Author: ljndawson

  • Coping

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    Yeah, I’m knitting. I’m also reading – every day, after work, for an hour. And writing. A thousand words every day, after work. And working in exercise next week. I’m adapting to a new job – a commute, even – that’s fallen by the wayside, but I’m aiming to be in an exercise routine by…

  • Fun Facts

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    No, actually, not so very fun at all. When I started doing genealogy research, my kids immediately asked me if there were slave-holders in the family. Honestly? I was asking the same question. From what I could ascertain, the branch of the MacKirdys who arrived in the US were descended from five or six brothers…

  • Petard. Hoisted By.

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    I will not link to anything related to Charlie Kirk’s death. I’m aware there’s a video circulating. I would advise anyone who’s watched it to immediately play Tetris. And I don’t think I need to comment on any of this. Everyone else is. I’ll just say that he advocated for gun rights against the “acceptable…

  • City of Joy

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    Zorhan Mamdani has done something incredible this weekend. He sent people on a scavenger hunt. Mocking, with the potato chip bag, the aide of Eric Adams who tried to bribe someone with…a paltry amount of money in a red envelope inside a Herr’s Sour Cream potato chip bag, he set up this amazing scavenger hunt…

  • City of Sin

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    Trump says he’s sending in troops – all kinds of troops, all the troops, so many troops, so many kinds of troops – to all the “Democrat cities.” Leaving aside the fact that Eric Adams is a goddamn weirdo, and this is a perfect example of him on a normal day: Leaving that aside… In…

  • Particulate Matter

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    I left the office at 2:30 this afternoon, at the behest of my manager, because both New Jersey and New York had declared states of emergency due to incoming violent storms that would drop seven inches of rain in just a few hours on the New York/New Jersey corridor. It wasn’t soon enough. What is…

  • Wrecked In the 80’s

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    God, the 1980s were…a lot of things. I wrote about some of this. Reading E. Jean’s new book has brought back a host of new memories. And I don’t need to share them all – nobody wants to know my shit; it’s literally not important. I do need to share that New York in the…

  • Joy

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    I’m a subscriber and Constant Listener to WQXR. They’re not really on Bluesky, so I can’t be in contact with them the way I was when we were all on Twitter. But I start and end my day with them. Jeff Spurgeon – irritatingly robust, a very morning person (which I am not). Elliott Forest…

  • People Forget

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    Or probably were never taught. My parents became Democrats in the 1950s, as the party swung from being a racist, southern, KKK-adjacent organization to a party that stood for civil rights, feminism, human rights. (One could argue they are all the same thing, and one would not be wrong.) My family name is Nixon. My…

  • Someone Asked Me

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    I’d posted some kind of throwaway comment on Reddit about newspapers – physical ones – and how editorial assistants in New York City would get all three of the major papers and read them on the subway on the way to work, folded specially so as not to interfere with your neighbor who was also…

  • Cleanse

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    Ever wake up and realize you’ve been living in a place for 10 years? I love my apartment. This little bunker, my fortress of solitude, has been my refuge ever since I moved into it. Virginia Woolf was right about having a room of one’s own (and money). Not just for writing fiction, but for…

  • And yet

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    Haven’t we been through this five years ago? I’ve been reading about Stephen Miller – I honestly cannot understand a person who grows up hating so many people. I cannot understand a glee taken in separating families and children; I cannot understand the rationale for what’s happening now. His family can’t understand it either. He’s…

  • Drama

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    The new job is lovely. We do our work, we go home. I’m building conceptual models and taxonomy schemas, and the work’s being embraced and implemented. And I’m realizing…I have some peace now. I don’t know if it’s the industry – insurance and financial management vs. adtech – or the people, who are enormously helpful…

  • Women’s Work

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    In my new job, I’ve been working on establishing nourishing routines. So every day, after work, I’m reading (I should be walking or lifting weights – eventually, I will be walking or lifting weights, but I’m not there yet; routines take time) – and I’m reading Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series. I never got…

  • The Gift of Routine

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    I don’t necessarily like living by the clock. Counting the minutes that I can check my phone before I have to leave for work. Coutning the minutes of the commute. Counting the minutes after I get home, when I can have dinner, wash the dishes, when I can read the book I’m entranced with, when…

  • In Extremis

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    I’ve disappeared down the well. I started a new job last Monday, May 5, at Prudential. I’m working on creating taxonomies to describe business processes. It’s fun work – I never thought I’d have fun working in insurance and financial services, but here we are, it’s a brand new day, and I’ve learned something about…

  • “Unreliable”

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    I’ve been thinking about Virginia Giuffre. From what I understand, she was training in Thailand for massage therapy, at Epstein’s expense, when she met her husband. She was only 19. So she kind of jumped out of the Epstein frying pan into the fire of a new relationship that got serious quickly. She didn’t start…

  • And Another Thing…

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    2020-2021 was a big year that we all seem to have cumulatively repressed – we were inside for much of it, but then, suddenly, we were emphatically outside. Corporate life had quite the shakeup. Organizations were suddenly confronting injustice at all levels – race, gender, ability – and setting up teams and recruitment efforts to…

  • Prey

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    Years ago, my kids graduated from hamsters to a rabbit. Lucy Bun – named after Lucille Ball because she was a ginger rabbit – was so sweet. For a while, she was a free-range rabbit, until she chewed a few charger cords (Macbook chargers are EXPENSIVE) and the lower spines of the Oxford English Dictionary.…

  • The Old Wheel

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    “The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.” – Sherlock Holmes When I left publishing in 2016, a large part of my reasoning for the pivot was because I thought, after twenty years of shouting, cajoling, sweet-talking, and consulting about metadata, I didn’t have…

  • Reclaimed and Resurrected

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    Today I’m announcing the revival of my consultancy, Numerical Gurus. As before, and based on my 30 years’ experience in media, I’m providing expertise on the following: Establishing frameworks Taxonomy/ontology development Data quality Data stewardship Advertising Entertainment Publishing Libraries And I’m adding a new area of practice: Knowledge workers and their unique needs Interpersonal friction…

  • The Humans in the System

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    Computers are easy. People are hard. Because tech is built on binary code, it presents a pretty simple series of problems: on/off, yes/no, 0/1. People…are not binary. People are vast soups of insecurity, irritation, pride, integrity, curiosity, resilience, and terror. And they bring all of that to the desk with them. If you’re managing groups…

  • What I Saw at the Evolution

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    Thoughts on a career in data governance I started my career in publishing in 1987, as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. (I was really bad at it.) From there I moved into bookselling, and then databases about books and bookselling, and then…well, a bunch of different companies, some of which don’t exist anymore, some of…

  • AI Is Dumb

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    I don’t have a lot of patience for the claims being made by companies who are heavily investing in AI. It definitely has its uses – image recognition, mining through large repositories of text, etc. But one thing that AI has not yet perfected is decisionmaking. Computers – even sophisticated ones – are stupid. They…

  • It Just Gets Darker

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    The balance between keeping my sanity and being a responsibly-informed citizen is so incredibly difficult. The “flood the zone” approach – which has gone on much longer than this administration’s first week – leaves me exhausted, which is the point of it. The obtuse misunderstanding of the way language works depending on context – the…

  • You Know My Methods

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    Announcing the debut of exactly what the world needs right now: a new podcast, Good Night, Mr. Holmes! Every Tuesday, my partner in both committing and solving crime, Rachel Rushefsky, and I discuss the ITV Granada Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett and a pair of Watsons. Side discussions include, but are not limited to:…