The feed of updates to Ken Zinser
It’s not a system. It’s just how I do things. An improvisation on the fly, influenced by decades of lived experience, thought, memory. A personal configuration file. A topography of consciousness. A constellation of synapses. Etcetera. Every time when I play this little puzzle game of loading the dishwasher, rearranging plates and bowls and cups… it’s all just only so I don’t have to hand wash a…
I always thought it would have been funny to have used that name for something substantial somehow. Instead, I’m spending it on the title of this page. But, it just fits too well for me to care. Because I decided that on this page is where I’m going to keep my list of lists about which order things should go in and (optionally) explain why. Strong opinions held loosely. Change my mind . Article I:…
I firmly believe branding is, at its core, a form of storytelling. A brand is a story. Your brand is your story of self. The story you tell yourself, whether you believe it or not—but it’s more authentic when you do. The more compelling brands are the ones whose promoters and presenters and performers more deeply believe in this shared story of self. The ones whose actors are committed to the act.…
I took M into town on the bus this morning. (M loves to ride the bus.) We rode it all the way to the ferry terminal. We watched the big boat come in, unload all the people coming from the island, then load all the people heading to the island, before disembarking. We walked along the beach. We walked until we stopped to watch an old man making big bubbles with a loop of rope on two sticks. The…
Coddling your child is all about banking up the good bonds between you, in order to spend those good bonds by being there for them, by their side, in their scariest moments. But, if you don’t periodically spend down those bonds, if they just bank up and up and up, it spoils. And the only way to spend those bonds is for your child to experience shock and fear and pain. It’s just a hypothesis. But…
Sometimes I send short emails to folks I bump into online who are making stuff or doing things or being ways I appreciate. It’s something I’ve done a few times now that I’d like to do more of. It’s really just about sending out into the universe more of what I want to see and experience. Practicing a way of being that my inner optimist wishes was more present, more discernible in me more of the…
Washington DC is a remarkable city to grow up near—even more so to live in. People come from all over the world just to see what there is to see. The Smithsonian Institution is a big part of why. Of all the museums that make up the Smithsonian, if you asked me which was my favorite, I’d have to say the Hirshhorn . Before I knew the Hirshhorn as a museum, I knew it as a strange building. I would go…
What if your next months-long life experiment were to find a therapist that clicks with your particular ways of being? Manu got me thinking ( again ). It can be such a slog (in America at least, in more ways than one) to find a satisfying connection with any sort health care provider. That goes double for mental health professionals. It might take meeting with three, four, fourteen different…
I’ve been afraid to reach out. Not afraid. Afraid is the wrong word. I realized one day that I most likely never expressed how much I liked hanging out with you. You were a really good friend. I’m sorry we’ve lost touch. I feel like I’m the one who messed up, who stopped first. Stopped reaching out. Stopped responding. Started living three thousand miles away. (Let’s interrogate that last notion…
These are my yearnotes for 2025. How to spend a day with a baby The overwhelming majority of my 2025 was dedicated to caring for and being with my infant-turned-toddler. At a dinner, our friends asked us how we shared parenting responsibilities, how our styles differed. I remember thinking, I’m definitely the one who kills (fills?) time. The work horse, pulling the gear to power the rotary mill.…
You are the robin sat in the branches of my tree after all its leaves have fallen and been raked up and away. Now you are the little chickadee hopping around the patio of my favorite coffee shop, waiting and watching for the crumbs of an almond croissant or a kouign-amann or a blackberry danish or a green tea and red bean muffin. Now you are the Steller’s jay who perches on the antenna on my…
You go in for a regular handshake but then you each do a “sike” with your hand and bring it up to your face with your thumb nearly touching and your fingers pointed up like a rooster and you wait a beat and then wiggle your fingers while you scrunch your nose and turn a grin and stare into their eyes and make a serious, silly, creepy face until either you break or you make them break.
I met a kid at the playground. Which is a strange thing to say because it was midday on a Tuesday and I’m a full blown adult. But it’s not actually strange because they were there with their mom and their friendly little black dog and I was there with my one year old. I’m still getting used to all the parental small talk, reading the cues and saying hello at the right moment. I usually keep my…
Have you ever done a hundred miles per hour? Seems like a question the automated self-service system would offer up to secure your login, alongside “What was the name of your best friend growing up?” I was thinking this question to myself. It’s an interesting question on multiple levels. It forces you to think about where you’ve been at different times of your life, about how your risk tolerance…
I met my back alley neighbor for the first time when his mother in law drove her car through my fence. She uprooted a 3-inch round metal post from the older chain link fence and a wooden 4x4 post from the newer prefab panel fence. (It looked gnarly.) She wanted to apologize, he said, but she doesn’t speak much English. I will fix it, he said, first thing tomorrow. It will be fixed. You could hear…
Some people keep a sketchbook and draw things they see or think up. I keep this website, and its contents are my pencil marks, published for anybody in the entire internet-connected world to see. It’s the beauty of the personal web. A lot of people use the term “commonplace book” to describe their personal websites. Super interesting idea. But it never really clicked with me, it gave me this very…
Today I talked with my Little™ about guns and gun violence. Shoot to spill I didn’t plan on it, to be clear. It’s not something he and I typically talk about. Heck, it’s a big, fraught, hairy subject for anybody, let alone a child. But later on that day, thinking about what I had said, I felt a kind of satisfaction. Like, I had shared my perspective in a way that landed. And then I thought it…
A poetic collage of phrases (found, mostly) that start with the same two words. See also Headline sci-fi and Quotes . They say you shouldn’t tweeze out your nose hairs. They say the only foolish questions are the unasked ones. They say taupe is very soothing. They say trained animals can be unpredictable. They say geniuses pick green. They say this part of the city used to be one big orchard. They…
After I was diagnosed with latent autoimmune diabetes , there was a good long while where I felt I had control over my blood sugar. I was in target range more often than not, A1C was bordering normal. But somewhere along the way I lost that control. I fell into relatively poor eating habits. My numbers would swing wildly or just climb and climb when I thought I had dosed appropriately. On top of…
A compilation of random thoughts and observations on parenting, fatherhood, etc. My child will like the music of Rush. We will learn the lyrics to Tom Sawyer and belt them out while driving with the windows down and the stereo blaring. My job is to make sure my kid is weird. Do I need to become somebody who writes strongly worded letters? Re Westfield Southcenter food court family lounge: who the…
These are my yearnotes for 2024. And maybe part of 2023. Let’s just say ‘post-pandemic’ to be safe. I became a dad This news will certainly make the rest of my notes feel small and unimportant, but I’m not one to bury the lede. I’m still figuring out how much I want to share publicly about them. (Them being the baby, who I refer to here as M.) I will say, M was born this past June and is…
Sometimes I’m scrolling through the photos app on my phone and I see a thumbnail of what looks like this ultra modern and minimal kitchen or studio and I’m like to myself where was I when I took that photo but after I squint long enough I realize it’s just an image I swiped from some glossy online architecture magazine and for a fraction of a second I feel completely and utterly bummed out. That…
Or, Starting yearnotes So I’ve been thinking and I decided I want to try and start writing some kind of year-end round up. In almost two decades of publishing on the web, this would be the first time. I want to see how it feels, see if it sticks. Of course, me being me, before I dive in and do it I need to analyze and rationalize (and over-analyze and over-rationalize) until the whole things feels…
A friend asked us if we were going to have M believe in Santa. The phrasing felt strange, but it’s a completely logical question that hit like a bag of bricks. Oh god, I hadn’t thought of that yet. And so we find ourselves facing yet another tricky parenting conundrum before M can even sit up on their own. Personally, generally, the word ‘belief’ doesn’t resonate. Too many connotations of faith…
A sort of living poem, made up of headlines seen on the text-only version of NPR.org . A startup aims to make lab-grown human eggs, transforming options for creating families # Carlee Russell appeared at home after vanishing while reporting lost child # Tribes object. But a federal ruling approves construction of the largest lithium mine # John was talking with a fellow patient — who noticed his…
Early in my career as a designer, I placed a great deal of value on impact at scale. I wanted my work to reach the widest possible audience. I wanted to work for the most influential studios. I wanted to effect positive change in the world. The greatest possible quantity of impact. But I was dreaming. Call it ego, maybe, or the folly of youth. I could never have lived up to the standards I set in…
Just chill out, take a beat, and breathe. Why are you angry? There’s no one to be angry with. Nothing to be angry about. Crying is normal. Crying is just noise. Breathe. Do they need a new diaper? Do they need to feed? Do they need to burp? Do they need to sleep? Do they need to feed more? Do they need to burp again? Do they need another new diaper? Breathe. Did you try swaying? Did you try…
M was born in June. Our first kid. They’re still just a little grub, squirming and wriggling around. But I daydream about the future—when they are a real person, walking around on their own, talking to us—and imagine new traditions we might practice as a family. Granted my memory is horrible, but when I think back on my own childhood—a very family-oriented one at that—I don’t remember having many…
If you’re like me you have some innate desire to read more books. You tell yourself it’s something you want to do, something you should do. And it becomes a source of shame when you don’t. After a years-long dry spell, I’ve found myself maintaining a habit of reading from a book every day. The best part is, this habit is something I really enjoy. So I decided to jot down a few of the things I feel…
In 2011 I visited Birmingham, Alabama and parts surrounding as part of a design project. These are some of the pictures I took using a Canon PowerShot SD1000 and an iPhone 4.
I’ve been kicking around some thoughts on personal websites. I was originally inspired by the /now page movement , formalized by Derek Sivers in 2015. “A simple link. Easy to remember. Easy to type.” Such a solid concept with really widespread, grassroots adoption. (The site lists over 2,000 profiles as of this writing.) More recently I came across the idea of /hello pages by Alastair Johnston.…