I write about the overlooked, the contradictory, and the quietly absurd.
Read Notes in Your InboxSubjectively ozjective essays, now on Substack. Always free to read.Short essays on design, technology, and the cultural habits that don't quite fit a hot take. Some are field notes from Montreal, some are arguments I've been having with myself for a while. Each carries a short summary, a reading time, and a handful of related reads.
In 1959 an East German army club painted over the third stripe on its Adidas boots rather than admit the socialist state made worse footwear. Sixty-seven years later, UEFA pays its top-ranked club thirty-six times what it pays its bottom one, by statute. A look at what concentrates the game.
Nine in ten writers want to be paid when their books train a model. One in eight already uses one. The last American slide rule was made in 1976 and handed to a museum, and the engineers who swore by it bought calculators anyway. Refusal and adoption have always shared a desk.
A complaint arrived through the contact form of blogroll.blog about the wrong flag on a listed blog. The flag was drawn by a standard, the standard follows the United Nations, and the United Nations inherited a fight from 1971. There is no neutral country list. The dropdown has already chosen.
The flight into solo work is sold as freedom. Read through Marx, Wilde, Luxemburg, and the wages-for-housework feminists, it looks more like an old machine rebuilt inside the home, where the worker now pays to work, teaches the machine to replace them, and calls it independence.
A man I could not understand, a footprint calculator, a rainbow logo in June. Three versions of one marketing move. Name a debt, sell it back to the individual as a feeling, and keep the money. A settler's essay on the virtue we can afford.
In early 2025 more people died in Canada than were born, and the country grew anyway. The shortfall was filled from outside, as it now must be. A look at how Canada engineered its dependence on immigration, and why Quebec, Germany, France, Türkiye and Japan meet the same arithmetic and deny it in different ways.
The alarm goes off at a number the body never agreed to, and we call the result a personal failing. Social jetlag, the daily gap between biological time and the schedule imposed on it, is near universal and quietly expensive. Some economies lose almost three percent of GDP to being tired.
You can hide stress from a colleague, a partner, even from yourself. The keyboard has been taking notes the whole time. On the oldest witness we own and the newest surface it leaks onto.
A 2023 US Surgeon General advisory put chronic loneliness alongside smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. The architecture that used to hold strangers together did not collapse. It was redesigned out of the floor plan.
May 1 was a fire and a maypole long before it was a slogan. The eight-hour workday demand asked for three blocks of time. Two got walls around them. The third quietly slipped through the calendar and ended up somewhere else.
AI is the first technology that makes labour optional to capital. The working class keeps debating distribution when the real fight is over ownership of what replaces us.
Moby Dick gets retitled as 'How One Man's Obsession with a Whale Destroyed His Crew'. The grammar is older than the algorithm, lifted from grocery-aisle paperbacks decades before the recommendation feed showed up. The feed only taught us, slowly, that the templates work.
A toddler swipes a paperback and waits for it to do something. Across the room, an adult thanks the language model and apologises for a typo. Two category errors in opposite directions, and the second one is becoming harder to see.
A soccer club spends a decade building the most expensive analytics department in its history and ends up in a relegation fight with a roster full of sprinters who cannot pass. The numbers were never the problem.
A monthly design subscription costs the same in San Francisco as in Sarajevo, but the dollar does not. A famous sandwich index was built to measure that gap, and regional software pricing quietly tried to answer it, until users acted on the logic and the companies pulled it back.
You slide the contract back. The men in fleece vests look at it like unfamiliar fruit. What a socialist startup does when venture capital shows up.
Trotsky wrote one of the sharpest portraits of New York in 1917. Can valuable work come from a source you would otherwise reject?
Haptics shift how buttons feel. Colour and scent shape decisions. The emotional layer of interfaces was never in the spec but always in the experience.
Every generation fears new tech will ruin the next. From Socrates on writing to the 1916 push button, the alarm rarely predicts what actually gets lost.
Public forums emptied out while bots moved in. The last genuine argument, the last mind actually changed, nobody marked the moment the room went quiet.
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