I always come across interesting things, from various sources. Publishing them here occasionally as bookmarks for myself, at least. I did find in re-starting this blog that old links suffer from incredible rot, but I'm an optimist.Detailed story about American Samoans in Alaska being whipsawed by election law, which few involved even understand. The desire to tell a national story about election fraud (with few facts) leads to personal trauma for innocents: Americans by Name, Punished for Believing It.
Where is Design Heading? is still in an open tab, not yet read, but written by someone with enough history (Mark Curtis) that I want this context. Part 2 promised in the future.
“Type your postcode below to find out how confidently you can say you live in London.” Data-driven and yet still tongue-in-cheek. from James Darling. https://london.abscond.org/
The Genius Whose Simple Invention Saved Us From Shame at the Gas Station is behind the WSJ paywall, but let’s recognize James Moylan (deceased) for adding an indicator to automobile instrument panels with an arrow for the gas tank side. So simple everyone followed, fortunately!
Months old, but new to me: The Best Line Length is great because it’s both a TL;DR (88 characters is the answer given) and an exploration in more depth about why. This is nerdy internet at its best.
Relax for the same result isn’t my typical approach to anything. Which is maybe why I needed to read this short note and I’m still thinking about it. Also, Derek Sivers has crafted lovely URLs for his work: https://sive.rs/relax
We are living in a time of polycrisis. If you feel trapped – you’re not alone in The Guardian. Never heard the term polycrisis, but feels right. It may be hard to envision distant, positive outcomes amid a crisis, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. “We’d be foolish to stop planning,” said Hershfield. “We can still think about the values that are important to us and plan around them.”
I recently finished Inventing the Renaissance by Ada Palmer, and learned a lot, and appreciated the rare academic-but-approachable tone. (Even if I got lost among all the names.) I have not yet read this blog post from 2013 that was recommended to me “The Borgias” vs. “Borgia: Faith and Fear” (accuracy in historical fiction) but posting here with ambition to finish.
I’m deciding what to do about the link rot in my archive, so these words hit home from Introducing Revived: Breathing New Life Into Old Stories. More than one-third of web pages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible. Between dead outlets and dead links, journalists too often get a 404 message when they navigate to stories they wrote years ago. Stories they were proud of. Stories that should have stood the test of time.
Title says it all: EURASIA GROUP’S TOP RISKS FOR 2026 and the first one is already true. Risk 1: US political revolution Trump is attempting to dismantle checks on his power, capture the machinery of government, and weaponize it against his enemies, making the United States the principal source of global risk in 2026.
Crowdsourcing project I may have known about at one time, but now I’m more curious than ever. “Help transcribe Library of Congress documents. Volunteers create and review transcriptions to improve search, access, and discovery of these pages from history.” By The People with the Library of Congress. Don’t know if I’ll waste (invest?) any time here, but if I’m going to be part of a Mechanical Turk, I’d do it for public data and information.
Not new, but good list to use in pushing harder for what really matters. Extreme brainstorming questions to trigger new, better ideas includes ones I hadn’t seen before, such as “No tech support If you were never allowed to provide tech support, in any form, what would have to change?”
Origin of the World Map is a fun seven-minute video about the Catalan Atlas, via Kottke linked from BlueSky. Maps rule.
I barely overlapped with Zain Rivani at Cloudflare. I left the company a few months after Zain joined in 2016, after nearly six years. His historical note published in January 2026 rings true about the company, overall. Success comes from hiring people who give a shit regardless of their pedigree, then giving them something genuinely worth caring about: problems so complex they require second and third-order thinking and missions ambitious enough to seem impossible.
Hiten Shah continues to publish and share and think in public. He’s still leading CrazyEgg (among other things). Since I help a few smaller organizations with their websites, I found this article useful How to Create a Website Using AI (From Start to Finish). Context: (1) Published January 8, 2026…some of the content is timeless, but some will age less gracefully (2) Despite the headline, the article is clear that “AI won’t do everything for you. You still need a solid website plan for your business.” (Of course, you can have AI help you plan…)
San Francisco opportunities to help volunteer for focused cleanup efforts around the city, organized by CivicJoy. There’s also park cleanups.
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That’s more than enough for now.