Hello · It's Danielle
THE JOURNAL
Essays on the unspoken work of being a person.
The Weekly Letter
A small, honest moment from each week. Delivered quietly on Sundays.
The Latest Essay
A billion dollars of vinyl
US vinyl revenue passed a billion dollars last year for the first time since 2000. A note on what people are buying when they choose the inconvenient format.
The Archive
AI is a contract term now
The creator-AI conversation has moved from whether to use it into what the contract says about it, and what's being negotiated in those clauses is provenance.
The notes I keep
On capture systems, commonplace books, and the difference between a note that records what you read and one that records what you thought.
The Park reopened
A chain closed the Park Theatre on Cambie. The Rio's owner and a group of filmmakers took it over and reopened it. On what a repertory house is actually for.
Marketing has a second audience now
This week's marketing news kept pointing at a second reader for marketing, the AI systems that now sit between the brand and the customer, and the judgment call underneath it: deciding which of your claims are worth optimizing for a machine at all.
What I cut
The categories of sentence I delete from my own drafts every time, and why cutting is usually easier than fixing.
A detective, not a teacher
A Nova Scotia study found faculty assessing student work through suspicion rather than evidence. On what that costs, and where the effort should go instead.
Everyone has the same tools now
As AI tools become commodities, the advantage moves to the inputs you already own: your proprietary data and your house voice.
The gallery and the parking lot
The site of the new Vancouver Art Gallery is a pay parking lot. The old building is showing the best Emily Carr exhibition in twenty years. A note on looking at what's actually there.
Everyone has the same tools now
A study found that using AI to generate ideas compresses variety across a group, while using it to refine your own ideas doesn't. That distinction may be the whole question for brand distinctiveness.