Short Attention Span Theater

Back in 2013, Alex King and I redesigned the Rands in Repose. Thirteen years — still happy with the design. It’s readable, clean, and prominently features typography I love. What you look at this moment is 90% Alex’s original design.

But there was one more thing we never finished.

Over the years, Esquire featured a densely packed, almost collage-like, front-of-book single page with wildly mixed type sizes, random facts, quips, and blurbs slammed together from the current issue. My short attention span-addled brain loved it. I showed this to Alex as an idea for the footer, and we agreed to take a swing as part of the redesign, but as the volunteer work proceeded, it was obvious we should focus on the header and the body of the site. We dabbled, we didn’t deliver.

Fact: No one ever sees the footer. Yes, some people, but most folks are above-the-fold readers, and a typographically and visually clever footer would be lost on them.

Fact: Never stopped thinking about this footer — for years. I wanted an informationally dense and playful footer that encourages the reader to wander a bit. No strict narrative, just pleasing bits of readable information that pointed to random parts of the site.

Over the years, I poked at the footer, but it remained bland and boring. Then, the robots arrived.

Grumbles Guides

I write a What’s in your bag? piece every couple of years. It’s therapy. I’m trying to figure out if I need to jettison stuff from the bag. It forces me to look at each item in my bag and ask, “Why?” Why is a great question to ask the robots, so when I got to the rat’s nest of cables in my bag, I asked why. Why do I need all of these cables? Which are the best ones to keep? These Whys lead to more Whys, and suddenly it was a day and a half later, and I had pages of research about chargers, cables, lithium batteries, and devices.

I learned a lot. I learned how different Apple devices charge, I learned how lithium batteries are designed, and I learned what makes a good charger. This could’ve been a Rands article, but the content was more research than exposition, so I asked the robots to take a template I’d built and appropriately place my research.

After much back and forth, we ended up with the Apple Charging Situation. This significant artifact was buried in the middle of the Bag piece and didn’t get a lot of attention. No biggie, posting stuff on the Internet follows this pattern: build it well, throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks. It usually does not.

The March Apple hardware releases showed up, and I eagerly read the updated specs. As a newly informed connoisseur of charging, I was curious how the new hardware mapped into my existing observations. After reading a dozen articles, I realized I already had a framework for understanding the charging landscape, so I asked the robots to update the Guide with everything we learned from March 2026. Grumbles 1 did.

I posted the new guide, grabbed the list of changes, and posted to the socials, and that is the version that stuck to the Internet.

The Theatre

You know where Jon Stewart started on TV? He started on a show called Short Attention Span Theater. It ran for five years on The Comedy Channel, with Stewart hosting three years of the show. The format? Clips of stand-up comedy for a half-hour. That’s it. Think YouTube shorts, except with no Internet.

There are important reasons to be alarmed by this type of short-form communication slash entertainment. When you combine bite-sized information with the robots, you get echo-chamber-y endless lists of useless intellectual calories. Think TikTok. It’s fun, but did you actually learn anything?

The chunky card format for the Apple Charging guide is not for everyone. There is a narrative arc, but it’s also just fine if you want to bounce around wherever your eyes take you. That’s the point. Bite-sized chunks of topical information. Choose your own adventure.

And, yes, Grumbles and I redid the footer.

Why Grumbles? It’s the name of my robot. More on this in a later piece.