on a server, like mine on this one), and replace proprietary software with open source alternatives.

That is the simple message of “Code for the People,” a short documentary film by Bao Nguyen, whose July 1, 2026 preview screening I was privileged to attend last night at the Crosby Street Hotel in SoHo, NYC. As the film’s mini-website explains:

We have traded a free internet for a collection of walled gardens. Today, a handful of digital landlords use algorithms to dictate our reality, while closed AI threatens to change the ways we connect. We are at a breaking point: we can either let gatekeepers continue to consolidate their power, or we can reclaim the open source spirit that built the web in the first place.

A terrific panel discussion (photo above) followed the film viewing and amplified its themes of digital self-determination in the age of AI and enshittification. Over and over, in different ways, a creatively diverse panel of experts asked us what future we want for the web, and invited us to help create that future.

(One of my favorite moments was when Anil Dash laughingly pointed out the irony of closed AI companies, who built their product by stealing the world’s IP without consent, threatening to sue any companies or people who try to reverse engineer their IP.)

“Code for the Future” will stream for free beginning on July 9, 2026.

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Underdubbed 17 Jun 2026, 8:04 am

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, so we recorded the quiet, acoustic instruments first. Then we overdubbed electric organ and drums. Our second-pass instruments drowned out everything we’d recorded first. How we kept time is a mystery.

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Remembrance of zeldman.coms past 4 Jun 2026, 9:35 am

As we finesse a few details of this site’s current redesign, it’s worth reviewing where we began, going back all the way to our launch in the spring of 1995.

Visual punk rock: 1995 ƒƒ

Frozen in still screen capture form below are two pages from my GIFPLEX (1995), which is still viewable on the current site. It used tables for layout and employed left and right ASCII arrows to guide the visitor through a series of animated GIFs. I made the GIFs by sampling homemade Beta and VHS tapes from my collection, using Gifbuilder, a System 7-friendly shareware video-to-gif tool. Psychotronic film fans and MST3K devotees may recognize a few frames from “Horror of Party Beach.”

And here (viewable via the Web Archive) is what the home page looked like at the end of that first year:

Note that earlier versions—and there were many; I changed the design every few days—are not available via the Wayback Machine, as it was not yet invented when I launched this site. All of those early pages, which were handspun in HTML, used to still be available live here at zeldman.com, but a few dozen or more were misplaced during one of this site’s many server migrations across three decades, and the original files are lost to Zip and floppy disks whose raw materials (I hope) have long since been recycled. If not, then somewhere in a reeking landfill, these earliest pages lie waiting for alien archivists to discover them sometime before the death of the sun. But I digress.

I called my homepage toc.html, which stands for “table of contents,” and was influenced by the weird but prescient designer David Siegel, who, along with Lynda Weinman, was one of only graphic designers taking the new medium seriously. (Fun fact about Lynda: She dated Matt Groenig before he invented The Simpsons, and appeared as a character in his early comic strip, Life in Hell, which was serialized in alternative journals like the Baltimore/Washington City Paper, for which I was a freelance writer back in those days. I later had the pleasure of meeting Lynda at a 1998 digital conference event where Jeff Veen, George Olsen and I introduced the community to our newly launched developer advocacy group, The Web Standards Project. But I digress.)

Although I blogged from the day I launched, I considered blogging merely one strand of entertainment I expected the site to provide, hence the need for a toc to cover such amusements as The Ad Graveyard, Pardon My Icons, Disturbing Patterns, and Ask Dr. Web.

Here’s another ugly home page variant from that time for your viewing pleasure.

Liquid design—precursor to RWD

Here are some really old views of pages that are still up on this website. Note their “liquid design,” which was something many of us tried in the mid-1990s, before the technology developed that would permit the more sophisticated approach of Responsive Web Design. (For more on Liquid Design and its Jello and Ice Design partners, see this site’s “A Dao of Responsive Liquid,” our “15 Minutes” interview with Glenn Davis, and Digital Web Magazine’s “Liquid Web Design: Build it right and it will work no matter what the container.”)

Fifteen Minutes

A zine within a website. You can still visit it here on this website. Fifteen Minutes featured my interviews with movie stars like Samuel L. Jackson and “web celebs” (early web creatives I admired, like Derek Powazek and the late Leslie Harpold). I performed the movie star interviews on behalf of Warner Bros., who were my client at the time, and published them on my website with permission from Donald Buckley, their VP Marketing, who also came up with the name, “Fifteen Minutes.” (Terrific guy, great mind; I was remarkably lucky in my clients.)

For your pleasure

Still available on the site, Waterbox was a collection of some of my music from the mid-1980s. These downloadable MP3 files were poorly mixed and never properly mastered, and MP3 is a lossy format—but they’re all I have left of the music I had composed, produced, and performed at my Red Flowers studio in Washington, DC during the latter part of the 1980s. Four decades later, I’ve begun composing and producing music again. You can stream my new LP-in-progress for free on Sonica (and eventually also on Apple Music and Spotify).

As an added bonus, go to the actual page and hover over the blue beanie in the orange box at the bottom of the page. It will animate to reveal my beanied punim. If clicked, it will take you to my current About page. (It used to take you to whatever toc.html page I had going that week.)

The “DHTML” TOC

One more ugly old TOC, from the beginning of the 4.0 browser era. The featured astronaut floated about on the page and the Emigre-set titles changed colors on hover. The animations were achieved via “DHTML,” which was briefly a name for JavaScript-plus-HTML. The combination of Emigre type, HTML Verdana, Photoshop outlines, and shareware microfonts is quite possibly the nastiest recipe ever to emerge from my demented early web kitchen.

The one you possibly remember

Here’s the version of Jeffrey Zeldman Presents the Daily Report that some of you will remember from the early 2000s. Note in the sidebar the inclusion of A List Apart (web design magazine launched 1998, still operational although we publish far less frequently these days), Happy Cog (my design studio, now under new and excellent ownership), and An Event Apart—the late, lamented web design conference I co-founded with Eric Meyer.

I iterated constantly on The Daily Report, which eventually became the most important part of this website (replacing toc.html as its homepage), and at some point will share more of this site’s visual history—the good, the bad, and the hideously ugly. I will also want to talk about the Big Type revolution this site and A List Apart underwent in the wake of antialiased web typography and the high-density monitors that became affordable for just about every computer user in the mid-2000s. Look for that in Part II of this  À la recherche des sites perdu (apologies for my High School French), coming soon.

But what I want to write about next is what you’re soaking in: the current redesign of this website. This slog through the visual muck that got us here was a necessary preface to that exploration, which I promise to share with you quite soon indeed.

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She’s the Boss. 1 Jun 2026, 9:22 am

SNOW WHITE is my jailer. She reclines near me while I work, watching closely for the moment I stand up. The instant I leave my desk, she directs me to her feeding area so I can open another can of cat food and arrange its contents neatly on a plate. She’ll eat a few bites, then walk away and resume her post by my desk.

She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance.

The uneaten remainder dries out on the floor; two hours from now, I’ll throw it away and open a new can with a different flavor.

I’m vegetarian because I love animals. But as Snow White’s feeder, I’m responsible for the useless deaths of countless chickens, cows, and fish whose pulverized remains I’ve offered to Snow White and she has nibbled, then ostentatiously wasted, to prove to me over and over which one of us is in control.

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Required reading: “The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything” 24 May 2026, 9:48 am

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 universe. Real-world dark matter is part of the development of such a theory. When astrophysicists pointed their telescopes to the stars in the 1970s, they saw things that could not be explained. Either Newton and Einstein were wrong, or there was something they had missed. Dark matter was the proposed explanation: what if there is additional matter acting upon the universe that we simply cannot see?

What I propose today is perhaps even more important than a physical theory of everything: a theory that can connect and explain the wide array of right-wing psychosexual neuroses. The theory is that right-wing political narratives are significantly influenced by porn—specifically interracial cuck porn—and conversely the narratives of said porn are significantly influenced by right-wing politics. Pornography is the unseen dark matter molding and shaping how the online right speaks and thinks about politics, on anything from immigration to transgender people to higher education. Call it the interracial cuck porn theory of everything.

Read, bookmark, and share:

The Interracial Cuck Porn Theory of Everything by Cameron Cummins-Smith

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Lest we forget 24 May 2026, 9:00 am

“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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My UX Superpower: Nothing Works! 20 Apr 2026, 10:48 am

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 early 1995. I understood it in a way most designers didn’t, and rose faster than I probably deserved—until the summer Steve Jobs fired Doug Bowman and me from a redesign of apple.com.

After that, Apple software and hardware went wonky for me for close to a decade.

At the time, I half-believed Mr Jobs had put a techno-curse on me. It certainly seemed that way. When my colleagues upgraded to what was then being called OS X, everything worked for them. When I tried, I failed. And failed. And failed.

Some of this was because OS X was secretly incompatible with SCSI cards, a peripheral in common use on System 7 Macs like my Power Computing P120 Mac clone tower, and Apple never bothered to clue us in. But mostly, what Apple’s new target customer found intuitive left me bamboozled.

Over the next decade, the Mac software and hardware curse lifted, but my disconnection from what other human beings apparently find intuitive persists. Over time, this flaw became, improbably, a professional advantage, because I’m as capable as any “normal” user of misinterpreting directions, misreading cues, and grabbing hold of things that only look like handles.

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Pete’s Presence 17 Apr 2026, 6:27 am

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 yellow bulb lit the kitchen. The kids must have left it on when they went to bed.

I made an espresso. Alerted by the sound, Snow White appeared from wherever she had been napping. I opened a can of wet food for her and laid its contents on a paper plate, separating it into two servings—not that any cat here but Snow White ever eats the wet food.

As she bent her small white head to the task, young Jasper showed up. He is always curious, always gives her plate a sniff before jetting off to walk his rounds. But this morning, instead, Jasper bent his tiger striped head and ate alongside his elder sister.

Gazing down at the two heads bobbing as they ate, I felt a sudden warmth that had nothing to do with the hot dead air of the room. 

Maybe two small creatures scrambling for food reminded me of my brother Pete and me when we were young. Or maybe I remembered how Pete, in the last years of his life, had delighted in playing with Pablo, the split-faced cat—dark on one side, light on the other—who still lives with Cheryl, three years after Pete’s death. 

I recall those thoughts—and then, for a sweet moment, Pete just there with me.

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The Courage to Stop 15 Apr 2026, 8:17 am

The hardest thing to write is less.

Anyone can generate words now. A prompt and a few seconds and you have paragraphs, pages, a manifesto. The machine never runs dry. Which means the words themselves have stopped meaning anything. Volume has become silence.

What’s rare—what’s difficult—is knowing when you’ve said enough. Cutting the sentence that’s technically correct but doesn’t earn its place. Trusting the reader. Trusting the idea. Trusting the white space to do work.

Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to show my work.

The web taught us to fill space. AI finished the job. Content covers every surface now, every silence anxious to be noise.

Learn to be quiet on purpose.

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Jimmy Carter was right 10 Apr 2026, 6:17 am

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 importantly about themselves. Even as Americans grow, for the second time, disillusioned with a Trump presidency, we have put drapes over all the mirrors. 

The American people are unhappy with Trump. They do not like this war. But they need a dose of truth right now. 

The truth is that the American people twice elected Donald Trump over more qualified Democratic women. The first time, Hillary Clinton warned explicitly that he did not have the temperament to be trusted with the nuclear codes. The second time, they overlooked an insurrection, a deadly pandemic, and a campaign full of bellicose and racist rhetoric, all despite the American economy being in the midst of one of the best post-Covid recoveries in the world. — Alan Elrod

I always believed that Carter was right. It’s nice to see him vindicated in print; I only wish he had witnessed this exoneration during his lifetime.

But Carter was faith-driven, and not in the phony way White Nationalists claim to be. To the extent that anyone can run for president without being a massively narcissistic egotist, Carter was free of the veils that egotism erects between an observer and their objective reality.

So if Carter’s ghost still roams this planet, he isn’t kicking his heels together at seeing himself praised at last. Whether Americans were ready to hear his message at the time or not, Carter did the right thing. His reward in life may have been ridicule and scorn, but he seemed remarkably untroubled by the personal aspects of this rejection by the American people—and continued to dedicate his life to helping others.

Had we followed his lead and reelected him, the planet would be in better shape, and clean energy, creating innovation and employment, would power our lives. Then again, had we been capable of following Carter’s lead, we wouldn’t have elected Donald Trump twice, and that is the point author Elrod makes sure we understand:

If we can’t rediscover a sense of the simultaneously awe-inspiring and intimate task of self-government, we will remain the country that re-elected Donald Trump. And we will continue to reap the consequences.

On that note, I invite you to read After a Dark Week, Americans Should Turn to Jimmy Carter’s Malaise Speech.

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Handwritten notes in the time of AI note takers 9 Apr 2026, 6:58 am

“Here is the thing people get wrong about AI in meetings. The transcript captures what was said. It does not capture what mattered.”—Lucas Radke

The best project management tool is still a pen, plus the discipline to notice what the machine cannot.

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Dine ’n em-dash 24 Mar 2026, 7:03 am

Abandon the em-dash in your human writing?

The irony—and it’s a major irony—is that real writers use em-dash frequently, and for reasons. As a written signifier of verbal speech pauses, it means something different than what commas and semicolons mean. It connects while separating. 

That’s why so many writers use em-dash when it is the best mark for the job. In turn, chatbots use it because they were schooled on millions of writers.

A moral conundrum

That this human thing real writers do is now a red flag to readers who mistrust AI is—as I said—ironic. And for editors, it’s frustrating, as it  presents a moral conundrum:

Replace a well-used em-dash with a comma so suspicious readers won’t mistakenly flag the text as AI-generated? I’ve done it. Particularly in bulleted lists where every list item includes a em-dash that could work as a colon, and/or when the writing is fairly dry—and thus potentially triggering for ticked-off hunters of AI signifiers. Le sigh.

Ultimately, the best defense is to write well. Write humanly. The closer you make it to that aim, the fewer the folks who will worry about the AI-or-human provenance of your words.

Photo ℅ energepic.com.

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RSS creator on Bluesky & AT Proto 22 Mar 2026, 11:29 am

My favorite social media channel, Bluesky, has a terrific new interim CEO and a business plan, but RSS creator and longtime blogger Dave Winer thinks they’d do better catching up to the web instead of reinventing it.

They can’t abandon the developers who made a bet on AT Proto, so they should give it to a standards body, work with them, but at the same time work on interop with products like WordPress and support inbound and outbound RSS. Markdown would be nice too. Get rid of the character limit and support links, styling, enclosures (for podcasting) and make their posts editable. In other words they have some catching up to do re the web. That’s where their leadership would be welcome instead of questioned. — Dave Winer

N.B. The link to Dave’s long-running website, Scripting News, works but the site does not use https://, so some browsers may incorrectly warn you that there’s a problem with the page. There isn’t one. Relax—and click on through to the other side.

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