Maggie makes visual essays about programming, design, and anthropology.
Designer, anthropologist, and mediocre developer
Currently design engineering at
Normally
The Garden
Essays
Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks
Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it
The Dark Forest and Generative AI
Proving you're a human on a web flooded with generative AI content
Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects
On seeing tools for thought through a historical and anthropological lens
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web
Notes
Statistically, When Will My Baby Be Born?
How to Import Academic Papers from Zotero into Tana
Aesthetic Command Lines with Hyper, Spaceship, and Oh My Zsh
Leaving Elicit
Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History
On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars
The Finest Narrative Non-Fiction Essays
Spinning Worlds, Seasickness, and Dealing with Vestibular Neuritis
A Collection of Design Engineers
Gathering Structures
Speculative Calendar Events
Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots
Patterns
Ambient Co-presence
Creating a subtle, peripheral, and synchronous sense of shared space and context on the web
Historical Trails
Giving people a visible, useful trail of where they've been over the course of an exploratory journey
Command K Bars
Command line bars you can quickly summon with a keyboard shortcut
Folk Interfaces
People reappropriating existing software to solve their own unique problems
Daily Notes Pages
Daily notes as a frictionless default input for personal knowledge management systems
Assumed Audiences
Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations
Epistemic Disclosure
Providing clear metadata on the epistemic validity of content
Algorithmic Transparency
Algorithms that make their reasoning visible
Library
The Good Mother Myth
Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
Seeing Voices: A Journey Into the World of the Deaf
Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution
Annals of a Former World
Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent
The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots
Being You: A New Science of Consciousness