A reading of this piece from 2023, followed by a brief discussion.
Oops: the post is from three years ago, not two as mentioned in the episode. Time flies like, one supposes, sand through an hourglass.
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Two ways to make an 8-page mini-zine using stuff you already have—and three reasons why you might do this.
Today, two ways to put together a specific type of mini-zine—an 8-page cut-fold-&-glue apparatus you can make on letter paper using any printer on hand. These are:
But first: ↓
This is a simple but annoying method. Start with a ready-made template for your word processor of choice, and then fill in the blanks to lay out your zine. Here’s an example in Apple Pages, using these wonderful templates from Jess Driscoll:
What you may detect in the screenshot is that laying out pages 5 through 8 in this method is comically irritating. The advantage is that it’s simple to do: fill in and print. Word processing upside-down is possible but not recommended. As a result, I prefer the next method instead.
This method uses delphitools’ amazing online zine imposer to lay your zine out for printing. Specifically, the tool takes a set of appropriately-sized individual pages and gives you a printer-ready PDF in a layout similar to what you saw in method 1.
Use this thing by first selecting your paper size and then noting the dimensions it gives you for the zine pages. Next, in your software of choice, set your page size to these dimensions, and begin. You’ll want to create 8 pages, including front and back cover, and then export them as images to pull back into the zine imposer.
Options here include Keynote or other presentation software—or pretty much anything that can lay out images and text on pages.
I use Canva, where it’s simple to create pages at the right size and adhere to whatever aspects of the style guide seem important at the time. My only advice is to get the physical size of the page onscreen to roughly match what it’ll look like in print. Given Canva and my particular combination of hardware, that ends up being a 33% zoom.
If it seems like this section is a glorified link to the zine imposer, you’re right. It’s a great tool (and part of a larger collection of web-based goodies worth investigation).
Here are a few places to look for starting points or inspiration:
If you want to put your contact information on the back page, use a QR code generator. Point it to your web site, a social media profile, or newsletter sign-up page. Make sure you list the exact page it’ll take someone to and what they’ll find there.
I’ve resisted putting PDFs of any zines online, preferring to keep it somewhat analog. But I’ll happily send you one—let me know where to send it.
Episode details: A reading of this piece from 2025.
Want to hear more? Listen online or in your favorite app.
Episode details: A reading and expansion of this piece from 2026.
Want to hear more? Listen online or in your favorite app.
Responding with attention, kindness & action as people return to work in difficult circumstances.
It’s the first Tuesday of the month—January 6, 2026. I remember where and how I was five years ago today: holed up in my office, up in the finished attic of our previous home, cold but cozy, laboring desperately and fruitlessly to finish some mildly overdue items for a client, making no progress whatsoever, instead watching video feeds on C-SPAN and texting furiously with Liana and various friends. My consulting partner on that project (hi Jennifer! miss you & hope you are well) created a little wiggle room for us that day. People die only the once, but ideals fall again and again, and either way the absence and grief is felt whole-heartedly.
Yesterday was the first day back at work for many of us who had the good fortune to enjoy some downtime or time away around the end of the year. I felt tense going into the weekend, not from apprehension about returning to work but rather from worry about what they’d do on—or for—the fifth anniversary of January 6. I needn’t have waited. In 1992 Leonard Cohen sang that he couldn’t “run no more with that lawless crowd / while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud.” In the current circumstance the killers skipped the praying in favor of congregating in front of a wall-sized display with results of a search on X dot com for ‘Venezuela.’
Square that with the expectation that work happens underneath a context-free, ahistorical capitalist realism dome; in this dome the past is about two months long and the future extends only as far out as the end of the quarter or the next round of asinine bulk layoffs. I see cracks in the dome. I wonder what might shine through.
How to respond in these conditions? I see three ways:
These three are incomplete, but it’s what I have, and how I’m operating right now.
2½ readings on seeing failures & responding to them. Celebrating my accomplished & wonderful pals.
Cat Hicks in Fight for the Human:
The experiences of folks who find themselves fighting on a technical battleground—privacy, security, infrastructure, or even developer experience—have a lot of common themes. There’s a psychological fortitude that goes into becoming a Champion, a clarity of seeing the consequences that other people don’t like to see. Most people systematically underestimate the problems, failures, fragility, and errors around them … Researchers tested people’s estimation of failure rates across more than thirty domains and found a consistent “failure gap.” Champions may just be the people who have learned to overcome the typical failure gap in a particular domain. They’re like our sociocognitive field scouts, with sharper prediction skills for the disasters most of us can't tolerate imagining for long.
Cat Hicks
The paper Hicks mentioned is this (freely available to read online or download): Eskreis-Winkler, Lauren and Woolley, Kaitlin and Kim, Minhee and Polimeni, Eliana, The Failure Gap (August 04, 2025). Across seven studies, this team looked into responses to failure:
People closest to a failure—those with the clearest access to information about a failure that occurred—will tend to be those with the strongest motive not to share it. This could seriously impede the accessibility of information. For example, a reporter looking to write a story about an individual, a company, or an organization, may find that the most knowledgeable and powerful sources more freely share information on what is going right, versus what is going wrong.
If you’d rather not read the entire, dense paper, read Fred Hebert’s summary and discussion instead.
I’ve been thinking about how and why bad news related to likely failures or recent failures does not get communicated inside organizations, or is deliberately hidden from view; hence my recent posts on shifting baselines and undiscussables. As various initiatives don’t pan out—in the typical case of mandated ‘AI’ usage, because they won’t, and can’t—people are left the unenviable task of ‘easing in’ the bad news (to use Argyris’ phrasing).
This is the part where we bask in the accomplishments of my friends, pals, and comrades. An incomplete, roughly chronological list:
Beyond this, various friends left jobs (by choice or otherwise), started new work or adventures, and have done the right things for themselves. My family is healthy and mostly doing stuff they like. Walk into our home and beware sewing scraps, LEGO bricks, and books piled underfoot. Meanwhile: a steady, year-length drumbeat of protest. I love all of this, and this is what I celebrate.
