Happy April! I got mad at a website again! (Jump down to the recommended reading if you want to skip this little IA/product case study! The links this month are pretty choice, not gonna lie.)

Let’s look at Speks, maker of fancy fidgets, and their nice, clean website and its sparkling mess of information design. [Hey, listen: the night before I went to hit Send on this newsletter, Speks actually changed a bunch of stuff on their site. Most of this essay still stands, but, yeah, some things are different now. I can only assume Speks hates me personally and wants me to suffer.]

The main navigation starts with a Shop link:

I would have expected it to take me to a landing page with all their product categories! Instead, it opens a dropdown:

Ever since I was a little girl, I knew I wanted to shop for Gump.

Truly, I’ve never seen a better example of jargon product names. Jargon isn’t always technical or academic! Sometimes it’s meaningless nonsense. And I get it — goofy names are the brand! But unless you’re already incredibly familiar with this brand, there’s no way to know what any of this is. I don’t know what any of this is! What the hell is Pivot! What the hell are Fleks! And without a visual product page, there’s no way to teach me. The only way I can figure out what this company sells is by clicking on each product name individually. (Which I did! It took a long time.)

From this Shop menu, a few products have additional side menus to show off variants — like Crags, which are tiny pebble magnets (obviously, of course, how could you not know that). Their side menu reveals options for Matte Crags, Neutral Crags, Gradient Crags, Oil Slick Crags, and a Shop All link, as well as visual cards for Neutral Crags and Oil Slick Crags:

Remember that band, Neutral Crags? I love shoegaze.

The visual cards are my first look at what Crags actually are, and I can surmise from this menu that the product is organized by color types, or maybe finishes? Matte is a texture, neutral is a palette, gradient is a range, and oil slick is a color (or four). Shruggy emoji!

When I click on Shop All, I get to a Crags landing page (finally!), but frustratingly, I immediately notice that none of the finish categories I just saw on the dropdown menu are part of the product listings. Instead, I get labels that blend color names and sizes, like Harmony Small! Dandy Medium! Vitality Large!

Are these Neutral or Gradient?

It’s not all unclear — light pink Crags are labeled Rose, bright orange are Coral, and Oil Slick is easy enough to identify— but nothing connects them to the dropdown categories. I don’t see anything that I would call Gradient, and when I click on the Matte and Neutral categories in the dropdown, they both go to the same page:

Dandy is yellow, in case you were wondering.

In the product page, the colors are explicitly mapped to “Tin Color,” even though many (like the aforementioned Rose, Coral, and Oil Slick) apply to both the tins and their pebbles. But the non-color colors — Dandy, Serenity, Tranquility, and Vitality (color naming is a different rant we don’t have time for right now) — only appear to alter the color of the tin, while the pebbles stay the same. Want a different color of pebbles? Change size! Small will get you shiny hematite-colored pebbles, while medium gets you black (and large looks like a cross between the two — unless the differences are just poor photography). What are we doing

I could not figure out how to get the pebble color and size combo that I wanted, because none of the labels matched how I expected product color and sizing to work. And while it’s the sloppy information architecture of it all that calls out to me, it’s really a failure of product design. The way this company conceptualizes their products is disorganized, and that disorganization bleeds through into how the products are categorized, labeled, and displayed on the site. What we, as users, get is:

• Restricted browsability

• Meaningless product names (and color descriptors)

• Inconsistent categorization from screen to screen

• Conflation of size and color as a single organizing principle

— all things that should be addressed first by how product information is treated and documented internally, then by how that information is structured and designed for users. This is the result of a product team that is either hyper-siloed or deeply underresourced (or both) — and definitely missing someone responsible for thinking about the experience as a system.

Despite all that, I did end up buying some Odds — the need for chunky dodecagon magnets is more powerful than UX frustration. Capitalism wins again!

Good writing

• “I think you should understand that most things in this world are neutral.” [tumblr]

• “But for these norms to stick they have to have some teeth. And that means you have to at some point refuse.” [Mandy Brown]

• “coding agents, which require constant attention and often generate low-quality code with (by design) random results, are a slot machine. […] you have a gambling addiction.” [Jae Kaplan]

• “Am I the circus?” [Brian David Gilbert]

Tools and games

• It’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows one or two XKCD comics [XKCD 2501 Generator]

• Add your own text to classic game screens [Alice Averlong]

• List as many animals as you can [Vivian Rose]

• Make 45 categories of 45 things [Thomas Colthurst]

• Very cool mockup tool made out of ASCII [Mike Bespalov]

April’s cause

The Trans Continental Pipeline is a nonprofit helping trans folks relocate to Colorado from states with unsafe policies (a number that seems to be increasing daily). Let’s send some money to TCP and save some lives!

Authors together

I’d nearly forgotten that this lovely unofficial directory of former-ABA books exists — and I’m a part of it! Heck! So I’m reminding all of us that it’s a great little site to find some of the smartest writing in the tech industry. Go! Now! Buy some books! Buy my book! (And big thanks again to David Demaree for designing such a great little home for the authors!)

2026 hasn’t wasted any time in breaking our hearts daily, again, always, so I hope you’ll forgive this issue for being both late and short.

I saw a post this weekend that is too long to replicate here, but contained some important reminders about self- and community care that I want to pass along:

• When your radius of awareness is wider than your sphere of influence, you will feel powerless.

• Information is only as useful as your implementation of it.

• You must go find hope in the world and bring it to others.

Poster by MK/RET

Here’s to all of you staying warm, staying safe, staying ready, staying strong.

Technology

• Accessibility for Everyone, the go-to, tried-and-true, best-ever resource on web accessibility, is free to read [Laura Kalbag]

• “How the hell are you supposed to have a career in tech in 2026?” [Anil Dash]

• Can’t believe I’ve missed this in prior Decembers, but here’s a month’s worth (several years running) of invaluable daily exercises for learning systems thinking [Ruth Malan]

• “Wrapped: How to ditch Spotify & switch to something slightly less evil” [tumblr]

• “Video can challenge power. It can also attract it.” [The Conversation]

• Signal for Beginners [Freedom of the Press Foundation]

Reading and writing

• A dark but oddly comforting meditation on death, relationships, and fascism [Mike Monteiro]

• A short, fascinating riff on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” [AO3]

• “[Empire] is a kind of poison that gets into the groundwater, and it can be very, very pretty while it strangles a culture”—a good conversation with authors Ann Leckie and Arkady Martine [Speculative Insight]

• If you’re looking for your next read, here’s a truly in-depth list of queer science fiction recommendations [tumblr]

• Another beautifully savage entry in the category of celebrity restaurant reviews [Defector]

January’s cause

All eyes on Minnesota, and strength and support to the organizations coordinating care for immigrants, protestors, observers, and everyone targeted by ICE.

Love and solidarity to you and your neighbors.

This is a story about interface design and capitalism. And K-pop.

I got really, really, really into K-pop earlier this year. It was completely unexpected—I went from never having heard a single example of the genre (and not listening to much pop music, from anywhere, at all) to pretty much only listening to it, all day, every day, for six months running now. (Ah, the neurodivergent brain.)

It started with a random encounter in Music League—just one or two songs, but I was enthusiastic, and the friend responsible made me a K-pop sampler playlist in response. Given my pop music ambivalence, I wasn’t sure I’d like any of the songs—but I liked all of them. So much. All the much. This is my thing now.

As much as I’ve fixated on the playlist (The Playlist), I’ve also tried to venture beyond it. It’s on Spotify (boo hiss), so I can easily explore more tracks from the groups I like best, or the algorithm’s suggestions for similar songs. (I’ve also been getting tips from my thirteen-year-old niece. I’ve officially entered my “learning about cool music from the youth” era.) But after months of adding, removing, and reordering a bunch of tracks, it suddenly hit me that I was fussing with someone else’s playlist.

My friend had created the playlist and shared it with me; she owned it, I just obsessed over it. I had assumed that my edits were local, as though the original playlist had been forked. (“Why is a Spotify playlist like a GitHub repo?” is a terrible riddle.)

My friend hardly minds that her playlist has more ITZY now than it started with, but I’m stuck on the fundamental error. Why did I think that’s how Spotify playlists worked? Why does it seem so hard to grok which playlists “belong” to me? Or, more accurately: why does the Spotify interface intentionally obscure the boundaries of ownership?

I’ll admit I’m not exactly a Spotify power user—hard to get good at something you hate—so there are certainly some signals I’ve missed. For example, I can see that my friend’s K-pop playlist is labeled as “public,” and that both our names are on it. But many other playlists in my library are marked this way, including whole albums I would never call a “playlist” and that I did not intentionally create. And even when I know a playlist is not mine, I can still make certain kinds of edits—like ordering the tracks alphabetically, or hiding songs—that don’t impact the playlist owner. The boundaries are indistinct.

An example of a “public playlist” saved to my library. Is it mine?

That blurriness is to Spotify’s advantage. Whether or not I “own” my playlist may be low stakes, but it reflects the much larger, pricklier issue of who owns the content itself, something Spotify would very much like us not to think about. It’s no accident that as companies erode consumers’ and creators’ rights to media—playlists, ebooks, streaming films, software, our own posts—interfaces for that media get weaker, fainter, less precise. The dislocation is deliberate.

It’s in capitalism’s best interests if I feel disconnected from the media, if I don’t feel a sense of ownership. It isn’t “my” media. It’s not even the creators’ media. It’s the studios’ media, the publishers’ media, the distributors’ media, the shareholders’ media. We own nothing, we rent everything. We pay for the privilege of conditional access to things we used to buy, only to be asked to pay again, and again, and again.

Well. Another day, another complaint about the rent-seeking nature of late-stage capitalism, as a friend recently put it. I just hadn’t realized how it gets baked into the interface—how tenancy could be made so legible in the UX. Now that I’ve clocked it, I suspect it’s all I’ll see.

I could share my beloved K-pop playlist with you, but I still don’t trust the interface (or the company). Here’s an absolute banger, though, if you’re curious:

Lightning round

• “I was asked to give a land acknowledgement for today's No Kings demonstration. I don't do that shit so I gave ‘em something else instead.” [Raven Payment]

• A beautiful comic about trauma and healing [Sienna Gonzales]

• Two well-designed posters to support your disaster preparedness [Katy L. Wood]

• Need a sewing pattern? There’s a free database for that [Commercial Pattern Archive]

• A level-headed take on why it always feels like “UX is dead” [Dylan Wilbanks]

• A wonderfully pragmatic approach to content strategy in messy systems [Elaine Nelson]

• Content conferences better be talking about these banners for years to come [tumblr]

• “Local prince charming discovers that he’s actually very into the gothic fiance his parents have landed him with in order to try and establish peace with the local evil lair down the lane” [tumblr, of course]

November’s causes

This month, let’s give to two excellent organizations serving indigenous communities: one for food, the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, and one for water, the Navajo Water Project.

As always, don’t forget your local food pantries and mutual aid organizations! We’re entering a rough time of year under rougher economic conditions. Hang in there, friends.

Learn JavaScript (and do some good)

Please spread the word to the front-end folks in your life/office/Slack about JavaScript for Everyone! It’s very good, it’s very written by my husband, and it’s very on sale right now. In addition to the Black Friday discount code, there’s also an expensive-er-ing code, which actually still gives you a discount, but also sends a donation to Resilient Coders, a Boston-based coding bootcamp for people of color. (Learn more on Bluesky, or just watch Mat do a bit.)

Somehow, it is September. The pumpkin vine we planted grew exactly one (1) enormous, brilliantly orange, fairytale pumpkin, which insisted on being harvested in the middle of August; our front steps look like we kicked off spooky season early (and why not?). Meanwhile, our peach tree—which I could swear we just planted—delivered a crop of two dozen peaches over Labor Day weekend. So our garden’s got the seasons a little out of order.

The orb, what does it want

If you’ve still got access to fresh peaches—or any good baking fruits, fresh or frozen—may I recommend extending your summer slightly by making this absolutely killer crumble-pie from Smitten Kitchen? I confess I’ve made it three times in the past five weeks; I literally do not want to stop eating it. I make some adjustments: I use store-bought pie crust to save time, and I’ve been getting about 5-6 cups of chopped peaches in there, with another 1-2 cups of berries, plus a splash of amaretto. With the crumble topping, I’ve been going 50-50 on the butter with olive oil, and 50-50 on the white flour with almond meal—but I’m sure the original is equally perfect. It’s so good I could cry.

If baking’s not your thing, may I recommend a cocktail? I’ve never heard of a Division Bell before, but I stumbled across the recipe when I was looking for something to make with Aperol. I love Aperol, but somehow this whole summer went by without opening the bottle once (migraine frequency has kept me away from alcohol, generally). I made it a point this week to get in one nice Aperol beverage before fall hits, and this certainly did the trick: 1 oz mezcal, 3/4 oz Aperol, 1/4 oz Luxardo, 3/4 oz lime juice. Shake, serve, sip, chef’s kiss.

Going so many weeks between newsletters, I’ve accumulated a lot of links to share—so this issue is double lightning rounds, loosely themed.

Tech and UX round

• “You’re being very inflexible about doing everything in a microwave and that won’t serve you well in the new microwave era.” [Colin Cornaby]

• An always-has-been-always-will-be-true piece on “Kudzu IA” and the critical need for content governance and maintenance [Dylan Wilbanks]

• “People who make things tend to move on when there’s nothing left to make […] but the Torment Nexus.” [Mike Monteiro]

• A new hub for dozens of tactics for resisting Big Tech from YK Hong [Decolonize.Digital]

• “so many of the small indignities of daily life come from us being denied the ability to tell a rich man in a tech company to fuck off.” [Bluesky]

• The talented Margo Stern has written a fabulous new book all about interviewing for design roles—from both sides of the table [Good Job]

• Want to develop some JavaScript chops? There’s a new course for that (full disclosure: I’m married to the author) [JavaScript for Everyone]

Humor and beauty round

• Ads for henchmen up for adoption from the shelter [tumblr]

• The sound of editing Wikipedia [Listen to Wikipedia]

• Gorgeously illustrated posters about disability, sexuality, feminism, politics, and more [Liberal Jane]

• A devastatingly beautiful essay on despair and survival from Hanif Abdurraqib [The New Yorker]

• A very cool collection of science fiction film lettering [Reagan Ray]

• “As long as they recognize each other as equals, Dads and Lesbians are more than capable of cohabitation. Now, if you were to release a pack of Lumberjacks into a Lowes or Home Depot, that’s where chaos will reign.” [tumblr]

September’s causes

• I’m a longtime fan of the People’s CDC, and with the ongoing dismantling of public health policy, their work is more important than ever—please give them some love (and subscribe to their newsletter!). (And while I’m at it: please mask up in public! Your disabled friends and neighbors thank you!)

• Public broadcasting has been hit hard with federal funding cuts—and even if my local station is okay, I love the idea of helping out a random town through Adopt a Station.

• I’ve been supporting Luce, a local-to-me organization working for immigrant justice. It would be amazing if you sent a few dollars their way (or look for an equivalent group in your state)!

Buy my book

Friendly reminder to give Everyday Information Architecture a whirl! Excellent, practical lessons in the organization, structure, and labeling of online content. Great for designers, UX writers, content strategists, product managers, and knowledge workers of all stripes. Buy now! Buy now!

They say that gardening is an act of hope—that, by planting and cultivating and weeding, one is practicing hope, anticipating a future in which there will be a harvest. How can one possibly plant tulip bulbs and tend tomatoes while also giving in to despair?

Hold my beer.

Despair is so attractive right now that, well, it’s hard to write. I’ve tried a few versions of this issue and almost every time the words choose a fairly dark path. I don’t think it serves either of us for me to give into that impulse.

Instead, let me lament my wisteria. We have—had—the loveliest wisteria vine in the side yard, its trunk braided and running up the fence, where it then split off in either direction to weave in and out of the fence-top lattice. It produced beautiful pale indigo blooms in heavy fist-sized clusters, usually with two rounds a season.

Unfortunately, earlier this summer, we realized it had grown too powerful: the vine had thickened and was forcing the lattice apart. To salvage the fence, we had to destroy the wisteria. Cutting it out and repairing the lattice was both a demanding chore and a small heartbreak.

Ouch.

Sometimes gardening means killing things. Is that a metaphor? Is that a kind of hope?

I don’t know. It doesn’t have to be anything, actually, beyond a sign that maybe we should have planned better. Should we have skipped wisteria? Planted it in a different spot? Taken better care to position the vines?

I suppose we’ll find out:

After just a few weeks of growth, from almost nothing.

I guess this is a metaphor whether I like it or not: that pruning is necessary and healthy, that everything has a cycle, that life finds a way, take your pick. Plants are good at grounding us. They don’t know what a government is. They grow and die and wreck your fence and die and grow some more. As we cut back the wisteria, the lilies popped off, and some unexpected crocosmia bloomed, and the zucchinis decimated by squash borers last year have already given us seven fruits this year. There’s always something growing. Even when you’re not looking, or trying, or hoping.

Unbreaking

I am extremely pumped to be following the deeply necessary and pragmatic work of Unbreaking, a site that tracks “how the administration is breaking the government, and what that means for all of us.” It’s not journalism—it’s well-written synopses of exactly what’s going on right now, based on credible sources. I cannot stress enough how valuable this site is for understanding what’s happening to the federal work force, healthcare, food safety, and pretty much every other pillar of society—so please check it out, and if your bandwidth allows, consider helping out too.

“The Invention of Memory”

I appreciated this piece from Emily Dupree—published last summer but still relevant—on the way society has, as a coping strategy, all but forgotten the pandemic, and what that means for those of us trying to survive it:

“When He Calls Your Name”

I don’t often recommend fiction here, but do check out this compelling, ambient-spooky short story from Catherynne Valente. There’s a fun reveal about halfway through that makes it very worthwhile! Plus the prose is, as ever, incredible:

Lightning round

• Exactly what it says. [owlsintowels.org]

• “I, too, was once a little skeptical of the Giant Plagiarism Machine™. But that was before I attended The Conference for Big Boy Business Owners™.” [McSweeney’s]

• Do you need an enamel pin of a smiling guillotine? Of course you do. [Mule]

• I adore these artist-modified bathroom signs [Lauren Quock]

• A useful site “to make it easier for people to access their [health insurance] claim files and to craft better appeals.” [ProPublica]

• Seven Steps to Stop ICE [Crimethinc]

• Another very good answer to the question, “what can I do?” [Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg]

July’s cause

This month we’re donating to the National Immigration Law Center, an organization "building an inclusive future for low-income immigrants through impact litigation, policy advocacy, movement-building, and narrative and culture change.”

Buy my book

Have you read Everyday Information Architecture? Probably! But just in case you haven’t, or you’re been meaning to, or you want to make sure your coworker has—you can buy it! Great for designers, content folks, product people, and knowledge workers of all stripes.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. They help fill the connectivity gap in Twitter’s wake, provide me with access to independent journalism, and let me keep up with friends and colleagues.

They’re also an abundant source of entertainment and scholarship, and that abundance is something of a problem. It’s a constant influx of content, volleyed through five or six different platforms, tied together with nothing more than an email address—which is why, for years now, I’ve preferred to use a reading app to manage the whole shebang. The app meant I could keep all the newsletters in their own dedicated reading experience and out of my inbox (where they would otherwise languish unread amid notifications and receipts).

Unfortunately, when I upgraded my phone last month, the reading app declined to come along for the ride. The icon squatted, undownloaded, on my new homescreen after my data transfer completed, and when I tried to download it, a message popped up: “This app is currently not available in your country or region.”

Hey. What. The hell.

Even after investigating, I still have no idea what happened. There’s no update to its (single-page) website, no message explaining its availability or what might have changed. I queried the only contact email I could find; no response. I can only conclude that the app no longer exists, and the company (presumably, some guy) ditched the site until hosting expires.

(This barely registers in the haze of 2025, but, ugh. I liked that app! It was a part of my daily routine! I resent having it yanked out from under me without warning or support! I resent losing years of my reading history! Look, I cannot fix foreign policy, but I can write 700 words about mundane irritation with product experiences.)

But now: what to do with dozens and dozens of untethered newsletter subscriptions?

The first half of the dilemma is where to read them. There are not many apps on offer for this service, and most of them work the same way as the app I just lost: by generating an app-specific email address, funneling subscriptions to the app inbox instead of one’s own. But this leaves subscriptions vulnerable to the exact problems I’m currently facing. How many companies (again, presumably, some guys) will go under or get bored or get bought out or pivot to AI or, or, or? As long as my subscriptions are routed through a third party, I don’t control them. There’s a lesson here.

The second half of the dilemma is updating the subscriptions themselves. Each newsletter platform has its own mysterious process for managing subscriptions: some let me update my destination address, while others have forced me to cancel and resubscribe; I’ve had to be particularly careful with the subscriptions I pay for. These tedious manual updates have stolen an absurd amount of my recent time—and that’s only for the newsletters that happened to have sent an issue out in the last two weeks. I’ll have to keep at it as less frequent newsletters show up, assuming I remember to check the still-working browser inbox for my defunct app. Plenty of opportunities to fall through the cracks.

Ultimately I decided not to download a new reading app, and instead reset what subscriptions I could to one of my own email addresses. I rigged up a complicated system of levers (nested labels) and pulleys (filters) to keep my inbox orderly; it’s not a good reading experience, but at least I know where the content is, and that it will stay where I put it.

It’s been a frustrating reminder of just how much work it is to manage media consumption now, and also just how much of that work we’ve (gradually, unwittingly) outsourced over the past twenty-five years. We digitized our content and gutted our media and sold out our creators and fractured our systems and it got harder and harder to read and keep track and pay attention, but we didn’t even need to because our benevolent tech lords were always ready to step in with services to fix the problems they created, and now I’m yelling at clouds about email addresses. It’s going so good!

Lightning round

• “day 5 at the communal puzzle club: the others are suspicious but they have no proof. they check my pockets before i leave but little do they know that this time i ate the pieces” [tumblr]

• I just finished playing Wytchwood and it was a captivating delight [Whitethorn Games]

• “The content strategist writes a resume (or three)“ [Ma’ayan Plaut]

• “And that’s what led me to argyling the pintafore with the quagmire instead of the hoobastank! I know, crazy.” [Annie Mueller]

• ICYMI: Click on the white star after the video ends (aw, just like the olden days of eastern eggs!) for Strong Sad’s impassioned defense of sitemaps [Homestar Runner]

• Listen to this! My good friend Dylan Wilbanks is spinning some truly chef’s kiss music over on Hollow Earth Radio [Slumgullion!]

Civic engagement round

• How to resist automated facial recognition at TSA checkpoints [Opt Out]

• “Following some of the advice in this book could land you in various sorts of trouble” [Internet Archive]

• A (really, for once) good set of tactics for managing mental health under the current despairs [Instagram]

• ”10 Commandments of Nonviolent Resistance by the Czechs and Slovaks to the Soviet Invasion of 1968” [Maciej J. Bartkowski]

• The Good Trouble Checklist [Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg]

• Help historians by volunteering to digitally transcribe documents [The Smithsonian]

May’s cause

This month, let’s donate to the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), which “improves the lives of day laborers, migrants and low-wage workers. We build leadership and power among those facing injustice so they can challenge inequality and expand labor, civil and political rights for all.”

Buy my book

It feels like it’s been ages since I talked about my useful little book, Everyday Information Architecture! If you haven’t read it, I promise it’s got excellent, practical lessons about UX and working with information online, no matter your role in tech. Get it from your local bookstore!

It’s hard to get the tone right these days. Above, I’ve shared lines from a beautiful but very dark poem; below, an illustration of an urgent political message. In between, I thought I’d write about eye makeup.

Not just eye makeup, though that is my unexpected latest enthusiasm. There’s also the oatmeal cookies I made last night with white chocolate and pistachios. And the fairy egg one of our chickens laid this week. And the raw green fringe of hyacinths and alliums starting to break through the still-dead lawn.

Or a different view: there’s the washing machine needing a replacement part. And spending 25 minutes on hold just to cancel a credit card. And migraines. Tax paperwork. Waking up this morning to the telltale piston sound of a dog vomiting on the rug. Twice.

Enormous, terrifying things are happening in the world, things I don’t want to or can’t talk about, and still I knit and buy toothpaste and make pasta.

That’s not a causal relationship, just parallel facts. The existential dread doesn’t make the mundanity more exciting, and the mundanity doesn’t mitigate the dread. Work is going really well. This is a great cup of coffee. My hair’s falling out. ICE just kidnapped a college student a few blocks away from my house.

I wish I could write about eye makeup. It’s stupid and simple and makes me happy, and, as my husband pointed out, “Sometimes things can just be good.” Of course there’s value in small joys. And in small irritants too. There has to be, against this backdrop. It all has to count.

But it’s hard to get the tone right.

Illustration by tumblr user coyoteprince. It’s not relevant to this newsletter, except that it’s relevant to everything.

On a related note, I may be sending these missives ever-so-slightly less frequently. Keeping to a monthly schedule has been good discipline the last few years, but there’s simply less energy available right now. I hope you’ll flex with me if I need to stretch delivery to every five or six weeks, in the future.

“The hairshirt doldrums”

Every time I share a Kate Wagner piece, I feel compelled to begin with “I love her writing so much”—a repetitive habit, but it’s the truth! This is a moving, thoughtful, and harrowing personal essay about brain injuries, rest and healing, identity and corporeality, society’s disdain for disability, and the (continuous) failures of the American healthcare system:

“The Digital Packrat Manifesto”

If you’re interested in breaking free of streaming services and corporate control of media, this is a good philosophical first stop on the (admittedly complex) journey. My household has been pivoting back to physical media over the last few years for plenty of reasons, many neatly explained in this piece:

Lightning round

• "To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults" [Jess Dugan]

• A guide to protesting safely [Fight for the Future]

• Copy, adapt, pass these around town [Canva]

• Some behind-the-scenes photos of early Sesame Street [tumblr]

• “The thin-obsessed world is growing more vicious by the minute” [Rebecca Shaw in The Guardian]

• An overview of weaving techniques with DIY supplies [tumblr]

March’s cause

My husband is running a charity stream this Saturday, March 29, starting at 10 am ET. Tune in on Twitch to watch him play way too much Mega Man for way too many hours. He’s donating $10 to Trans Lifeline every time Mega Man dies, increasing by $1 for every $100 y’all donate—so even if streaming isn’t your thing, it’s worth throwing a few bucks at the cause.

Buy this book

Ethan Marcotte’s wonderful and necessary You Deserve a Tech Union has a new look! His beautifully redesigned, fully self-published volume is available for purchase at Bookshop.org (and others). Truly, there’s never been a better time to read this one. Make sure you and all your coworkers have a copy.

Not to talk about the weather, but the weather’s been bad. It’s been cold in New England, of course, but we’ve also had a brutal pattern of snow, sleet, rinse, repeat—the landscape has built up alternating layers of snow, mud, and ice, like geologic striations, or a really cold sandwich.

On one particularly odd day this month, the falling snow turned to rain, which turned the top layer of it all into slush, which then flooded huge portions of the sidewalks and streets—then the temperature dropped so rapidly that the slush froze mid-current, perfectly preserving tire treads and boot prints. Everything became jagged and glassy, not a single even surface on which to step.

Live footage of real Bostonians in their natural habit

For me—someone who has to walk her dog several times a day, regardless of the conditions—this has made the past ten days somewhat hellish. Nothing feels safe. I don’t trust my own feet, or rather, the ground underneath them. I’m hypervigilant, fixated on the few inches in front of my toes, gauging its slickness, its solidity, its lies. I’ve learned which houses reliably shovel and which don’t, which fence posts will support me when I slip. And there are so few other pedestrians out—just me and the dog and these fraught, exhausting, tiny steps.

I am absolutely only talking about the weather.

Ice has a way of making me feel helpless, forever at its mercy, nothing to be done, endless winter. But no weather pattern lasts forever. These last few days, the ice has started to melt; the walks have gotten a little easier. It’s not spring yet, but it will be.

“Hope Is Important, But So Is Curiosity”

This piece from Charlie Jane Anders, about “curiosity as the opposite of depression, in much the same way that hope is the opposite of despair,” really resonates with me. The process and outputs of knowledge-gathering (in a similar vein to Celine Nguyen’s “research as leisure activity”) can be such a balm:

“Ursula’s list”

I swear this newsletter isn’t just an Erin Kissane fan page. (So what if it is.) (It is.) But she’s just kicked off a series deep-dive into Ursula Franklin’s philosophy of redemptive technologies, which I’ve been obsessed with for years. This first piece sets the stage and digs into the concept of justice:

“We…need worldbuilding?”

I loved The Traitor Baru Cormorant, but rarely recommend it, the same way I rarely recommend The Parable of the Sower—the literary merits are astounding, but the world it describes is too brutally current. But you might read this blog post from author Seth Dickinson; it’s about worldbuilding in fantasy writing, but its core lesson is applicable to UXD, to policymaking, to living:

Lightning round

• I would describe the best game I’ve played in a while as “Monument Valley with transliteration puzzles” [Chants of Sennaar]

• My latest tumblr obsession: fyblackwomenart [tumblr]

• God, I really love donuts [Mike Monteiro]

• Which chicken is more sincere? [Erika Hall]

• An excellent look at navigation design and the trade-offs of “directories” versus “neighborhoods” [Dan Brown]

• The amazing Designing Content Authoring Experiences is out and available for purchase! [Greg Dunlap]

Civic engagement round

• Oh, HELL yes, federal workers [We the Builders]

• On “the intentional weaponization of trauma” happening in the federal government right now [Rachel Dietkus on LinkedIn]

• “Fight those battles at home, on your own turf, with much more immediate impact.” [tumblr]

• Helpful scripts for calling right-wing officials [tumblr]

• Why public comments matter to federal regulations, and how to participate [Public Comment Project]

February’s cause

This month I’m donating to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which works “to increase the political voice and visibility of low-income people and people of color who are transgender, intersex, or gender non-conforming.”

Movie magic

Have you heard about White Meat? It’s the zombie movie that my friend David Dylan Thomas is hoping to make—about the bodies of enslaved people rising from the grave to devour white people—and I’m psyched for it. Help fund his proof-of-concept in its last week on Kickstarter—I wanna see this thing get made!

I’m listening, as I type this, to something called Vintage Radio Obscura. It’s a website that my friend Bill introduced me to earlier this week, and it’s essentially what it sounds like—a radio streaming obscure, twentieth-century music from around the world. I’ve heard lofi jazz from Suriname, heavy blues from Tehran, experimental electronica from the Netherlands, and something labeled French Algerian Balearic ambient psych fusion. I can’t get enough of this stream.

It dovetails nicely with my recent enthusiasm for old, terrible movies. I’m obsessed, it seems, with older media, anything with texture, as I’ve put it before—anything, really, made before algorithms dictated our art, our availability, our access. It’s not nostalgia, exactly—it’s not the media of my childhood that I want—but there is a longing for the past, free from digital rot.

Like many folks, I’m trying to determine how online I want to be, now, anymore. For the first time in thirty years, the benefits of being connected are starting to be outweighed by the costs. The surveillance, the misinformation, the AI slop, the enshittification, the corporate fascism, the end of content moderation—it’s dangerous to be online.

This panel was originally about cars, but if you squint it’s also about the modern internet.

I left Facebook a few years ago, then Twitter. Now I’m trying to leave Instagram—I’ve been complaining about the hostile user experience there for a while, but now there’s an added urgency to respond to Meta’s policies by withdrawing participation, withholding attention and data.

But, frustratingly, it’s not just a matter of switching platforms, or replacing a wronghearted app with one yet to be corrupted. Leaving Instagram means leaving behind old friends, distant family, strangers I’ve come to care for, people to whom I have no other digital connection. The moment I step away from that account, I lose them.

To stay connected, it seems we have to stay connected.

Everyone I know seems to be talking about connection right now—seeking it out offline, meeting more neighbors, touching more grass—while the internet that’s offered real, life-giving connections for three decades slips out of our grasp. We’re disconnecting to connect, connecting to disconnect; it’s increasingly hard to know where to go. Online or off, I’m heartbroken and I’m scared. None of this is about deleting one more app. It’s about accumulating grief.

Going offline is good. Diversifying our access points, our resources, our platforms—all good, all necessary. They’re small, individual actions in the face of systemic destruction, but what else can we do? So I’m looking for ways to minimize my engagement, block more ads, use more privacy-focused tools. I’m keeping my eyes open for hints of the old internet, the self-made web, the homebrews, the cultural preservationists, the weird hidden corners and wikis and forums. The points of genuine human interaction. I’m listening for obscura.

Now for some deeply thematic links.

“Bad shape”

Erin Kissane consistently has the most incisive thinking about online (and offline) community and making the internet a more humane place. Her most recent post is a sharp and crucial critique of the illusion of content moderation at scale:

“Take Back Your Digital Footprint”

If you’re interested in clawing back a little of your online privacy, Janet Vertesi has created an excellent series of how-tos. Her site’s a trove a resources, but she’s also been using the month of January to post one step per day, on topics like leaving Gmail, getting a VPN, and managing passwords:

“The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age”

Love this essay from Thea Lim about the way our actions are quantified and commodified online. The essay’s framing is focused on the challenges of being a working writer and the way the attention economy requires mining your soul for content, but, well, tell me that’s not true for most of us now:

“Casual viewing”

Will Tavlin’s brilliantly researched history of Netflix and their hell-bent directive to produce drivel will make you want to cancel your subscription, if you haven’t already:

Throwback read

whoops 

Technically this isn’t a throwback read, because, much to my surprise, I didn’t actually share it in an earlier newsletter. (I just spent twenty minutes scouring my archives, confused as hell, and it turns out I shared it in an essay I wrote on tumblr, in 2017, about the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Patterns of Force.” Feel free to read my thoughts on Star Trek’s failure to meaningfully interrogate Nazism. Doesn’t that sound fun!)

At any rate, here’s what I wanted to share (for no reason, no reason at all!): an essay from a 1941 issue of Harper’s called “Who Goes Nazi?” by Dorothy Thompson, about what kind of person is attracted to fascism and why:

January’s cause

Let’s stay on theme and give some money to the Internet Archive. Like everything else good right now, they’re coming under attack, and they really are one of the most critical organizations preserving the internet and fighting against misinformation and disinformation.

Stay weird, stay safe, friends.

After several off-Twitter years of having to work, really work, to find articles I wanted to read, suddenly I’m surrounded by a glut of content. It’s like everyone’s been hitting publish on their drafts for the last six weeks, and they’re not stopping. Is it because we collectively need more places to put our feelings? (Yes.) Is it the mass migration to Bluesky? (Also yes.)

Thought leadership

As a result, this issue is Oops All Links. But first, some news about books—it’s a great time to use up your pro dev budget for the year, or snag some last-minute gifts:

• I just rereleased my book Everyday Information Architecture. The content hasn’t changed, although I did update links and resources, and there’s a gorgeous new cover (still turquoise!) that Mat designed. And yes (as I said on LinkedIn), Walter Plecker’s still an asshole.

• Alisa Bonsignore’s new book, Sustainable Content, is now out! I’ve been excited for this one for a while, having read some early drafts—she’s talking about the cost of content in a way that no one else is right now. A necessary book!

• Mike Monteiro published a pulp version of Design is a Job, and when I say pulp, I mean pulp—the cover, yes, but also the paper, the interior layout, the typography, everything nails the brief in the best way, and is worth another copy on your shelf.

• A whole bunch of former ABA authors have been working hard to make their books available again without a publisher. Both Alan Dalton and Dave Demaree have been so kind as to track where to find all those wonderful titles as they reappear—tune in!

On to the links!

“We Need to Rewild the Internet”

Utterly obsessed with this article connecting the current state of the internet to ecological destruction, and the lessons we can take from the latter to rebuild the former (and we desperately need to save both!):

“Never Forgive Them”

Just as I was about to hit publish, Ed Zitron sent out another issue of his newsletter, and it was once again full of truth and beauty and rage (long read, very worth it). Quoting this part because I could have written it:

“Nearest Neighbors”

Really excellent piece on the challenges faced when trying to build a tech union, and why it’s worth it regardless of the outcome:

“A Man of Parts and Learning”

Incredible and riveting investigation into the origins of an eighteenth-century painting, and the ways that history and bias can mislead us:

Lightning round

• “Poem in the Shape of the Poet Beating Henry Kissinger to Death with Their Bare Hands” by Felix Lecocq [Taco Bell Quarterly]

• Do you need a fairy tale about losing a battle to a great evil and moving forward anyway? Of course you do. [Cat Valente]

• “We will destroy systems that fail to make a compelling affirmative case for their existence.” [Ali Alkhatib]

• A beautiful excerpt about hope from Great Tide Rising [Kathleen Dean Moore]

• “I’m interested in a robust & active hope; the kind that has dirty and calloused hands.” [Mariame Kaba]

• Compelling, thought-provoking study on global democratic backsliding [Journal of Democracy]

• “Designers aren’t trying to slow you down. They’re just trying to keep you from getting lost.” [Dylan Wilbanks]

• “I want a president” by Zoe Leonard [Whitney Museum of American Art]

December’s causes

Rather than picking one cause during this season of big giving, I thought I’d share some of the organizations where I’ve been donating regularly this year. Please join me if you can!

• Undue Medical Debt

• Internet Archive 

• Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund 

• Electronic Frontier Foundation 

• National Network of Abortion Funds

Wishing you all a safe and gentle start to 2025.

<3

Getting an early jump on this month’s newsletter because the American election next Tuesday has fully hijacked the brains of most everyone reading this, especially mine. I’m a bundle of live wires and there’s no way I’m going to be able to write or send anything next week on my usual schedule; nor will I hazard a guess as to the mental and emotional state of my surrounding contexts and communities for the foreseeable future. What a time to be alive.

As if that weren’t enough, I’m neck-deep in a client project, fumbling some health issues, and entering grief season—so when I say I didn’t write an essay for this issue, I hope you’ll forgive me. Instead, I offer the usual hodge-podge of links and brainwork and heartwork and nonsense.

May we all get through this [waves hands] together, and in one piece.

This is not fine.

“Making God”

This is a long, complex, fascinating essay by Emily F. Gorcenski about the historical connections between technology, Christianity, America, transhumanism, and AI. That description hardly conveys how much reading this made my brain spark (complimentary), and there’s no paragraph I can highlight that captures what a wide and brilliant net it casts, but here’s a start:

“The Unexpected Corner of Culture That Explains a Lot About the Election”

This timely Jess Zimmerman piece looks at how society uses fairy tales, mythology, and monster stories to police what’s “normal” and what’s “weird”—and what’s been changing about those boundaries:

Lightning round

• The Avian Vector Encyclopedia [Scott Partridge]

• “It’s not a technological problem. It’s never been a technological problem.” A comic by Juan Santapau [The Secret Knots]

• On ownership expiration dates and right to repair [PIRG]

• “Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist […and] .io—and countless websites—will disappear." [Every]

• The shared anthropological origins of constellation mythology [The Conversation]

• Delighted to see that Approachable Open Source by Brian Muenzenmeyer is finally out and about in the world! I edited some early drafts and can confirm: if you or your developer colleagues want to get into open source projects, this is an excellent resource.

• If you’ve canceled your subscriptions to the Washington Post and the New York Times on account of their endless iterations of cowardice, but still want to support journalism and publishing, may I direct your attention to ProPublica and Lux?

Throwback read

From issue #19

I went back to the newsletter I sent just before the 2020 election, hoping I had shared something, anything, that might provide a measure of anxiety reduction in 2024. I found “10 things you need to know to stop a coup” by Daniel Hunter. I don’t know that I can use the word “calming” here, but it helps me to remember that many people have been thinking (and continue to think) about this topic for a long time. Consider this pledge:

November’s cause

Let’s send money to the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies, which bills itself as “the only U.S. disability-led organization with a focused mission of equity for people with disabilities and people with access and functional needs throughout all planning, programs, services and procedures before, during and after disasters and emergencies.” Sounds damn necessary to me.

Workshop: last call

There are only a few remaining tickets for my virtual IA workshop on November 7! It’s a great excuse to spend the day thinking about anything other than American politics—plus you’ll learn all about techniques for organizing digital content. And remember, newsletter subscribers get 15% off registration with code NEWSLETTER15—I’d love to see you or your colleagues there!

Fix Your Sitemap: November 2024

An online workshop about content findability and digital organization

www.eventbrite.ca/e/fix-your-sitemap-november-2024-registration-1035292396427

I ran down a rabbit hole last week all about tagging (buckle up, friends). It started with “How to Tag Content Like a Fanfiction Author,” a LinkedIn post from information architect Connor Cantrell about what we can learn from the folksonomic tagging practices found in fandom communities like AO3. (Go read it, it’s great!)

It’s not the first time that information professionals have enthusiastically pointed and shouted in AO3’s direction. (I do it all the time!) AO3—or Archive of Our Own, a popular site for sharing fanfiction—is often held up as a shining beacon of taxonomies, and rightly so. It has to manage a massive volume of content for an audience that’s generating that content just as voraciously as they’re consuming it. The site’s entire proposition hinges on a search functionality that hinges on tags. AO3’s tagging system is nothing short of a modern miracle. It’s beautiful.

Me looking at AO3’s tagging system, or finding a really good Garashir fic

In Everyday Information Architecture, I wrote about another example of an enormous bank of user-generated content dependent on tag-based searching: Ravelry, a website for fiber artists to track, share, and research yarns and patterns. The complex tagging system—with thousands of yarn- and pattern-related facets—is what makes the site functional and valuable. And this is, I believe, what pushes the site to become more than just a list of brands or a personal log of projects—to become a community.

On both Ravelry and AO3, dedicated communities have been able to thrive because of a rigorous, high-quality, user-dependent, tag-based search system. It turns out that people stick around when a website actually just does the thing they need (*glares at the entire modern web*). And when people stick around—when they put down digital roots, as it were—they take the time to meet their neighbors. They learn user names; they create bookmarks; they carve paths and shortcuts. They build up the space to connect to others, and those connections in turn sustain the system.

But back to the rabbit hole: Connor’s post referenced a Vox article with a pretty good explainer for AO3’s tagging system:

(The story in that article is a whole kettle of fish that I desperately need to talk about. In fact, I did talk about it, but it pushed this already-long newsletter to a scary wordcount, so we’re going to have to save it for another time and place. Stay tuned!)

The Vox article linked me over to a 2019 Wired article by Gretchen McCulloch (author of Because Internet), also lauding AO3’s superb, community-based tagging work:

These types of articles are always a joy (love tagging, love fandom, love to see normies learning about both tagging and fandom), but I’ve also noticed a subtle but persistent thread in some of them: a kind of amazement that non-professionals could or would build such effective taxonomic systems. People seem surprised that volunteers would go to such lengths (of time, patience, skill) to contribute to and maintain these systems—especially when the rest of us can’t get professionals to use similar systems at work! Why do knitters get to have perfectly faceted search when our coworkers can’t even keep files straight in Google Drive? How come fanfiction writers get elaborate and effective tag-wrangling while our intranet folksonomies wither on the vine? How are these amateur sites achieving the kind of vehement user loyalty that most companies would sell their souls for?

I can’t say for certain, but I think it has something to do with human connection.

I think you get good systems from people who not only have a passion for the matter at hand—fanfiction, knitting—but also have a stake in the community. And I don’t know that it’s possible to get there under an exchange of capitalist value. I don’t mean that we can’t create good taxonomic systems professionally (we do!), or that we aren’t passionate about our work (I certainly am!). But if we are wondering why our coworkers or our users don’t treat our systems with the same dedication that we see in non-professional contexts, the answer might just be: work that is fundamentally about increasing profits for shareholders will never match the raw power of connecting with others about your blorbos.

Yes—we have some lessons to learn from fandom, from folksonomies, and from community.

Two quick cherries on top of this little tagging sundae: If you’re interested in learning more about the aforementioned tag wranglers, you can read AO3’s actual tagging guidelines. And if you’re interested in how people think about tagging their own work, a friend pointed me to a fun infographic on tumblr (apologies, the image does not appear to have alt text) in which a user broke down their tagging process into five categories: canon, format, tone, relationship, and theme.

Lightning round

• “Gender explodes more quietly than a fighter jet”: on the urgent necessity of queering our thinking about design systems [John Voss]

• Programmers are wizards [tumblr]

• “If they can’t fill those zombie towers, they have to trim their budgets with stealth layoffs.” [The Sentinel-Intelligence]

• Noel Fielding does Kate Bush [via Jess Zimmerman on Bluesky]

• “When you see the term mutual aid thrown around like a progressive synonym for charity, it helps to remember its roots—which are anti-establishment and anti-police.” [Lux]

October’s cause

Two this month, because the heartbreak is endless:

• Gaza Funds collects and shares crowdfunding campaigns for families trying to escape genocide. The homepage loads one campaign at random, or you can browse them all.

• Feeding the Carolinas, which I found through the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, is an emergency fund shared by food banks across the state—and they’re in desperate need of funding for disaster relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Helene.

Fix your sitemap

The October session for my FIX YOUR SITEMAP workshop sold out and spun up a waitlist, so I’ve decided to schedule one final session on November 7. This is the (actual) last time I will host this event, so don’t miss out! And remember, newsletter subscribers get 15% off registration with code NEWSLETTER15—I’d love to see you or your colleagues there!

Fix Your Sitemap: November 2024

An online workshop about content findability and digital organization

www.eventbrite.ca/e/fix-your-sitemap-november-2024-registration-1035292396427

As you probably know, I recently gained ownership of my book, Everyday Information Architecture, from my defunct publisher, which is: so exciting! Yes, and: so annoying! If I’d wanted to do things like “license fonts” and “manage distribution channels,” I would have gone the self-publishing route in the first place! Instead, I opted for a traditional publisher, so that I could focus on making words good instead of, you know, all the other labor that goes into printing and selling a book.

C’est la vie. Anyway, I (as well as the other forty-odd authors in this boat with me) have spent the summer updating book files to remove all references to my former publisher. That makes it sound a bit like I’m scribbling big ballpoint Xs on yearbook photos, but it’s really a simple legal requirement, and mostly involves revising the copyright page, creating a new cover, etc.

Of course, changing one little thing tends to necessitate changing other, sometimes less little things. For example, links were previously displayed in a shortened format managed by the publisher, so I’m updating that formatting—and while I’m there, I’m also checking to make sure the source links are still active, which (thanks to the ravages of time and billionaires) isn’t always the case. Updating and removing source links makes me wonder if I should be updating the research and replacing older references to Facebook and Pinterest and—you can see how this snowballs.

Which brings me to the links I want to share with you today! There’s an excellent quote in my book, originally tweeted by information architect Sarah L. Barrett in 2017: “Categories are both powerful and fundamentally arbitrary, which is a dangerous combination.” In my search to confirm that the tweet still exists, I realized that she’s continued to write very smart things in the intervening years over on Medium. A la: this post on the fascinating history of Australian railroads as a metaphor for information architecture work:

But, funny story: after I read that post—literally an hour or two later—I happened to be scrolling tumblr when a familiar number jumped out at me. 4 feet, 8.5 inches. Didn’t I just see that exact measurement? Lo and behold: the fascinating history of American railroads:

Check out both links for a one-two punch on the history and value of standardization. (Well, I’d click through for that!)

Lightning round

• “I prefer a future where everybody has good ideas to one where all the ideas are handed down from one fancy bitch.” [Charlie Jane Anders]

• Dan Brown on helping clients understand the trade-offs in design (and thinking out loud about his process!) [LinkedIn]

• An illuminating thread on language acquisition and learning goals [Twitter via tumblr]

• “A pedestrian cannot live on compliance alone.” [Sean Hayford Oleary]

Throwback read

From issue #16

In honor of Labor Day, here’s Ethan Marcotte’s 2019 essay, “Getting to work,” on the ongoing erosion of workers’ rights, particularly in the tech industry:

Five years later, capitalism continues to dehumanize us all, and the need for unions is still urgent and ascendant. If you’re looking for a starting point in your own workplace, get yourself a copy of You Deserve a Tech Union.

September’s cause

You’ve no doubt heard about recent voter suppression actions in Texas (and other states), particularly the raid on 87-year-old activist Lidia Martinez’s home last month. Donate to the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to help support civil rights, education, and voter registration in Hispanic communities.

Register for my workshop

After a summer break, it’s time for another edition of my online workshop, FIX YOUR SITEMAP, this time on October 16, 11 am to 2 pm eastern. All three sessions sold out this past spring, so reserve your spot now! And remember, newsletter subscribers get 15% off with code NEWSLETTER15—I’d love to see you or your colleagues there!

Recently I’ve been feeling disconnected from my work—or more specifically, disconnected from professional discourse and from my fellow design and content practitioners.

Some of that comes with being an independent consultant (*grizzled vigilante voice* I work alone); some of that is the result of a powerful need to distance myself from an increasingly self-destructive and dehumanizing tech industry.

But a lot of it is because I’ve lost many of the things that had previously kept me tethered to the practice. Twitter no longer exists, and professional conversations have only fractured across its replacements. The annual conferences I used to attend no longer exist, and even if they did, there’s still a pandemic on. And I no longer have my publishing work, which—here’s something I took for granted—used to function as an anchor, a consistent long-term goal to return to, while dipping in and out of short-term client projects.

It’s no wonder that I suddenly find myself reevaluating everything: how I approach my work, how I find clients, how I even fit anymore into a landscape obsessed with product optimization and corner- and cost-cutting. Being an independent information architect in 2024 has been frustrating, disheartening, alienating.

But it turns out the antidote to my malaise has been surprisingly easy to access. Do you want to know what it is? Are you ready? Buckle up for this one. It’s pretty nuts. Here we go. Look out. It’s:

Talking to people.

No, shut up, listen: If the problem is disconnection, the answer is to make deliberate connections. Wild, I know. So that’s what I’ve been doing: just talking. Having conversations. Asking friends to hop on a Zoom. Reaching out to colleagues I haven’t caught up with lately. Chitchatting! Connecting.

That’s hardly an earth-shattering notion, but it does require actual action—something more than sitting and waiting for others to do it first (or just scrolling LinkedIn). In fact, it’s so obvious, so simple, that it keeps repeatedly shocking me. Because the effects of these conversations on my brain have been anything but obvious and simple. I want to go around shaking people by the shoulders, yelling, “Did you know? Did you know you can just talk to people? On purpose? You can just ask them how they are and what they’re working on and they will tell you? And the conversations will be sweet and unpredictable and energizing and challenging and earnest and make you, just a little bit, fall in love with your work again?”

Because you can, and they will.

In related news: I’ve relaunched my website, and I’m looking for projects! If you’ve got a knot of complicated content—a messy website, a messy system, a messy product, a messy (*gestures at every team’s internal documentation*)—I’d love to help you untangle it. And/or: has it been a while since we’ve caught up? I’d love to hear about your work!

“Research as leisure activity”

I absolutely adored this piece from designer and writer Celine Nguyen, which has provided me (an ex-academic, poet, and tumblr enthusiast) with an articulation of why I rabbit-hole on the internet so much, and why that has value:

“The motel room, or: on datedness”

Architecture critic Kate Wagner on the concept of “dated” spaces—which has something in common, I think, with my recent thoughts on texture:

“The limits of ‘data-driven’”

I love data, but my experience working with self-proclaimed “data-driven” cultures is that you can’t do anything—not change a color, not relabel a page, not edit a button—unless you can prove, with numbers, that it will increase conversion. That’s tedious, and also misleading, since numbers can lie (or at the very least, not tell the whole truth). So I enjoyed designer Pavel Samsonov’s look at a recent “data-driven” mistake from Nike:

Lightning round

• “YOU are a fragment of the Lord God’s divine will made earthly in the form of A FOURTH-CENTURY GOOSE” [Grant Howitt]

• Incredible collages that I would like to lovingly refer to as horse tornadoes [Lola Dupre]

• Artist Robbii Wessen’s cover illustrations for The Absolute Sound magazine [tumblr]

• “It’s hard to explain the generational importance of Homestar Runner without sounding insane.” [Sam Thielman at Flaming Hydra]

August’s causes

This month, let’s donate to Islamic Relief USA, providing relief and development to a whole range of projects in America and abroad, including emergency support for both Palestine and Sudan. I’m also donating to If Not Now, a Jewish-led organization working to divest the American government from Israeli military interests.

Buy my book

As I mentioned last month, my book sales now support me directly. Self-publishing huzzah! You can get your copy of Everyday Information Architecture from IngramSpark or your favorite independent bookseller.

For the past two years, I’ve been watching bad movies. Really bad movies. The Room. Roger Moore’s Bond. David Carradine’s entire oeuvre. Old kaiju flicks. Grindhouse and made-for-TV movies and poorly dubbed Italian dystopias. B-movies and Z-movies. And it’s funny to me, not just because I’m enjoying objectively terrible films, but because I’ve never been much of a movie person at all, before this.

There are many reasons as to why bad-movie-viewing (celebrating, really) has become my new hobby, and I don’t have the space to unpack all of them here. But there is one factor I want to discuss, which is: texture.

Texture, as I think of it*, is a kind of experiential friction that’s absent from prestige television—from all modern** media, really, especially those productions driven by big budgets and streaming algorithms. The current aesthetic for movies, television, websites, and even physical spaces is, above all else, smooth. Clean. Shiny. Automated and seamless. Focus-grouped to within an inch of its life. Every experience seems to be striving for the same bright neutrality—palatable, inoffensive, sanitized.

It’s not that I dislike modern aesthetics! There’s so much good stuff to watch, truly.*** But the dominant vibe is still trying to replicate the Apple store, as though this is the only way to make number go up. Anything different, it seems, could make number go down, so there’s no room for mistakes.

I am so hungry for mistakes. I want to watch actors flub their lines. I want stilted dialogue and choppy editing and sour audio. I want a premise that no producer thought about for longer than their shower. I want boom mics that keep falling into the frame, and cameras that keep rolling long after someone should have yelled “cut.”

A bad movie is bad. It’s not a good viewing experience; it’s not good cinema. It’s cringe and it’s messy and it’s incoherent—but at least it’s something. At least it’s trying and failing. At least it’s a feeling, a take, a way to be in the world, and not just another polished calculation.

There’s more to say here—not just about film theory (probably), but also about capitalism, about cynicism, about what all that polish is covering up, about bread and circuses. But I’m running out of space, so in the spirit of the bad movies I love so, I’ll just end abruptly. Roll credits.

*There are probably better terms for what I mean, found in decades of film criticism that I’ve never read. Apologies for awkwardly describing my first beer critical concepts that have probably been exhaustively explored by smarter folks.

**I want to be clear that “texture” is not solely a feature of bad movies; I think what I’m describing is a feature of most media of the twentieth century, before algorithms ate our lives. Bad movies are just how I happened to get here.

***Like The Brothers Sun (starring our queen Michelle Yeoh) on Netflix, one of the best things I’ve watched in ages.

“I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again”

You’ve probably already seen this perfect essay, but I’m legally mandated to include it here because it’s both the most sensible and the most tonally appropriate piece of writing on AI, ever:

Lightning round

• Trauma-informed design principles and practices from US Digital Service designer and social worker Rachael Dietkus [InnovateUS]

• A good Bluesky thread on why machines aren’t actually thinking [Alexandra Erin]

• “I don’t want us to give in to despair” [Ijeoma Oluo]

• My friend David Dylan Thomas is making a “social justice horror comedy movie” that sounds unmissable [White Meat]

• Were you looking for 22,000 animated gifs? [Google Drive]

• Fight fascism / Wear a mask [People’s CDC]

Throwback read

“The Algorithmic Colonization of Africa” by Abeba Birhane in Real Life: This essay, prompted by observations from the CyFyAfrica 2019 technology conference, reflects on the relationship between African and western tech industries—and the lessons that we all (still) need to learn about ethics and humanity:

July’s causes

Let’s send money to the Sudanese American Physicians Association, to get emergency aid, healthcare, water, and food to genocide-ravaged Sudan, and to the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund, to get medical and humanitarian aid to Palestinian children.

Buy my (cheaper!) book

You may have heard that my (now former) publisher is shuttering (and without paying their authors months of overdue royalties! Such a good look). The silver lining? I’m now the sole owner of Everyday Information Architecture, and proceeds (after the printer/distributor takes their cut) will support me directly. To celebrate this new freedom/horrifying responsibility, I’m making the print version available to newsletter subscribers for just $22—get a copy now!

Every time I sit down to write about the ongoing fight I’m having with LinkedIn, I just end up writing in circles.

First, I can’t help but feel like it’s boring. Everyone, come quick! A major tech company is making a decision that’s bad for users! Girl, it’s been bad decisions all the way down for several years running. Complaining about how they’re deprioritizing links and wheatpasting AI bullshit to the bottom of posts is such a yawn.

Second, it’s the smallest of potatoes. It’s trivial as hell. We are in the midst of seemingly endless, algorithmically assisted atrocities of historic proportion—genocides, pandemics, widespread mental health crises, massive wealth inequality—and I’m whining about a website.

And third, everything I want to say is already being said better by someone else. I don’t mean I shouldn’t add my voice to the mix (we all should! Remember, ABC, Always Be Complaining about tech companies, out loud and in public and on purpose), but I’m having trouble right now finding a narrative thread that feels additive. Or maybe just coherent, at least for this channel. I have no problem shitposting about LinkedIn on LinkedIn (personal brand 2024), but every time I try to write a newsletter essay on the same topic, I devolve into keysmashing.

Because the endpoint of every essay I want to write about tech right now is simply: I AM SO FUCKING TIRED. WHY IS IT LIKE THIS. WHY HAVE WE DONE THIS. HOW DO WE UNDO IT. WHEN WILL WE REGULATE IT. WHERE IS MY GUILLOTINE

So here I am, doing what I usually do when I’m in this bind: I’m writing about the writing. And I’m sharing the good tech writing down below. And I’m wishing fervently for the death of the algorithm. (That last one’s not really about my writing process. It’s more of a lifestyle.)

“Oh, Whatever, Everything Is Totally Great For Writers Right Now”

Here’s an essay that halted an earlier version of this newsletter in its tracks, because it said everything I was trying to say, but funnier and sadder and sharper. Thank you, Chuck Wendig:

“Expectations Versus Reality”

Ed Zitron is one of the few clear-eyed tech journalists writing right now, correctly criticizing both the tech industry for its snake oil and tech journalism for its fawning. While he’s released several excellent essays this past month, I have to share this one because it makes me want to scream from the nearest rooftop (complimentary):

And also (more screaming):

Lightning round

• My husband made a zine about HTML elements and I helped (Multipage Version)

• Another great zine on the importance of masking in the age of protests (Rimona Eskayo and Sheyam Ghieth)

• AI as magic trick (Jeff Eaton)

• On the limits of empathy as a tactic for activism (Ijeoma Oluo)

• “If Ireland can do online passport renewal, why can’t the US?” (Don Moynihan)

• A current list of country requirements for digital nomad visas (Thrillist)

• Make-your-own piracy memes (youwouldntsteala.website)

Throwback read

From issue #13

“Trans-inclusive Design” by Erin White: a thorough, thoughtful, and practical exploration of some of the many ways we can make space for trans folks in our design and content:

June’s cause

Happy Pride! Let’s all send money to the Transgender Law Center, which works to “change law, policy, and attitudes so that all people can live safely, authentically, and free from discrimination regardless of their gender identity or expression.”

Register for my workshop

There are still some spots available for the last FIX YOUR SITEMAP workshop of the season, happening Thursday, June 13, 2–5 pm eastern. Student tickets are sold out, but there are tickets left at corporate, nonprofit, and self-employed rates. Remember, newsletter subscribers get 15% off with code NEWSLETTER15—I’d love to see you or your colleagues there!

It’s spring, finally, more or less, here at our urban farm in New England. The birds have been announcing it since February, but temps have stubbornly stayed low all this year, and we only had our last frost a week ago. Today’s warmth won’t stick around; later this week, we’ll be back in coats again.

The only tulip that survived April’s rabbits

I’m trying to do what I can with the sunshine while I have it: starting seeds, sifting compost, preparing raised beds. I moved cranberry plants into pots, away from where they were getting crowded out by blueberry bushes. I thinned daikon and kale sprouts, and severed another batch of raspberry runners (the raspberries were removed last year, and yet!). And just as I was getting ready to curse those neverending roots—oh, god, I saw the mint.

For years, we’ve kept a patch of encroaching mint at bay through a combination of barrier fabric and vigilance and sheer luck. But something’s changed, and, suddenly, it’s everywhere. I kept grabbing handfuls of dirt, shocked to see six or seven runners in my fist, each bright white and thick as a landline. I don’t know if it made a deal with the devil or what, but this mint has a newfound persistence that, frankly, makes me jealous. Girl, aren’t you tired?

May your gardens (whatever they may be) rid themselves of invasives as spring continues.

“The Trouble with Passion”

In a recent Anne Helen Peterson newsletter, Tyler Burgese interviewed Erin A. Cech about her new book, The Trouble with Passion: How Searching for Fulfillment at Work Fosters Inequality. Passion as the driving force behind career choices is not only a function of privilege, but also a tool of capitalism, and can make us complicit in our own exploitation:

“Swearing and Automatic Captions”

Developer Eric Bailey took several automatic transcription tools (like those used during Zoom meetings) for a test drive, and found that too many are censoring language as they go—which is an issue for both accessibility and self-expression:

“You Need to Make This Right”

If you work in UX, you’ve likely heard about UXPA’s recent lapse in judgment in granting its International Lifetime Achievement Award to someone the community widely regards as harmful. Though the award was rescinded, UXPA has failed to take responsibility for their mistake; worse yet, they have been defensive and lashing out in response to criticism, and have worked to silence Chelsea Glasson, who has been calling attention to their lack of accountability. Read the whole story (and sign the open letter):

Lightning round

• “Women talking is one key to ending capitalism.” (Mandy Brown)

• Our favorite anti-buzzword site is on its way back—add your submissions, and revisit the tragically-still-in-use classics (Unsuck It)

• I adore these narrative comics, especially “To The Cashier Who Asked How I Am Today” (Jordan Bolton)

• A thoughtful zine for Covid in 2024, to click through or print (Hazel Newlevant)

• A quick and dirty breakdown of how to write storybeats for a 12-page comic—with lessons applicable to any kind of storytelling, imho (tumblr)

• I’m thrilled to see that the extremely excellent Design for Cognitive Bias is now available as an audiobook! (David Dylan Thomas)

May’s cause

This month I’m donating to MPower Change, a grassroots organization whose purpose is “to empower American Muslims to realize their faith values and translate it into local, state and national policies that safeguard the freedom to move, work, and be Muslim.” I encountered their work through solidarity efforts with the recent student protestors. If you can’t donate right now, consider signing some of their letters to university administrators.

Register for my workshop

There are still some spots available for the last FIX YOUR SITEMAP of the season, happening Thursday, June 13, 2–5 pm eastern. Remember, newsletter subscribers get 15% off with code NEWSLETTER15—I’d love to see you there!

Fix Your Sitemap: June 2024

An online workshop about content findability and digital organization

www.eventbrite.ca/e/fix-your-sitemap-june-2024-registration-887629934027

It’s been a minute since I had exciting professional news to announce! WELL GUESS WHAT

CHICKEN BUTT

I’ve launched a new workshop called FIX YOUR SITEMAP. It’s a practical, interactive look at content findability and organization. We’ll discuss questions like: How come no one can find anything on the website? What even is a sitemap? Why should your boss care? And, crucially, why do grocery apps hate me personally?

This workshop is for web workers of all stripes, in content, design, development, and product, especially those who are actively working on the information organization of their site/intranet/app. No prior IA experience required.

I’ve led dozens of workshops for in-house design teams and conferences, but this is the first time I’ve published one independently—I’m out here on my own, baybee. You can support me by sharing this workshop opportunity with your friends, colleagues, reports, and teammates. (Here are some handy reposts for LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Bluesky.) And if you want to sign up yourself, see the bottom of this newsletter for a subscriber discount. Many, many thanks for your support, friends!

“Models All the Way Down”

Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp have created a fascinating snowfall piece that is both explainer and warning regarding how LLMs are trained—on flawed, unmoderated, marketing-heavy datasets from algorithms that just plain fuck up:

“From Tech Critique to Ways of Living”

I admit, I have very little stamina for academic philosophy (I blame grad school), but this Alan Jacobs essay about technology criticism is well worth the read. If you’re a fan of Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology, it’s an absolute must:

“Why we should stop describing design as ‘problem solving’”

Apologies for a second academic-ish piece, but this 2022 essay from Hugh Dubberly—about design thinking’s history, adulation, and very real shortcomings—articulated a lot of free-floating questions I’ve had since design school twenty years ago:

Lightning round

• “The rise of inspiration-sharing platforms might be making me, and everyone else on the collaborative internet, more focused on publicizing our taste rather than feeding it.” (It’s Nice That)

• Tamsyn Muir’s short story “Union” (2015) gave me strong 1960s scifi vibes (Clarkesworld)

• Fun with procedurally generated fantasy maps (Red Blob Games)

• Solidarity for those of us still living in the pandemic (The Sick Times)

RSS feed

Listen, real talk: I don’t know how RSS readers work. I don’t! But I do know that a lot of folks appreciate an RSS option. Beehiiv has provided me with no functionality for this beyond a generated link, so help yourselves and vayan con Dios: https://rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/UTUG4cosDb.xml

April’s cause

This month I’m supporting Jewish Voice for Peace, an intersectional group working to combat both antisemitism and Palestinian oppression. I’m also looking into the work of JVP Action, a sister PAC that works to elect leaders who align with JVP’s values, and to pressure elected officials who don’t (like some of mine, unfortunately).

Register for my workshop

FIX YOUR SITEMAP happens Tuesday, May 28, 3–6 pm eastern—and you fabulous newsletter subscribers can get 15% off with code NEWSLETTER15 (so creative)!

Fix Your Sitemap: May 2024

An online workshop about content findability and digital organization

www.eventbrite.ca/e/fix-your-sitemap-may-2024-registration-875397626867

Part of the newsletter transition last month from tinyletter to beehiiv meant migrating the back issues—manually, copying and pasting six years’ worth of posts. While reviewing the old magics, I came across plenty of writing that certainly wasn’t my best (ah, the cruel memory of the internet). But I also spotted links to articles I’d read that I adored, writing that really affected me or perfectly captured a cultural idea. In the age of algorithms, it’s embarrassingly easy to lose track of content once it’s been read (ah, the cruel memory of the internet).

How does one cultivate a long-term digital library when media consumption is oriented around newness? A newsletter like this, I suppose, is part of such a project—it collects and curates—but it doesn’t really solve the challenge of resurfacing and revisiting. To that end, I am going to try including a throwback link in each issue, just as a reminder that five-year-old content still matters.

Since we’re walking down memory lane, I might also mention that last month marked ten years since I quit my job and began consulting. (Did I typo that as consluting? Yes. Is that an amazing typo? Yes.) Ten years is a long time, but mostly it’s a round number, and I’m endlessly grateful that people have been paying me to organize their websites and intranets this whole time. I’m good at it, and I like doing it without having to attend all-hands. ¡Feliz aniversario!

“This Christmas Party Was So Fun That Now I’m a Communist”

I don’t know how to explain Brennan Lee Mulligan if you don’t know who he is—comedian? game show contestant? professional TTRPG player? But I recently came across something he wrote—an essay? a piece of fiction? actual reporting? I’m starting to realize that he’s hard to quantify—and it’s rich:

“Behind F1’s Velvet Curtain”

Cycling journalist Kate Wagner recently attended a Formula 1 racing event, and the resulting essay went so hard that the publisher removed it from their site right after it went up (gods bless the Internet Archive). It walks the same road as Brennan’s piece, but with a slightly different energy (press credentials):

“Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster”

I wasn’t familiar with Brett Scott, but I was immediately obsessed with his thoughtful post about the growth economy, the illusion of convenience, and technocratic capitalism (so, uh, I’m sensing a theme to my reading lately). It’s the kind of writing that makes me nod vigorously several times a paragraph:

Lightning round

• There’s so much to say about generative AI (Ethan Marcotte)

• Truly sensible and necessary advice on how to build your brand without burning out (Charlie Jane Anders)

• Saying goodbye to Voyager I, 15 billion kilometers away (Doug Muir)

• A thorough guide to making numbers more accessible in web design—not just for users with dyscalculia, but for everyone (Laura Parker, Rachel Malic, Jane McFadyen)

• “Handling Death Gracefully in Digital Experiences” (Jason Grigsby)

• I hope everyone’s seen, and started using, donotreply.cards (Dan Hon)

Throwback read

From issue #7, “The Automation Charade” by Astra Taylor: a sharp, socialist feminist look at the capitalist need to overpromise automation (or “fauxtomation”) and elide the labor that makes technology possible—even more salient now than in 2018:

March’s cause

Seems like a good time (no reason, haha, nothing special!) to donate to the Algorithmic Justice League, an organization committed to shedding light on the harms of AI. They work to raise awareness of the need for “affirmative consent, meaningful transparency, continuous oversight and accountability, and actionable critique” of AI systems. Sign me the hell up.

Support this book

I’m so excited for this forthcoming book from Greg Dunlap, Designing Content Authoring Experiences. I had the privilege of reading some early drafts, and I can tell you that this is going to be a great and necessary read:

Show this book some Kickstarter love, and let’s get some better CMS setups!