Howdy, I’m Nick. 👋

Welcome to my little corner of the world wide web. You can read more about me, or see what I’m up to now.  

 

Latest Post

Suit wears the man

On clothing, costume, and inhibition.

Jul 3, 2026 02:47 PM

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Latest Notes

1. Last week I was able to attend an informative online session on creating a digital accessibility program, presented by Jesse Loesberg.

   Creating a sustainable digital accessibility program in higher education requires more than responding to legal requirements or fixing isolated website issues. It involves understanding an institution’s digital environment, identifying priorities, developing internal expertise, educating content creators, and integrating accessibility into everyday operations.

   In this session, Jesse Loesberg shares how the UC Berkeley Library formalized its digital accessibility work within a large, decentralized university system. The discussion begins with UC Berkeley’s complicated disability rights history and the legal action that ultimately led to stronger accessibility requirements across the institution.

   The event was hosted by the WordPress Accessibility Meetup (Equalize Digital), but the content and takeaways were applicable to any set of technologies. Jesse is a great speaker, and I would attend one of his accessibility talks again in the future. The video recording and transcript of Jesse’s talk are available now on the Equalize Digital website.

   Aug 12, 2026 02:01 PM

2. Took my first trip to Taos with the family this past weekend. We stayed at El Pueblo Lodge, a sprawling property which has a nostalgic roadside Americana feel. Highlights of this hotel were the hot breakfast and the cool pool. We visited Taos Pueblo, the Taos Musem of Art at the Nicolai Fechin House, and the Harwood Museum of Art. Our child played at Twirl, a unique toy shop and play area in the downtown corridor. We hiked a bit of the Italianos Canyon Trail on the way to Taos Ski Valley. My favorite meal was at Aji restaurant, celebrating our wedding anniversary. On the way home we stopped at the St. Francis church at Ranchos de Taos, made famous by Georgia O’Keefe.

   Aug 3, 2026 08:38 PM

3. Bookmarked Vladimir Nabokov’s pale fire: the lost ‘father of all hypertext demos’? by Simon Rowberry.

   In the mid-sixties, Ted Nelson worked at Brown University on an early hypertext system. In 1969, IBM wanted to show the system at a conference, and Nelson gained permission to use Vladimir Nabokov’s highly unconventional and hypertextual novel, Pale Fire (1962) as a technical demonstration of hypertext’s potential. Unfortunately, the idea was dismissed in favor of a more technical-looking presentation, and thus was never demonstrated publicly. This paper re-considers Pale Fire’s position in hypertext history, and posits that if it was used in this early hypertext demonstration, it would have been the ‘father of all hypertext demonstrations’ to complement Douglas Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos’ in 1968. In order to demonstrate the significance of Pale Fire’s hypertextuality and Nelson’s ambitions to use it, this paper will explore its hypertextual structure, the implication thereof for the novel and evaluate its success as a hypertext compared to electronic systems.

   Jul 25, 2026 07:05 PM

4. Raphael Magarik, on the Jewish Museum’s Paul Klee exhibit:

   [Walter] Benjamin would have understood all too well his text’s appropriation as a nationalist trophy. He writes terrifyingly of present victors’ power over the past: “Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” Here again, Benjamin rejects the illusion of a fixed, monumental past; historical legacies are battlegrounds, to be won or lost in today’s struggles. One sees an intimation of this idea in the Jewish Museum’s laudable choice to devote a full exhibit to Klee. For Paul Klee was notably not a Jew, though he was accused of being one by the Nazis, who attacked his art as “degenerate.” He responded by gamely incorporating Stars of David and legendary “Red Jews” into his sketches and paintings. In honoring Klee (including his earlier, pre-Nazi work), the Jewish Museum acknowledges an anti-essentialist account of its own organizing identity category: art, and even artists, can be made Jewish, even retrospectively, by the assault of history. Because the fight against fascism furnishes the rationale for the exhibition, the museum might have easily gone further, connecting the ultra-nationalism and genocide of Klee’s moment to our own.

   Jul 22, 2026 06:21 PM

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