A reading of two short passages, one from The Art of Public Speaking, by John Rippingham (1814), and the other from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ‘The Comic’ (1875). By way of Wikipedia on the ‘sad clown paradox’ as shared on Mastodon by John Overholt.
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Given so many big things to be angry about, let’s indulge in some petty beefs instead. I offer four.
A pattern: it’s the first Tuesday of a month, and I have a tidy newsletter drafted with a few useful links and passages, perhaps an upcoming event. This is the newsletter from the mirror world, the one I wish we were in. Twelve hours or so before sending, I delete the draft. It is not suitable to the moment we occupy.
This month, as in the months and years and decades preceding, there is much to be angry about. The future is here, super poorly distributed. There is enough of everything, far too much of it accumulated into the grubbies of the least impressive people on the planet. The Trumpy secret police runs rampant. The rest of the administration is busy too. They know they don’t have much time and they’re not wasting it. What they’ve knocked down in years will take decades to rebuild, if we’re lucky enough and obstinate enough to have that chance. I believe things will get better, and soon, but that they’ll get worse before they get better.
It is with this in mind that I chucked my plans to share the following with you—the beautifully laid-out indieweb invective A Website To End All Websites; then National Design Studio offers a rebrand of government services, a riveting discussion of the aesthetic overlap between the Apple retail experience and the administration’s impetus to ‘simplify’ public sector services (read: to obscure, remove, make scarce); and finally the essay Science at the Edge of the World by Cat Hicks, which had me pondering my own childhood trips to the Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I might mention that I’ve resumed the podcast, with short episodes publishing each Wednesday. I could write that newsletter, and I in fact did, and then I scrapped it, in favor of this one:
Given so many huge things to be angry about, I want to wallow in some small things to be angry about. Inconsequential irritants rather than existential threats. Let’s indulge, together.
Virginia Satir’s ‘temperature reading’ is a useful method I’ll describe in more detail down the road. A key step is ‘complaints with recommendations’, and it is in this spirit that I offer the following, my beefs, with recommendations.
You know the one. ‘The Summer Day’. This:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
It’s a truly great poem. But it is totally overdone as the poem to read aloud at your gathering. We’re a month into 2026 and I’ve heard this thing twice already.
Recommendation: Other poems are available. Many of them very good, many of those also written by Mary Oliver. Pick up a book of poetry and find any other poem to read.
Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.
There are several things I could say about this quote. A basic problem is that is a fabrication, invented in whole cloth—and pretty clumsily at that—by noted self-help clown Stephen Covey, instead of being written or spoken by Viktor Frankl.
A board member at the Viktor Frankl Institute offers this excessively polite explanation:
The true origin of the quotation is somewhat involved. To put it shortly, the author Stephen R. Covey used to recount that he found the quote in a library book and thought it fitting to describe Frankl’s views—but he did not note down the book’s author and title.
Recommendation: when recording inspiring or useful quotations, (1) don’t make them up, and (2) find an original source, or as close to it as you can. For example, see my own little quote barn.
Ghost is the best content management system I’ve used in 30 years of publishing on the web. But it’s missing one thing: simple, automated welcome e-mail(s) when someone joins the e-mail list. Instead, there is a clumsy thing where it can try to send someone to a page on your site where you can put a welcome note. Guess what? I want the welcome e-mail! When someone signs up for the free e-mail newsletter (as you may now be regretting three beefs deep), I’d love to be able to send them a little e-mail saying: thanks, welcome, here’s a thing or to two to do to ensure future mails get delivered as you like.
This is such an absurd missing feature that Lex Roman brought it up as the very first drawback of Ghost in their recent content management system knife fight/comparison video.
Recommendation: Ghost should add this feature. That’s it.
This whole thing. Lord above, I’m tired of it. For example, one is supposed to avoid em-dashes because they’re a tell for LLM-generated text. Then people bravely continue to use em-dashes for the same reasons they were useful in the initial, actual texts that tech companies stole and used to ‘train’ their things that generate randomized texts.
Ditto other alleged tells—title case at hazard, now? Semicolons? Lists, especially those of three items?
Here’s how you can tell a piece of text was extruded from an LLM instead of written by a human being: it’s boring as shit. It is about nothing. I don’t mean in the relatable, directly observational way that ‘Seinfeld’ was (at risk of dating myself here; remember that thing about decades-old web pages above). It is about nothing in the sense of referring to nothing, being based on nothing, an expression of nothing. No sensation, no memory, no specificity, no intelligence, no personality, no person. Nothing shall come of nothing.
Recommendation: Don’t read things that are boring. Stop reading the instant you are bored. That will help you dodge a lot of LLM-generated writing, as well as a bunch of bad writing, full stop.
What are your beefs? And what do you recommend? I’d love to know.
Two ways to make an 8-page mini-zine using stuff you already have—and three reasons why you might do this.
Today, two ways to put together a specific type of mini-zine—an 8-page cut-fold-&-glue apparatus you can make on letter paper using any printer on hand. These are:
But first: ↓
This is a simple but annoying method. Start with a ready-made template for your word processor of choice, and then fill in the blanks to lay out your zine. Here’s an example in Apple Pages, using these wonderful templates from Jess Driscoll:
What you may detect in the screenshot is that laying out pages 5 through 8 in this method is comically irritating. The advantage is that it’s simple to do: fill in and print. Word processing upside-down is possible but not recommended. As a result, I prefer the next method instead.
This method uses delphitools’ amazing online zine imposer to lay your zine out for printing. Specifically, the tool takes a set of appropriately-sized individual pages and gives you a printer-ready PDF in a layout similar to what you saw in method 1.
Use this thing by first selecting your paper size and then noting the dimensions it gives you for the zine pages. Next, in your software of choice, set your page size to these dimensions, and begin. You’ll want to create 8 pages, including front and back cover, and then export them as images to pull back into the zine imposer.
Options here include Keynote or other presentation software—or pretty much anything that can lay out images and text on pages.
I use Canva, where it’s simple to create pages at the right size and adhere to whatever aspects of the style guide seem important at the time. My only advice is to get the physical size of the page onscreen to roughly match what it’ll look like in print. Given Canva and my particular combination of hardware, that ends up being a 33% zoom.
If it seems like this section is a glorified link to the zine imposer, you’re right. It’s a great tool (and part of a larger collection of web-based goodies worth investigation).
Here are a few places to look for starting points or inspiration:
If you want to put your contact information on the back page, use a QR code generator. Point it to your web site, a social media profile, or newsletter sign-up page. Make sure you list the exact page it’ll take someone to and what they’ll find there.
Responding with attention, kindness & action as people return to work in difficult circumstances.
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It’s the first Tuesday of the month—January 6, 2026. I remember where and how I was five years ago today: holed up in my office, up in the finished attic of our previous home, cold but cozy, laboring desperately and fruitlessly to finish some mildly overdue items for a client, making no progress whatsoever, instead watching video feeds on C-SPAN and texting furiously with Liana and various friends. My consulting partner on that project (hi Jennifer! miss you & hope you are well) created a little wiggle room for us that day. People die only the once, but ideals fall again and again, and either way the absence and grief is felt whole-heartedly.
Yesterday was the first day back at work for many of us who had the good fortune to enjoy some downtime or time away around the end of the year. I felt tense going into the weekend, not from apprehension about returning to work but rather from worry about what they’d do on—or for—the fifth anniversary of January 6. I needn’t have waited. In 1992 Leonard Cohen sang that he couldn’t “run no more with that lawless crowd / while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud.” In the current circumstance the killers skipped the praying in favor of congregating in front of a wall-sized display with results of a search on X dot com for ‘Venezuela.’
Square that with the expectation that work happens underneath a context-free, ahistorical capitalist realism dome; in this dome the past is about two months long and the future extends only as far out as the end of the quarter or the next round of asinine bulk layoffs. I see cracks in the dome. I wonder what might shine through.
How to respond in these conditions? I see three ways:
These three are incomplete, but it’s what I have, and how I’m operating right now.
2½ readings on seeing failures & responding to them. Celebrating my accomplished & wonderful pals.
Cat Hicks in Fight for the Human:
The experiences of folks who find themselves fighting on a technical battleground—privacy, security, infrastructure, or even developer experience—have a lot of common themes. There’s a psychological fortitude that goes into becoming a Champion, a clarity of seeing the consequences that other people don’t like to see. Most people systematically underestimate the problems, failures, fragility, and errors around them … Researchers tested people’s estimation of failure rates across more than thirty domains and found a consistent “failure gap.” Champions may just be the people who have learned to overcome the typical failure gap in a particular domain. They’re like our sociocognitive field scouts, with sharper prediction skills for the disasters most of us can't tolerate imagining for long.
Cat Hicks
The paper Hicks mentioned is this (freely available to read online or download): Eskreis-Winkler, Lauren and Woolley, Kaitlin and Kim, Minhee and Polimeni, Eliana, The Failure Gap (August 04, 2025). Across seven studies, this team looked into responses to failure:
People closest to a failure—those with the clearest access to information about a failure that occurred—will tend to be those with the strongest motive not to share it. This could seriously impede the accessibility of information. For example, a reporter looking to write a story about an individual, a company, or an organization, may find that the most knowledgeable and powerful sources more freely share information on what is going right, versus what is going wrong.
If you’d rather not read the entire, dense paper, read Fred Hebert’s summary and discussion instead.
I’ve been thinking about how and why bad news related to likely failures or recent failures does not get communicated inside organizations, or is deliberately hidden from view; hence my recent posts on shifting baselines and undiscussables. As various initiatives don’t pan out—in the typical case of mandated ‘AI’ usage, because they won’t, and can’t—people are left the unenviable task of ‘easing in’ the bad news (to use Argyris’ phrasing).
This is the part where we bask in the accomplishments of my friends, pals, and comrades. An incomplete, roughly chronological list:
Beyond this, various friends left jobs (by choice or otherwise), started new work or adventures, and have done the right things for themselves. My family is healthy and mostly doing stuff they like. Walk into our home and beware sewing scraps, LEGO bricks, and books piled underfoot. Meanwhile: a steady, year-length drumbeat of protest. I love all of this, and this is what I celebrate.
Making sense of ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ in the world & in the workplace.
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The original tagline for this site and newsletter was ‘continuous improvement in a world that’s one damn thing after another.’ Today let’s revisit that last bit. What does it mean for a world to be one damn thing after another? And what does this have to do with the potential for continuous improvement, or the possibility of provision?
In 1995 fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly (by this time 20 years into his career and already a prolific author) wrote a one-pager published on the back page of an obscure biology journal.
This was the location of one of the biggest, gloomiest ideas going. Pauly described a ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ affecting his profession:
This syndrome has arisen because each generation of fisheries scientists accepts as a baseline the stock size and species composition that occurred at the beginning of their careers, and uses this to evaluate changes. When the next generation starts its career, the stocks have further declined, but it is the stocks at that time that serve as a new baseline. The result obviously is a gradual shift of the baseline, a gradual accommodation of the creeping disappearance of resource species, and inappropriate reference points for evaluating economic losses resulting from overfishing, or for identifying targets for rehabilitation measures.
Pauly viewed this as a generational ‘shift’ to be countered with careful data collection and analysis. These countermeasures would occupy much of his time and publication schedule for the rest of his career.
When I first read this article some years ago, it really stuck with me. It seemed to explain a lot. But I wondered:
Eventually I poked around the archive. No surprise that Pauly continued to think and write about this big, gloomy idea.
In 2011—sixteen years after ‘shifting baselines’—he wrote:
Without firm rooting in scientific, quantified knowledge of what we now have, or had, we will inevitably experience the ‘shifting baseline syndrome.’ As I have described, successive generations of naturalists, ecologists, or even Nature lovers use the state of the environment at the beginning of their conscious interactions with it as the reference point, which then shifts as successive generations degrade that same environment. The story of the frog kept in water that is heated very slowly comes to mind here, and if we are not careful, we are going to get boiled as the frog does: a runaway greenhouse effect would do the job nicely.
I found here in the 2011 writing the broadened scope, the boiling frog, and the slow-but-fast progression of human-caused climate change that is the defining feature of our century.
The decade-scale example is excess deaths caused by COVID-19. We never did a great job tracking mortality due to COVID. Instead, we mostly stopped counting 3 years ago, and mostly stopped estimating one year ago, as the body count neared 30 million. There is a huge impulse to forget and to move along, although insurance companies remember. (Thanks to Susannah for these links.) Is this another aspect of shifting baselines? Despite, alongside, and during this unsurpassed tragedy, we continue to care for the people in our lives and provide and labor in community. What the hell else would we do? Emerson wrote that “we learn geology the morning after the earthquake.” This is true; also true is that only a few days or years pass before the “cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea” become as unremarkable as any other feature of our surroundings. A disaster as invisible as any other.
Pauly made an additional point—also revealed to me by my friend Summer:
For baselines to shift is not always bad. There are many stupid things that must be forgotten even if they have been the rule for thousands of years. Getting rid of these notions will free our minds and enable us to concentrate on things that matter, including some important things that we should remember.
Forgetting, remembering—and in Pauly’s discussion, forgetting some things in order to remember others. All baselines can shift. It seems that most will. But a few must not, lest we lose our footing during the ongoing scramble toward liberation. This is the idea. It is big, and it is gloomy.
This is not mere theory. I see it in my daily efforts as a consultant supporting people in their work and in their workplaces.
I don’t have answers to any of this. But I find it helpful to remember that these are the conditions people are in.
Let’s give Pauly the last word. He ended his 2019 book Vanishing Fish with an offer of advice, which—after all of the above—I was eager to accept. His advice is honest and true. I suppose time will tell whether it is sufficient. Pauly wrote:
If I have any advice to give, it is that one should have friends and work hard.
