Category: Essays
Unbreathable Air
When it comes to outdoor activities, my personal mantra has always been, “there is no such thing as bad weather.” Very few weather-related things could keep me from getting out there.
Prior to today, the only thing that could keep me from my daily run was icy conditions. Add one more to the list: wildfire smoke.
We are in a code purple with air quality pushing 300 here in Pittsburgh. It smells like the world is on fire and you can’t see more than a few hundred yards away.
I run to be healthy, not to feel like I’ve smoked a pack of cigarettes afterward.
Reading is Thinking
Seth Godin on how work and meeting dynamics have shifted due to the proliferation of Powerpoint-driven content:
If you have something to show us, send it before the meeting. If there’s a memo, we can read it in advance, or afterward. In fact, if the memo is really important, simply pause the meeting while we all take two minutes to read it. We know how to read.
I’ve been doing this for a while and find the most productive meetings start with a detailed pre-read. Give people the appropriate context before the meeting so they can come prepared to discuss the topic intelligently, ask the tough questions, and make the most informed decisions.
A meeting brief or memo requires people to read (a fleeting skill, I know!), but reading requires people to think and comprehend and formulate thought. And those are the things we want, er need, informing our work.
Mid-2026 Bangers
I know we’ve only just passed the halfway mark in 2026, but here are a few of my favorite records released so far this year. I will be curious to see if and how these show up on my year-end list.
- bitknot by feeble little horse
- URGH by Mandy, Indiana
- A Short History of Decay by Nothing
- Cost of Living Adjustment by Cola
- Singin’ to an Empty Chair by Ratboys
- EXPO by Ulrika Spacek
- A Wave That Will Never Break by WU LYF
- PANCHO EP by Pancho
- Unexpected Violence by School Fair
What’s on your mid-year list?
Refreshed & Rejuvenated
We are back after spending a week on Bonita Beach in southwest Florida. I really needed this vacation. Work has been intense and this trip came at precisely the right time for my mental health. It was the first time in my career that I left work completely at home. No laptop. No work phone. Completely disconnected. And it was awesome.
While in Bonita, we just relax. Lots of time on the beach. We intentionally keep the itinerary empty and everyone just does what they feel like doing.
My favorite thing to do is take an early morning run on the beach. Our spot is just north of the Barefoot Beach preserve, which offers miles of undeveloped beachfront. I run this every morning while here and it is amazing. I can run for 2 hours and not see another human. Most mornings, the only other living things I see are porpoise, birds and jumping fish. In all my years vacationing there, I had never run the complete island in one go, so I decided to do that this time.
The point of a vacation is to return refreshed and rejuvenated. This trip did that for me and I’m ready to get get back after it now that I’m home.
The Boy in the Tree
The air was thick as I stepped outside. It wasn’t raining, but it felt like the sky could open up at any moment. It was quiet. The world hadn’t fully awoken to greet the day. On mornings like these – most mornings – I never know which route in my standard rotation of routes I will run. The first decision is to go left or right at the end of my driveway, and the rest just comes naturally based on how I’m feeling. Today I went right.
When I go right, I want hills. The first mile of this route is all uphill. The steady upward incline allows me to take it slow, work into a rhythm and center on my breath. Today I was quickly able to get into a breathing cycle with my cadence. The first step toward a much needed flow state.
I make a point to spend at least one hour outside each day because I need it mentally. It’s my way of getting away from screens, the news, personal and professional commitments, and anything else that vies for my attention. My hour outside is where I go deep into my own mind, rejuvenating it so I can give the rest of the day my all.
Cresting that first hill, I caught a glimpse to my left of two bare feet gently dangling a few feet above wet grass. I followed the feet upward, to a pair of legs that were attached to a young boy sitting in the crux of a tree branch. This sight surprised me because the boy couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8 years old and it was still early. Most of the neighborhood was still sleeping. Except for us.
In the boy’s hand was a phone. His head hung, neck krinked, watching something on the screen.
I thought about this image of this boy in the tree with the phone for the next hour as I finished my run.
Initially, I was overtaken with elder disappointment. “Kids these days,” I thought. “These goddamn phones,” I thought. But the image of this boy in the tree with the phone would not let go of me. Questions began creeping.
Why was he up so early? Why was he outside? Why was he alone? Why climb a tree and not just watch the phone on a couch inside? Did his parents know he was outside? What was he watching in that tree? Does he do this often?
The questions kept coming and as I neared home I had no answers. Maybe the boy in the tree with the phone was outside for the same reason I was. Maybe this was his escape. Maybe he needed this escape the same way I needed mine. That’s the amazing thing about nature and the outdoors. It’s there for us in whatever way we need it. It asks nothing about the way we use it and demands nothing in return.
Today, I needed the hills and breath. He needed the crux of the branch, the feeling of bark on his back and dew on his feet.
We are the same.
Reflecting on Another Year
I turn 48 today. At this age, birthdays have become just another day. This morning was similar to yesterday and it will be similar to tomorrow. I woke, had a cup of coffee, got outside for a bit, went to work, and spent time with the folx I love.
If you search June 26 on this site, you’ll find a bunch of birthday posts. It’s interesting to see how the voice in those posts has evolved with me over the years. In 2013, I posted about disconnecting to celebrate my 35th year. Back in 2021 I posted about seeing a birthday twister. And last year I posted a list of 47 things I’ve learned in 47 years.
Over the years, I’ve realized that the anticipation and excitement younger me once had for this day has given way to deep reflection and gratitude.
This coming year, I want to lean into mindful reflection and gratitude wherever possible. In order to grow my practice in these areas I am beginning a routine of posting a daily haiku. A temporal snapshot of my gratitude. My first haiku is posted here and, from today onward, each day’s poem will also hit the front page of this site for 24 hours until the next one arrives.
I am appreciative of my family, friends, health and career, and I want this daily practice to reinforce that sentiment. Here’s to another 48 years powered by love, gratitude and positivity.
36 Hours in Chicago
We came to see Jimmy Eat World, Sunny Day Real Estate and The Get Up Kids, but the show was cancelled last-minute due to weather. Some intense stuff blew through right at showtime.
We still had a great time during our abbreviated stay. Now we are packing up and heading off to Detroit to catch tonight’s show.
Pacing at Rabid Raccoon 100
My fist pacing experience was so much fun and extremely rewarding. For the first time in my running journey, I wasn’t running to achieve a personal goal, but to help someone else achieve theirs.
When Rob asked me a few weeks ago to share the last 25 miles of the Rabid Raccoon 100 with him, I instantly said yes because he was instrumental in helping me crush my first 50 miler back in 2020. I’ve wanted to return the favor for a long time.
Congrats on crushing your first 100k, Rob. Thanks for asking me to join the adventure. It was an honor to share those miles with you.
No Trust to Burn
The incomparable Koven Smith asks some important questions about how AI might impact the museum sector, particularly key differentiators like trust and authority:
I’ve always been somewhat skeptical of the “museums are the most trusted institutions in the universe” trope, but here is a situation in which a loss of authority in a very small situation has the potential to lead to a real collapse in the purpose of the institution.
This is very similar to how I’m starting to think about customer-facing AI at my current company (a retailer), where we strive to be the most trusted in our industry. Activating LLM-powered experiences is a decision that should not be taken lightly. We should take a measured, thoughtful, proactive, and research-based approach, as Koven advocates for in his post.
Nobody trusts Walmart or Target or Amazon the way our customers trust us. Let them rush; they have little trust to lose. The bottom line is that we need to be careful rushing to implement in customer- and employee-facing experiences, so as to preserve – and ultimately grow – the trust we’ve earned over decades with both groups.
I still maintain: a company brave enough to publicly lean away from AI and lean into humanity as a differentiator could have one hell of a winning strategy.
When It Rains
You’ve likely heard the saying, “When it rains, it pours.” Well, it rained on me yesterday. Poured, actually. Metaphorically. I didn’t have an umbrella or rain jacket, so I got wet. Also metaphorically.
I’ve learned that when this happens in life, it’s valuable to pause, reflect, understand the root cause, and internally commit to addressing the things I can control that factored into my soaking experience. Sometimes those things are difficult to acknowledge because sometimes you make your own weather.
We’ll all get caught in a downpour at one point or another in our lives. The key to getting through these drenching moments is having a framework in place that acts as a rain barrel to collect the water and store it until it can be used to grow a garden.
Metaphorically, of course.
The 2026 Pittsburgh Half Marathon
I’ve run 13.1 miles countless times. I’ve done it in fun runs, training runs and as part of longer races like marathons and ultras. But as I get older, I’m growing to love the half marathon distance as race in and of itself. The training is (usually) manageable. The distance lends itself well to both building speed and mental strength. And there is definitely still some risk of things going south on you if you don’t prepare and execute well.
Thankfully, my race today at the Pittsburgh Half Marathon is evidence of preparing and executing well:
- I PR’d with a time of 1 hour, 39 minutes, 23 seconds
- My average pace was 07:31 minutes per mile
- I placed 698th overall in a field of 14,011 runners
- In my 45-49 age group, I placed 26th out of 949 runners
I’m really pleased with this result. My only goal going into this race was to beat 1 hour, 45 minutes – the time I clocked at the last half marathon I ran back in December. Shaving 6 minutes off that time is more than I was expecting, but I guess all those interval workouts and tempo runs payed off!
The weather might have helped. It was a crisp 34º at the start. Once the sun came out it warmed up a bit, but for the most part the cool temps prevented me from running hot.
The vibes of the race may have also played a part. Each neighborhood - from the Strip District to the North Side to the West End to the South Side – brought the energy and cheering. There was rarely a point during the 13 miles that didn’t have a group of people ringing cowbells, shouting encouragement, and sending positivity. When I started to feel the fatigue around mile 11, those vibes definitely helped me bring it home.
So, in a nutshell, I’m now hooked on the half marathon and looking forward to finding another one to train up for. If there’s a race on the eastern seaboard you absolutely love, hit me up.
The Retailer Rush
This article from Modern Retail about the retailer rush to develop and integrate their apps into the OpanAI & Claude ecosystems caught my eye.
Having worked in retail for more than a decade, I understand this rush because the industry is reactive. Most of the time it goes down this way: Target or Walmart or one of your competitors does something, then you rush to copy-cat as fast as you can for fear of getting ’left behind.’ This is exactly what’s happening here, especially when you consider the marketing narrative around AI these days.
Having products or services surfaced in ChatGPT or Claude, and then having those apps facilitate a checkout on your behalf is alluring for retail leadership because all they’re hearing is that this future is inevitable. (It’s not.) But if we pull on this thread and think about how this path might evolve, I think there’s a lot of risk associated with it. From the article:
Still, some retailers, brands and other app developers are hesitant to hand off customer information and payments to OpenAI, according to Bloomberg, which also reported that developers have complained about a tedious app approval process, a buggy coding system and the lack of usage data.
If the AI hype comes to fruition, we’ll be mediating our entire existence through these apps eventually. In my opintion, this is our generation’s version of the snake oil pitch. When it comes to retail, if we optimize for the snake oil we’re being sold we will have willingly embraced a layer of obfuscation between our customers and our products. We will have relinquished the most important aspect of retail: our customer experience. If we don’t control the quality and consistency of our customer shopping experiences, what differentiates us?
We will have also lost any position of control over margins & profitability because we will be at the mercy of our new LLM marketplaces. This would create immense market pressure on our business. Just look at Amazon for how this might pan out long term. How is that going for business owners other than Amazon?
I think retailers need to think critically about this rush to embrace a mediation of their shopping experiences and business conditions by LLMs. Curiosity is one thing. Curiosity should be always be encouraged to understand the potential for emerging technologies. But rushing to embrace the vibe-based future we’re being sold is a concerning play in my mind.
The Violence of AI
Tante pulls no punches in this blistering critique that likens “AI” to a fascist, political, borderline-religious project with a mission to shift power & agency away from people and organizations toward centralized power structures. This mission is often rooted in violence:
The first form of violence “AI” depends on is the violence of data acquisition: “AI” depends on scraping and accumulating all you can get – including taking against people’s explicit will and without their consent.
This is must-read for anyone thinking critically about AI and/or working to subvert it.
Outsourcing Our Cultural Memory
Anil Dash explores why NASA published the Artemis II photos on Flickr, of all places:
By having the public’s images preserved in an independent archive in standard formats, we increase the likelihood of future generations being able to access accurate copies of these historical records.
As I get older, cultural memory and the long-tail archive of our digital lives is on my mind. This site serves as that personal archive for me, and at individual scale, it works. I manage the infrastructure, pay the bills and nurture its development.
Anil makes the good point that at institutional scale, self-hosting is often not a viable option. NASA is naturally more concerned with flying humans into space than managing a website, so the outsourcing of this archive to a responsible, ethical 3rd party is the wise choice, if not the only choice.
I’m glad Flickr is still here and they’ve made commitments to cultural longevity with archival intent. We need more platforms to think this way to ensure the cultural artifacts we’ve been producing for the last several decades remain accessible for generations to come.
Chop wood, carry water
I spent the majority of the weekend working with my hands. It felt good. It felt natural. My mind was clear. I was tired and sore by the end of the day.
When the severe storms blew through last week, we had several trees down. All the limbs missed our house, thankfully, but we were left with a large amount of wood to process. Last weekend was about cutting up the trees and hauling away debris. This weekend was about splitting and storing what the chainsaws diced up last week for our summertime supply of campfire wood.
Before splitting, though, I needed a spot to house the wood so it would stay dry and season appropriately. I could just stack it at the back of the lawn and put a tarp over the pile, but Jilly and I didn’t like the aesthetics of that approach. We wanted something that could dress-up the yard a bit while storing the wood.
Saturday morning I grabbed some pressure-treaded 2x4s and my circular saw and got to work. I am not a carpenter. I’ve done very little construction work, but I decided to just vibe out on the build. Eight feet wide by four feet tall, capped off with a corrugated tin roof. What I ended up with might be laughable to artisan woodworkers, but I enjoyed the creative process of making it with no pre-set plan.
After the firewood rack was complete, it was time to start swinging the axe. Sun’s out, guns out. What a workout. It was warm and I sweat. By the end of the weekend I had blisters on my hands from all the chopping and there’s still more to do.
Throughout the weekend – as I assembled the structure, swung the axe and stacked the wood – I kept returning to the Zen proverb ‘chop wood, carry water.’
Before enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment? Chop wood, carry water.
The mundane, foundational work of life is important because it reinforces mindfulness, presence, consistency, discipline and humility. This labor did just that. My work this weekend was a meditation through movement and I’m looking forward to splitting the remaining logs, although that will happen after some well-deserved rest.
I Feel the Need, the Need for Speed
My ‘breaking 1:45’ half marathon plan called for 7 miles with intervals this morning. It was 15ºF when I left the house to stretch. I wanted nothing more than to stay indoors with a warm cup of coffee and ease into my day.
The icy air froze my nose hairs as I started the warm-up. An easy 2 mile warm-up still requires you to inhale at rhythm. You know that feeling when you’re about to sneeze but can’t? That’s what the first few breaths felt like.
I passed another runner going the opposite way during the warm-up. We gave each other a nod, acknowledging each other’s dedication and crazy.
Mile 3. Go time. My interval target was 7:00/mile. Within a few yards of starting, my lungs felt like they were on fire as I gulped frigid breath to stay on pace. Ladders, up and down. 400, 800, 1200.
It was a helluva workout. I’m hoping these tough speedwork sessions pay off in May.
Ethical Streaming from the Cloud
We all know Spotify and other big tech music streaming services are evil. They take advantage of artists, their algorithmic business models are designed to flatten the cultural bell curve, and they directly support ICE. I quit using Spotify ages ago, but since that decision I’ve struggled to find a cloud-based streaming platform that was ethical to artists, aligned with my personal political worldview, and accessible to me everywhere and on all my devices.
My first move after Spotify was to switch to Apple’s iTunes Match, not to be confused with Apple Music (which has a similar business model ickiness to Spotify). Rather, iTunes Match sync’d my locally-stored music collection with Apple’s cloud servers, making my purchased music collection accessible on all my Apple devices. This worked well for me for several years. I was able to purchase digital music directly from artists or via ethical outlets like Bandcamp, import the files into my music library on my laptop, and poof – the music would be available on my phone.
Somewhere along the line though, iTunes Match broke. I think it coincided with the release of iOS 26. After that update new additions to my collection would not sync to my phone. I was heartbroken.
My next step was to sync my collection to my phone via a hardwire, like a Neanderthal. This was inconvenient but manageable, and I found the offline availability of the collection to be wonderful. My collection is large, however, and I needed to curate what I was syncing to my phone due to storage capacity. I needed to find a better way to have access to all my music.
Enter Navidrome. I never read blog post comments, but a note from Thomas Brand on Manton’s post about Spotify burnout was enough to peak my interest. Navidrome is a free, open source personal streaming service. After a few minutes reading the docs, I decided to give it a go.
The first thing I needed was a place to host the Navidrome instance. I chose PikaPods because they have an out-of-the-box managed integration with Navidrome and the hosting cost estimate for a collection like mine was ~ $3.00 per month. The price is right!
Creating pod and installing the Navidrome app took me about 10 minutes. I uploaded a Nirvana’s In Utero as a test to see how it all worked. Listening in the browser on my laptop, it sounded great. Could Navidrome become my radio-friendly unit shifter?
But what about listening on my phone? Navidrome doesn’t have a native iOS app, but there are several options that support streaming from Navidrome. After playing around with a few, I settled on Amperfy which is open source, feature-rich and seems to have the most elegant UI of the mobile apps I tried. Yep, works as advertised. Francis Farmer did indeed get her revenge on Seattle via Amperfy’s CarPlay integration as I drove to pick up my kid last evening.
With a quick, multi-device test complete. I bit the bullet and transferred my entire collection via SFTP. It took most of the night, but I am now live with a cross-platform, multi-device, ethical streaming workflow that I think will serve me well into the future. I’m excited to have access to my entire collection on all my devices again.
Just Pull Up
Pull-ups are an activity I’ve wanted to be good at for a long time, however the truth is I hate them. I’ve tried to work them into my exercise rotation many times but they’ve never stuck. For as long as I can remember I’ve despised doing them, probably because I’ve got a runner’s body with toothpicks for arms.
Well, 2026 is the year I will get better at pull-ups. A few days ago I bought a pull-up bar and hung it from the door frame of my office. I chose this location because it’s unavoidable as I pass through this threshhold numerous times a day. I wanted an undeniable way to establish muscle memory and create a habbit.
For the past few days, each time I enter and leave, I do as many pull-ups as I can. Entering in the morning, pullups. Grabbing a refill of coffee, pullups. Hitting the head, pullups. Leaving for the evening…you get the picture.
It started on Monday when I could not complete just one good-form rep. Today is Thursday and I just completed five pull-ups as I entered the room to sit down and write this, which feels like a small milestone. My goal now is to progress to the point of being able to do ten perfect-form pull-ups.
I’m not sharing this to humble brag, although I am proud of the progress. I’m sharing as an acknowledgement that the human body and mind are amazing things. All I needed was the persistent reminder to keep trying. Repitition and consistency are the enablers of rapid growth and progress. I’ve known this, but it’s interesting to see tactile results so clearly in just a few days.
The Promise is Perception
Casey Newton in Platformer:
One of the more famous papers about artificial intelligence last year came from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI models. In July, it published results of a randomized controlled trial studying experienced open-source developers. It found that when they use AI tools, completing tasks takes them 19 percent longer than when they go without. That was surprising enough. But the real twist is that when these same developers were asked what AI had done for them, they reported that it had sped them up by 20 percent.
This was a fascinating dive into the professional productivity that’s promised by our AI overlords. We’re starting to learn that much of this productivty is perceived. I’ve felt this in my own professional life, and have drastically reduced my use of Copilot at work because I found myself spending far too much time reviewing and correcting incorrect output from the model.
I also found many of the outputs, when accurate and correct, were just OK and simply not up to my professional standards. So much of my daily work requires communicating effectively through writing – explaining value and impact to leadership; acting as a translation layer between engineering, design and the business; and aligning stakeholders to broad, complex initiatives – all of which need to be buttoned-up to my highest standard. I’m simply not getting that quality from any AI model I’ve tried.
A Running List of Human-First Orgs
Last week I posted about the differentiation opportunity for companies and organizations who publicly lean into humanity and away from artificial intelligence. Since posting that, I’m starting to notice some examples of this in the real world.
I think it’s important to raise the visibility of Companies With Guts. Therefore, this post is will become an evolving list of organizations that take a public, pro-human, anti-AI stance. If you know of good examples, please share via email and I will update the list here ASAP.
- Bandcamp (via reader email)
- Procreate (via reader email)
- San Diego Comic Con (via 404 Media)
- Vivaldi (via reader email)
Last updated 2026-01-21
On Superhumanity
Scott Belsky writes about the promise and vitality of ‘Superhumanity’ in a world that’s becoming ever-obsessed with artificial intelligence. Several of the ideas in this piece resonate with me.
First, I think Scott’s definition of taste as a combination of INPUTS, FILTERS and DISCERNMENTS is really smart. As AI evolves, humans will remain tastemakers. How we lean into the experiences we seek out (INPUTS), the things we actively choose to ignore (FILTERS) and the decisions we make (DISCERNMENTS) based on our inputs and filters will be the key to thriving in a post-AI world.
He rightly points out that establishing human taste will not be enough. We will need to activate our human agency to act upon our tastes. This often resembles – and in the post-AI world it should continue to resemble – audacity. Our human-centric audacity that we can achieve the impossible or be the first to accomplish something. AI can only know the past, but humans can envision a future.
I also thought his jazz-based approach to using AI is unique and worth considering:
You must engage AI with flexibility rather than having a fully formed sonata in your head and no willingness to deviate from it. You must discover the “instruments” AI is best at, and you must complement AI with what it lacks - your taste, agency, and natural human tendencies.
I highly recommend this piece, as well as Scott’s other writing, for anyone who thinks critically about technology and our human experience living with it.
Humanity as Differentiator
I just spent a few days in New York City at NRF 2026, the premier conference for the retail industry in the United States. For those unfamiliar, NRF is a behemoth – nearly 40,000 retail practitioners descending on the Javits Center each January.
My primary observation: AI wasn’t just present at this year’s event, it dominated everything. Every session. Every conversation. Every exhibitor pitch. Everything was presented through an AI lens. You couldn’t avoid it, even if you tried.
And I did.
NRF 2026 wasn’t billed as a “retail & AI” conference, but that’s exactly what it was. AI optimizing your supply chain. AI promising store operations efficiency. AI running wild on product catalogs to enable agentic shopping. Robots massaging data so websites are easier for other robots to navigate.
I wasn’t surprised by the saturation. Just look around. AI is being shoehorned into our daily interactions and companies are desperate to brand themselves as AI companies. The US economy is being propped up by AI investment, and retail is claiming its share.
What struck me was the opportunity cost.
In a landscape where every company fetishizes AI – in their products, in their operations, in their marketing – there’s a massive opening for companies brave enough to lean the other direction. Into humanity. Into the natural world. Into what makes us distinctly human.
I caught glimpses of this alternative path. Ryan Reynolds’ keynote touched on it. My friend Justin Weinstein’s talk about grocers serving their communities embodied it. But these were exceptions in a sea of sameness.
Here’s what I’m imagining: What if a company stood up and publicly declared they would resist artificial intelligence in their operations? What if they said instead they’d invest in people – the people who make the company work and the people the company serves? And what if they went all-in on this message in their marketing?
That decision would instantly differentiate them in a meaningful, substantive way.
The irony of everyone chasing the same AI strategy is that it eliminates competitive advantage. When everyone optimizes for the same thing, nobody stands out. But a company that deliberately chooses humanity over automation? Right now that’s an admirable decision and a signal customers can’t ignore.
I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of company I’d get in line to support.
The Kindness Keeps Me Here
Sarah Samms Velázquez writes about finding unexpected kindness and a long-term home in Pittsburgh after years of wanderlust:
However, in an alleyway in Pittsburgh, I woke up to homemade soup, leftovers and even a camper-sized crockpot sitting on my truck’s bumper. In Pittsburgh, folks say hello and rarely turn their nose up at one another. In Northern Appalachia, we value the blue collar and the stories that come along with hard living; and do I have some stories to tell. I sometimes wonder where I’d be if I never found the Paris of Appalachia. Probably still searching, with a pack on my back – waiting for home to find me.
This is very similar to my own personal experience, although my journey to land in this city took place about 15 years prior to Sarah’s. I didn’t ride into town as a stowaway on a freight train (legendary!), but my arrival was in the cab of a broken-down tour van.
Pittsburgh is the kind of place where strangers look you in the eye. Where people help each other when there’s no benefit other than a thank you and smile. There’s an element of ‘realness’ here that I’ve found to be very different from most other cities. I think this realness can be distilled down to the kindness that Sarah writes so eloquently about in her piece.
That kindness is what keeps me here. And that kindness is what the world needs more of right now.
Welcome to the News Desert
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will cease operations on May 3, 2026, leaving the region without a daily print news publication. The paper has been operating as the cornerstone of reliable media in the area for nearly 240 years. This is a massive blow to the news ecosystem here in Western Pennsylvania.
Block Communications Inc. communicated the decision to shutter the paper to employees via a pre-recorded video. This is a spineless, timid act that’s unfortunately par-for-the-course for the Block family who spent years fighting against the rights of PG workers only to lose that fight in the Supreme Court of the United States.
The announcement to cease operations on the immediate heels of the Supreme Court verdict reinforces that the Blocks believe there’s no point in maintaining a valuable asset for a community if they can’t exploit the workers who toil to create that asset.
Yes, the media landscape is shifting. The news business is difficult. Journalistic institutions are reeling. But we collectively have to find a way to keep journalism alive and accessible for communities. It’s one of the most important things we can do for our future.
User Error is a Myth
In a meeting earlier today, a colleague used the term user error. My ears perked up. After nearly twenty years building digital products, I’ve heard this phrase countless times and it never sits right.
This is how I’ve found it usually plays out: Someone uses our product in an unexpected way. Something breaks or doesn’t work like they thought it would. A product team member then asserts:
- “They’re using it wrong.”
- “The app isn’t designed to work that way.”
- “They just need to tap this button first.”
- “The software is functioning as designed.”
Next comes the verdict: user error. The person is making the mistake, not us. They need to adapt to our design, not the other way around.
This mindset is poison for great product work.
Every unexpected behavior, every “misuse,” every bug report from someone navigating our product differently than we imagined aren’t errors. They’re signals. They’re opportunities to learn about actual usage patterns, understand what people are really trying to accomplish, and iterate toward something better.
The phrase user error lets us off the hook too easily. It places blame on the person trying to get something done rather than on the system we designed. It assumes our mental model of how the product should work is the only valid one.
Users don’t care about our mental models. They care about their goals. If our product makes it easy to take a wrong turn, that’s a product problem, not a user problem.
There’s no such thing as user error. There’s only unwillingness to acknowledge that we might have gotten things wrong and a refusal to recognize opportunity to make things better.