Dear Dr. Boli: I was told not to bring a knife to a gunfight, but, like, why not? —Sincerely, Gus down at Gus’s Cutlery ’n’ Things.

Dear Sir: For the same reason one does not wear a black tie to a white-tie occasion: one would feel uncomfortably out of place, even if the other participants were too polite to say anything.

This Magazine has not changed the way it appears on your computer or phone for a dozen years now. That is a very long time in Internet terms. If we had marketers on our staff, they would have changed the look of the site at least twenty-four times in twelve years. Marketers are easily bored, and nothing is more destructive than a bored marketer except perhaps a bored urban planner.

But some people have asked whether Dr. Boli intends to modernize the site, and Dr. Boli himself has been thinking about its future. That led to this long essay about how this long essay looks when you read it in this Magazine.

There are many reasons for changing the look of a publication, and certainly every magazine, whether in print or on screen, goes through changes in design if it lasts more than a few years. Even the designs that seem most stable—“iconic,” to use a word borrowed from our Eastern brethren, who have not yet noticed that it is missing—can hold out only so long before some marketer or designer fusses with them. Time, National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal—we think of these as bastions of conservative stability. But go back a century and see how different they looked.

The main reason designs change is to keep up with trends. That seems like a very stupid reason: trends are by definition temporary, and no one thinks, “I want to create something that will make people turn up their noses six years from now.”

But trends are never presented as trends. They are always peddled to us as new discoveries in what is true and beautiful. Previous generations wallowed like pigs in the slop of ignorance, but we have stood up, washed ourselves off, and seen the light.

For example, these paragraphs are right-justified. That is a “rookie mistake” in Web design—so much so that WordPress, which runs half the Internet, removed the right-justify formatting option several years ago. How do we know it’s a rookie mistake? Well, this article is one of the sources most often pointed to when the question comes up. Some of its information is outdated: every major browser—Firefox, Safari, Chrome and all its cousins—supports automatic hyphenation now. (Here’s a curious fact that may surprise even the most loyal readers of this Magazine: before browsers supported automatic hyphenation, Dr. Boli used to hyphenate articles by hand. It was not as hard as it sounds. Pasting “­” between syllables of long words took care of it, and few articles were so long that hyphenating took more than thirty seconds.) But you will notice, if you read to the bottom of that article, that our designer’s opinion is not based on or limited to Web technology. He believes that justification is “just bad typography.” Justifying text in print is also a bad idea most of the time, he says. Naturally, his own self-published book is set ragged-right.

Everyone from Gutenberg to the advent of me got it wrong, but at last we know the truth about type. This is how design trends always come to us: as discoveries of how stupid our predecessors were.

Incidentally, here is a little challenge for you. Visit that article if you haven’t done so already, and judge it by its typography. You may think it is a breathtakingly gorgeous piece of design. You may say so in the comments if you like. Dr. Boli thinks it’s ugly and hard to read, but his opinions were formed by reading books. In which context, it is interesting to note that, if you read publishing professionals’ advice on formatting books for publication, you will find that they point out failing to justify text as a “rookie mistake.”

So trends, we reiterate, are a stupid reason for making changes. But adapting to the current state of technology is not a stupid reason. The introduction of printing changed the way books looked, and some of the changes were for the worse. But it was necessary to adapt to the new technology, because the benefits were obvious.

The software that runs this Magazine is WordPress, and the part of the software that controls how everything looks is the “theme.” There are thousands of themes out there for WordPress. Dr. Boli’s site runs on a theme called “Dr. Boli,” which is not one of the more popular ones. As far as he knows, the number of sites running it hovers around the one mark, dipping down to zero on those rare occasions when this one is off line.

This theme was cobbled together from spare parts twelve years ago, and it has been creaking along since WordPress 3.5.1. We are now at version 6.9.4. In most software, something put together for a twelve-year-old version of the software would have ceased to work about eleven years ago. We have WordPress culture to thank for the longevity of this design. “In core WordPress,” writes Matt Mullenweg, one of the founders, “we are obsessed with backwards compatibility. You can run plugins and themes written 20 years ago on today’s WordPress.”

Not all of them, though. Dr. Boli has seen themes break with software updates, and his may be next.

So would it be a good idea to give the site a fresh look, based on current technology instead of the Bronze-Age theme it currently runs?

Dr. Boli has been trying some experiments. On a small model of the site, he created a new theme based on other up-to-date themes. It works.

But then he looks at all those “iconic” publications whose designs have been fussed with and thinks that he liked them better the way the used to be.

So he has made a compromise. For now, he will let the “Dr. Boli” theme continue to shape the site. If it breaks in a future update, though, there is a substitute waiting. It may not be perfect yet, but it will work. This will still be a publication where words are primary, and design exists mainly to make the words easy to read.

And it will still have right-justified text. If it was good enough for Aldus Manutius, it’s good enough for you.

National Left-Handed Cat Groomers Awareness Week begins tomorrow. Are you ready? Many offices will be celebrating by matching your contributions to left-handed cat-groomer awareness during this special week. Basically, what that means is that, if you say, “I am aware of left-handed cat groomers,” your boss will say, “So am I.” Ask your supervisor whether your place of employment is participating.

Transcribed below…

The typewriter is a Royal Quiet De Luxe (with Pica type) from 1949.

Transcribed below for the better training of our robot friends.

To book an optometrist appointment on line: 25,419 words—roughly the same length as The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Did you read all those words when you booked the appointment? Perhaps you did. Perhaps you are a retired legal scholar with a monomaniacal devotion to the craft of legal language, and a sincere delight in well-crafted terms of service. If you are not that sort of person, however, you simply checked the box saying you had read the agreement, because you could not go on with your life until you did. We shall occasionally point out these word counts, which no one can possibly read in a reasonable time, as a public service, reminding our readers that we could solve the problem with mutual benefit to both parties in the transaction.

In Internet forums and similar gatherings of cognoscenti, writers often use abbreviations for the sake of efficient self-expression. Here are some of the more common abbreviations you will encounter in Internet communications:

AFAIK: And furthermore, all is kaput.

BTW: Big tall weeds.

FWIW: Found watermelon, ingested watermelon.

IMHO: I may have overeaten.

OTOH: Over the old hamburger.

ROFL: Random outburst from lungs.

TOS: Terms of slavery.

TL;DR: Tried levitating; damaged rump.

A Windows user asked this question, and Dr. Boli thought he would refer it to the Windows experts among his readers:

Is it bad if the top tasks in the Task Manager, sorted by “total disk utilization across all physical drives,” look like this? We can see that there are three instances of Windows Problem Reporting running at once and wearing down the drive quite a bit, while the most disk-hungry process is Windows Modules Installer Worker, which we suppose is installing another instance of Windows Problem Reporting.

Dr. Boli’s assumption was that this was just how Windows works. Perhaps it is reporting the useful diagnostic information that the computer is running Windows, which it correctly identifies as a problem. But someone who knows Windows better might be able to give us a more nuanced answer.

Dear Mr. Flounder: I find myself in a very delicate situation. Two very nice young men are vying for my attention, and I like them both, and they both seem to have good prospects, but my mother says I can only marry one of them even though I’m a Mormon. So how do I choose? —Sincerely, Salt Lake Sal, the Belle of West Bountiful (Utah).

Dear Miss: In my vision, which came to me in muted pastel tones, I saw a graceful gazelle leaping across the African veldt, unless it was a savanna, because my visions sometimes mix those two up, but at any rate it was a gazelle, or at least some member of the antelope subfamily, and it was leaping, gracefully, as graceful leapers do; and gradually (still, you must remember, in muted pastel tones), the gazelle became a xylophone, which continued to leap, although not nearly as gracefully, and every time it landed it made loud clanking noises; and then a turnip rose up out of the ground and devoured the xylophone; which, however, continued to leap and clank inside the turnip, so that it was the loudest turnip you ever heard; and then instead of the clanking turnip, it was the sound of locker doors slamming, and I was back in junior high school, and I suddenly realized that I didn’t know where my locker was or what the combination was, and I had forgotten to go to all my classes for most of the year already, and now I was going to fail everything, and it was going to go on my permanent record; and then there was that gazelle again, leaping through the hallways of Elinor Glyn Intermediate School like it owned the place, and it went into the teachers’ lounge and closed the door behind it.

To interpret these visions requires delicacy and a sensitive appreciation of Jungian archetypes, so I was wondering if you have tried flipping a coin. I often make decisions by flipping a coin, or rather by having my staff flip one for me, since I am deficient in coin-flipping apparatus. I frankly don’t even know how I ever made it through junior high school.

A loyal reader would keep up with everything we publish in this Magazine. An efficient reader, however, would wait for the year-in-review article on December 31, by which time the wheat should have been separated from the chaff. That strategy might be more effective, of course, if Dr. Boli had not decided to publish an all-chaff Magazine in 2025.

In January, we ejected the word “share” from the English language, though only in certain contexts. We also published a newly discovered fragment of Finnegans Wake, which Joycean scholars are still coming to grips with, to judge by the fact that we have not yet heard any Joycean scholars rendering an opinion on the fragment.

February was International Anything-but-Haiku Month, in which we wrote a poem a day on a typewriter a day. We could pick our favorites, but you might as well just start at the beginning, because if you did not come here to waste time, you are in the wrong place.

March gave us a word game that most of our readers probably still have not completed.

In April, we chased a quotation by Sam Ullman and probably found Frank Crane behind it. We were considering the relative merits of youth and age, and the one thing we can say for our essay is that everybody got a little bit older during the course of it.

In May, for the convenience of the cardinals among our readership (we are nothing if not ornithologically inclined), we reprinted the Vatican’s Daily Conclave Announcements.

June taught us How to Write, with helpful photographic illustrations. We also learned why we should not judge Edgar Allan Poe by his most popular book.

July brought us The Adventures of Superego, a new superhero with a Malt-O-Cod endorsement contract.

In August, we discovered that the Voynich Manuscript had been even more figured out while our attention was elsewhere.

In September, because no one else would do it, or rather because everybody else was doing it wrong, Dr. Boli explained the obesity epidemic.

In October, we saw a few examples of How Modern Science Is Making Life Better.

November was an especially delightful month for young readers, bringing us The James Joyce First Reader and More Jokes for Kids.

In December, we prohibited the word “Indigenous” when used before the word “peoples,” and since then public discourse has been conducted with exemplary precision and rationality.

Now, what should loyal readers expect from the year 2026? Probably to have their loyalty rewarded with more of the same sort of thing, which is the most we can promise. As for the efficient readers, we hope to see you again on December 31, 2026.