KAFKA FOR LOVERS

Stalin decided what was good science. Millions starved. Mendelian genetics was branded a “whore of capitalism,” and geneticists were forced to renounce their views or lose their jobs.... https://zeldman.com/2026/07/11/stalin-decided-what-was-good-science-millions-starved/

The Secret If I learned one thing in 25 years of running design and education companies, it’s that idealism isn’t a business strategy. If you wonder why my partners and I had to shut down organizations we and lots of you loved, refer to the previous sentence.

Memories Can’t Wait—or, How I Learned to Keep Worrying About the Web The web is still the best hope we have for a durable, shared memory. But it requires us to be gardeners, not merely tenants....

The End ON THIS DAY in 1971, Pamela Courson found Doors frontman Jim Morrison dead in the bathtub of their Paris apartment....

The Human Story of the Open Web STOP ME if you’ve heard this one: The members of an extended family spend years curating a shared online photo album. Then the website they posted on vanishes, flushing their collective memories away forever....

Designed for a Dead Language Every language app in your pocket inherited a teaching method built for Latin. Understanding why that happened is a more useful design lesson than anything the apps themselves can teach you.... https://alistapart.com/article/designed-for-a-dead-language/

When my brother Pete and I were kids, and our parents were out of town, we ditched school for a week and cut an “album” by recording backing tracks to my dad’s reel-to-reel, then live overdubbing on different instruments and capturing the whole mess on a cassette recorder. Here’s what happened next. https://zeldman.com/2026/06/17/underdubbed/

Look back in anchor tags: a partial review of my site’s 31-year visual history before diving into the new design.... https://zeldman.com/2026/06/04/remembrance-of-zeldman-coms-past/

She’s the Boss. She is not here to eat. She is here to ensure my compliance....