Side One of my debut album (which is also titled “Side One”) is now available for your listening pleasure on Bandcamp. Follow me to be the first to hear when I release new music — including Side Two of “Side One.”
Abandurance
Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control. Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived….
https://zeldman.com/2026/07/29/a-permanent-home/
The instant a business guy uses a sports metaphor to make his most important strategic point, I am lost….
https://zeldman.com/2026/07/24/you-lost-me-at-infielder/
The name of this LP is “Side One.”
On Sunday, I published Side One of my album on Bandcamp. The name of the album is also “Side One.” It is instrumental music with roots in Soundtrack, hip-hop, funk, jazz, 19th Century Romantic classical, ambient, electronic, and art rock….
Who’s the internet for? Who owns it? What will it take to keep it free? If you missed the July 1 premiere of “Code for the People” in NYC, there’s video of the live panel discussion that followed the film.
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….