Finished reading: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor 📚
Blogs
Taste the Music is a new audio series exploring why artists are driven to create. The first episode features storytelling and songwriting by friend of the blog Whitney Mann, where she chronicles her experience getting “the yips” onstage, and how she worked through it and picked up her guitar again.
Amid renewed calls for the death of feminism, or of millennial feminism or whatever (TERF alert), I found this old victory lap from the era where it looked like new media had permanently paved the way for a newer, fresher publishing industry. It also tips the hat to Jezebel’s place in the fray, “the first online women’s publication to successfully combine feminist writing with a for-profit motive.”
I’m collecting mentions of the old blog while they still exist bc lot about this cohort is hagiography written well after the fact. I don’t think I saw it way back when, from the first time I “quit blogging” in 2006 by Rebecca Traister. As ever, a big part of social media is quitting social media.
Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the audience being sold, they’re also a labor force co-producing the content that attracts more audience.
Looking back at the feminist blogging era with the benefit of my current experience, I’d argue that what made Feministe different from our peer blogs was the commitment to convening the audience and sharing the platform without packaging it up for or selling to advertisers. That was largely my boundary – with as much market space as it commanded for the time, it was never monetized at scale, though individual contributors were free to use it as they wanted to build their audiences. We eventually committed to a small advertising carousel to cover hosting costs.
I recall someone balking at me for refusing to broadly monetize when I spoke at Blogher in 2005, but it was a hard line, for better or worse.
While poking around for some examples of media coverage of the early blogosphere, I found this mention from the time Liza Jervis of Bitch Magazine did a guest stint at Feministe. For context, Feministe hosted regular guest blogging seasons where we opened our comparatively gigantic platform to much smaller bloggers. What we didn’t pay in money, we could offer in audience and attention, with mixed results. Several people who guest blogged found the audience and attention experience terrible – which began its own media cycle.
The reality is that having a platform on Al Gore’s unregulated internet means you face a lot of gross commentary from in and outside the proverbial house. Invitations for guest blogging were happily accepted, but the attention wasn’t reliably durable for writers and their goals. This reflection in Salon, “In Defense of Ladyblogging,” recaps what it’s like to have a massive platform on the open internet: “For every commenter who thoughtfully critiqued my message, there would be one who’d say I was a tool of the patriarchy, and another who’d accuse me of abusing my class privilege. It’s a vibrant, razor-sharp community and I was honored to be a part of it, but my point is, if explicitly feminist blogs are the only acceptable online outlet for feminists to inhabit, we’d get exhausted mighty quickly.” This is a limited telling, but there are some nuggets here that forecast the commentary around Lindy West’s book – particularly around the pressures of being smart in public while also being a person who wants to be liked and included.
A collection of articles that answer the question, “Why have a personal website?”
Testing a new feature I created using a mix of open source code and Claude, hoping I didn’t break my own site. I pulled together a dynamic link library using a Hugo partial and some shortcode that automatically catalogs all of my outbound links into sortable lists.
Playing with a link archive that produces a sortable list of each of my outbound links. An okay start.
If digital millennials are interested in what was being written about them when they were going off on Tumblr, they should read “Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age” by Jessalynn Keller.
While poking around for other academic sources on feminist blogs, I found this article from 2016, “The Trouble with White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism and the Intersectional Internet.” The complete article is embedded in the page.
In 2007, S&F Online dedicated an entire issue to feminist blogs with essays on race, anonymity, access and audience. The blogs are mostly dead links now but the academic record holds up. Important names: Clancy Ratliff, Tedra Osell.
An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among women at scale. Many kinds of women were there that had no space at other tables. And it was very messy, and very revealing, because it was the first time that happened at scale for all to see.
Some thoughts:
- When I started in 2001, the most viewed website about feminism on the internet was a solo blog by a man in Portland.
- I just pulled Mindy Seu’s “Cyberfeminism Index” off my shelf, a veritable tome, and the feminist sites don’t even make the table of contents. Which is not an indictment of the book, but an example of how ephemeral all this is online.
- You can see this on Twitter in the live debate about what Jezebel was and wasn’t, a conversation happening mostly through collective remembering. Jezebel joined the pack of blogs at some point, and they were big dogs, but they weren’t responsible for the creation or steering of the digital movement. They were a glossy, spendy repackaging of the organic thing, backed by real investors. It’s wild to see the entirety of the movement attributed to Jezebel by young Twitter, given that most of the indies kept Jezebel at arms’ length until much later. They were pretty widely considered a corporate interloper in a grassroots arena, though in hindsight that wasn’t right either.
- The first time the indie bloggers gave Jezebel their day was when they published the untouched photographs of Faith Hill on the cover of Redbook, a women’s magazine. The Redbook post tore the veil off the beauty industry in real time. Until then, the idea that “celebrities are photoshopped” and “photos are retouched” was almost an urban myth, which is easy to forget given the ubiquity of filters and AI now. Then, you heard about it but couldn’t confirm it for yourself unless you had firsthand experience. Retouching was a discrete industry practice, digital tools were still expensive and clunky, and all of it was surrounded by a lot of tradecraft and secrecy. The mystery of celebrity image management exploded with an animated gif on a public-facing post, and it was rad.
Looking at early feminist blogs and how they previewed the social critiques and economic problems present within today’s attention and publishing economies. What is old is new again.
Regarding dinergoth, a rebrand of an old trope: “Alt kids are the social fabric of the most economically depressed, culturally conservative corners of America and have been for a very long time.”
Finished reading: Bog Queen by Anna North 📚
I’m watching the feminist writer scene go hard on some recent books: Jamilah Lemieux’s Black. Single. Mother. and Lindy West’s Adult Braces.
Both books were published on March 10, and both authors are talented, with impressive bylines, with significant followings baked in. Incidentally, they come from the same cohort we loosely refer to as “feminist blogging,” though both would probably bristle at the description. And both use autoethnographic methods to leverage their personal lives to tell bigger stories about social, cultural and economic dynamics (a common method among feminists, where the personal is often made explicitly political). Lemieux goes further by including a series of essays by other Black single mothers at the end of her book, expanding the frame from memoir into something more collective, a full bloom.
West’s book has gone ultra viral over the last few weeks while Lemieux’s has found significantly less footing. West’s work is being spectacularized in real time, while Lemieux’s support has been mostly grassroots, respectful (thankfully), and largely limited to Black media outlets and NPR. This reproduces one of the oldest patterns in feminist media: a white woman’s confessional work circulates as universal or spectacular (West is being treated like a spectacle currently, which is great for sales and visibility but comes with negative trade-offs), while a Black woman doing rigorous, arguably more structurally ambitious work gets categorized as niche, an outlier. That this is happening within the very audience that would generally name and critique this dynamic in any other context makes it worth sitting with.
While I respect both authors and their bodies of work, I am looking forward to Lemieux’s book because I know firsthand how difficult it is to get a publisher and an audience for serious, foundational work like this. I suspect it will prove relevant long after the viral moment is over.
Turned on a couple of micro.blog site features: if you’re reading this feed on a social site (Mastodon, Bsky, Threads), I’m posting from micro.blog and syndicating out from there. Replies from federated social sites (Bsky, Mastodon) are now syndicated on my site as comments under my blog posts.
A friend of the blog told me a story about a Substacker who uses AI to summarize books and then publishes AI-generated content about those summaries, never reading the books herself, and yet has a ton of followers. I’d guess at least some of those are purchased, betting that a high follower count will beget more followers by suggesting clout and credibility she didn’t earn as a reader talking to fellow readers. And followers aren’t subscribers, but that’s the business bet.
People are lookie-loos, they get curious when something is doing numbers and creating activity, so inflating follower counts is a real and persistent strategy. None of this is new. But best practices still hold regardless of which technologies you layer on top. Marketing erodes trust when it prioritizes short-term gains over honesty and reliability.
It’s strange to live in a time when you can’t reliably distinguish someone who has engaged with ideas from someone who automated the appearance of engaging with them.
Telling the gods: I would love a micro.blog plugin that provides an easy way to bulk-manage post categories. If there is one, lmk.
AI in practice: Chatbot tool comparison
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Come look over my shoulder while I explore how and whether LLMs are good writing tools: Here’s a wee version of the LLM comparison exercise I did with my team. We’ll make it a two-fer so you can see how the “good writing” skill works in practice, though we’ll see how that actually goes.
One of the more useful things you can do with an LLM is hold up a few ideas side by side and apply lenses to them. I know this history pretty well, so I asked a series of LLMs, why is Wisconsin’s cultural identity and cohesion stronger than Indiana’s, from a historical and business perspective?
Here are the answers in one doc, for comparison.
Each LLM will give us more or less the same story, different flavor. Within the industry, the differences across the models reflect “model personality.” Asking “why” instead of “whether” will probably drive the answer to favor Wisconsin. Using multiple lenses (two states, historical + business, identity + cohesion) forces the LLM to cross-reference across more of its training data, which tends to produce a more comprehensive answer.
For all the chatter about consciousness and whatever, remember that an LLM is an infinite series of if/then/elses applied to human language and semantics, so being able to talk about language and communication, getting meta with the tool and how you think through language, helps a lot when using one. This is maybe the one thing I like about experimenting so hard with the tools. I’m thinking about the technical side of writing and enjoying it quite a lot.
Functionally: all of them acknowledge hard historical truths within the subject matter and don’t shy away from critical perspectives, which is good. Both Gemini and Copilot include in-line links, which lets you judge the output’s authority in the moment as a reader. I liked Copilot’s more than I expected here. Claude’s answers are more lyrical and do provide more context, and yet do not encourage checking against outside sources by providing links within the output. And you can see that even with the good writing skill calling out hard bans on certain structure, Claude plows right through them.
Model personality: Claude favors sociological answers to Copilot’s economic answers. Claude is also highly intellectual and narrative by comparison, and that narrative style can mask nuance by sinking relative context within the storytelling. Gemini simplifies, boosts and cheerleads where the others don’t, and really goes hard on Wisconsin’s reputation as a drinking and Packers state when there are stronger structural arguments in play. Copilot is tricky because it looks authoritative like a briefing, which also makes it easily “extractible” for the user, but every citation requires authentication unless this is one of those “good enough” tasks.
As a writer, something I find annoying across the whole spread is the semantic reveal. LLMs are semantic machines, and it is persistently revealed in ways that are weird to the human ear. All of them go out of their way to describe things as “structural,” “connective” as in “connective tissue,” “load-bearing” and “legible.”
Finally, I included a second tab where I asked Claude for analysis across the four outputs, where it suggests that my framing of the question is altogether kind of problematic. It shows how a strong prompt is sometimes also a bad approach.
There are a lot of possible takeaways here, but I’d rather set aside the question of which tool is “good” or “bad” or “better” and think more about the patterns across the tools and their implications.
A note on Ezra Klein: I’ve been looking across the NYT’s breathless reporting on the AI industry and seeing very few women represented across the commentary. Klein’s tech coverage tends to center a fairly narrow circuit of sources: founders, researchers, and policy thinkers who are overwhelmingly male and concentrated in a few institutions, and generally assert the inevitability of disruptive AI as a matter of course. Meanwhile, Anthropic and others are anticipating that career ladders where women are concentrated will be impacted, some claiming professional women’s jobs will dry up or disappear entirely.
I looked over his podcast guests for the last year and noticed that among his tech-focused guests, almost all white, almost all men, almost none of them are women. A rough count of eight podcasts (nine if you stretch) with accompanying commentary only produced two women, both economists. Klein’s brand is the guy who does the reading, the big ideas guy. So it’s worth asking what he’s reading and whose ideas he considers big. While he probably wouldn’t disagree with Gebru or Crawford or Noble on the substance, his current body of commentary is pulled toward the perspectives of people who have the most to gain from the technology’s expansion and the least exposure to its costs.
One of the tricky things about consumer AI tools like Claude and Gemini is that the experience varies widely depending on the person using it, and it’s not always clear why. I have spent a lot of time learning the tools so I can advise on them in my work, and this variance of experience has become a frustrating part of the deal.
I manage a team of writers and creatives at work, and we are expected to be familiar with the tools, despite complex and sometimes hostile feelings about the political and environmental implications of this sector. That’s quite a pickle, organizationally, managerially. Borrowing from Haraway, I thought, okay, what if we take these tools seriously as a team of writers and creatives and put our professional standards up against them?
Among other exercises, I did a couple of comparisons on my team that help create discussion around the “plausibility” question. People dismiss LLM outputs as being merely plausible answers, rather than accurate or factual ones. And that’s correct; they are, and that’s the design. In many cases, plausibility is fine. Take Wikipedia, for example, which we understand to be a pretty good source, a plausible source, unless you’re writing a formal paper requiring original sources.
I digress. Ultimately, we needed to understand together that LLMs are not a WYSIWYG tool and talk through the implications.
I asked everyone to run the same paper through their LLM of choice, prompting it for a plain language summary. We then copied and pasted it into a shared doc, and compared and contrasted for discussion. Upon discussion, we had several takeaways, including that they were all similar in spirit but sometimes varying wildly in style and approach.
Knowing that algorithms are responsive and not static, we did it again later in the day and copied and pasted our outputs into the shared doc. We compared and contrasted the difference between AM and PM. Again, it was similar in spirit but varied in style and approach. Some changed dramatically. One team member whose morning summary had been jokey and conversational received a much more staid and serious version in the afternoon.
At the time, I asked Claude to explain the variance: “Even with the same prompt and source material, LLMs don’t produce identical outputs each time. This is by design — there’s a degree of randomness (called “temperature”) in how the model selects words, which means each run produces a slightly different path through the text.”
Anyway, this got our gears turning on how (and whether) to approach LLMs as a team and as individuals and led to good group discussion. (It’s important to create space for criticism and critical approaches here.) It also gave us more confidence as a team responding to this new layer of complexity in our work, and helping our professional contacts and peers think about how to approach the tools and when and whether to use them. There will be tasks where AI-based tools are “good enough,” and tasks where they are not.
The swirl of mystery and speculation around this sector has people up in arms, and it’s useful to have approaches that give people firsthand experience and to see how the experience works for others. The god trick of the singular interface turns out to be a bear for navigating it in the workplace, where our work is foundational, prosocial and specific.
Finished reading: Life in Code by Ellen Ullman 📚
Thinking more about arXiv and public-facing publishing: Back in the day, my mentor was among the first on campus to successfully argue that public-facing publishing should count toward tenure, as service and outreach at minimum. She was on the edge of digital studies, and by the time her work was formally peer-reviewed it risked being irrelevant. At the time, in the early 00s, blogging was the primary mechanism to get the job done, and peer review happened online in real time through interaction with other scholars. This also foreshadowed the “influencer” model that we know today – by cultivating interest and influence through these more informal channels, their formal work gained traction in formal channels.
Do you have what it takes to be the next McDonald’s CEO? A quiz about this week’s funniest business story.
Reaching back to 2025 to put this article on the pile of AI commentary: Cottom’s argument here is that AI, for all the breathless hype around it, is a “mid” technology, one that makes modest augmentations to existing processes while its loudest boosters use it to justify employing fewer people and delegitimizing expertise. Around the time the article was published, she supplemented with some additional video commentary worth watching.
She draws on Acemoglu and Restrepo’s concept of “so-so” technologies and traces a pattern from MOOCs to DOGE, where each iteration promises transformation but delivers incremental improvements at best and labor displacement at worst. The real danger, she argues, is that AI’s most compelling use case in the current political environment is threatening, demoralizing workers and justifying cuts, not revolutionizing how work gets done.
Cottom has been one of the writers I keep returning to because she is not dismissing the technology or retreating into reactionary nostalgia. She looks past the product announcements to the political economy underneath them. Who benefits from the hype cycle? What happens to the institutional infrastructure (education, research, public expertise) that AI claims to augment and simultaneously threatens to starve? She’s also very active on Instagram (and promoting a new documentary) and tracing the news around AI and higher ed in real time.
Applying a Claude writing skill
Friday, March 6, 2026
LLMs have a default house writing style with identifiable patterns: sentence fragments for emphasis, “not X, but Y” constructions, lots of hard contrast, atmospheric openings, heavy use of em dashes, and heavy use of marketing language. This reflects the semantic construction of an LLM. Custom instructions can override these defaults. A custom skill is a set of instructions within your account that modify how the model generates text. When you paste instructions into your profile settings, Claude reads them at the start of every conversation and adjusts its output accordingly.
I began using Claude daily for light writing tasks about six months ago, and over that time I started cataloging the patterns I was consistently editing out, including the terrible “not X, but Y” construction that showed up in nearly every response, and persistent em dashes used as all-purpose connectors when other punctuation is more appropriate.
I went through several iterations of bullying Claude into submission, narrowing the scope each time, before arriving at this version, which focuses specifically on writing mechanics and hard prohibitions.
You’ll need a paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise). Free-tier accounts don’t have access to custom skills.
• Within the app, navigate to Customize > Skills and Create new skills
• Select add a new skill and Write skill instructions
• Copy and paste the copy from this file into the skill, making note of the name and description boxes. Feel free to tinker.
• Save your changes.
Note: The instructions in the linked file are Claude’s work, not mine. They came out of months of conversation, where Claude would analyze my style notes, and the file evolved from there. They read a little strangely because of that process. If I’d written them from scratch, they’d sound different. But looking at the file you can see what Claude responds to and how it works.
Claude will apply these instructions to every new conversation going forward. Existing conversations won’t pick up the change, so start a fresh chat to test it. If and when Claude struggles to apply the skill, call it out specifically in the prompt, such as, “Revise this for length using the good writing skill.”
The skill specifies constraints in a few categories and the instructions are plain text. As you go, you can also ask Claude to analyze previous conversations for suggested additions to the skill, which Claude will produce and implement within the chat. Each rule operates independently, so removing one doesn’t affect the others.
Claude processes custom instructions at the start of every conversation, before it generates any output. The instructions function as constraints on the model’s default behavior. The model doesn’t always follow every instruction perfectly and the results vary by task. You will still need to edit.
WaPo on the many issues of LLM house writing styles. I have much to add. Here are some notes on applying a writing skill to override house style on Claude.
Some content notes: while I haven’t quite figured out how much I want to broadcast this space, I have put a couple of feedback mechanisms into place, including an email loop as well as turning on comments for those logged into micro.blog, Bluesky and Mastodon. If you’re reading along, say hello.