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
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.
The Archive
The expensive part is knowing whether it worked
AI made marketing cheaper to produce. The harder, more human work of measuring whether any of it worked, and deciding what to do about the answer, is what's getting scarce.
Writing a book in the gaps
How a book actually gets written around a teaching load. On short sessions, the cost of reloading a chapter, and why the schedule matters more than the mood.
Measuring what you can no longer see
Zero-click search passed two-thirds this year and the IAB has published a first standard for measuring AI visibility. What's left to measure, and what to stop pretending you can.
What people will let AI do, and what they won't
Consumer polling, a Washington Post experiment, and a shift in how ChatGPT cites content all point the same way: as AI gets cheaper at producing marketing, the human parts of the work are what gain value.
The first sentence is a promise
What a first sentence commits you to, why most drafts begin a paragraph too early, and the test I use before I let myself continue.
The Concentration Problem: What AI Is Actually Doing to Customer Experience
Somewhere tonight, a customer is on hold. Her card got declined at a hotel checkout in a country she doesn't usually visit, and the fraud...
The argument about junior jobs
Two credible studies point opposite ways on AI and entry-level work. What both of them mean for the students I teach, and the Canadian numbers nobody has.
On reading slowly
Some notes on deliberate reading, from someone who writes for a living and worries about her attention like everyone else.
The one-sentence test
A test I give teams and students: say what you do in one plain sentence a stranger would understand. Most can't at first, and the struggle usually shows where the strategy is still fuzzy.