2025-12-11 10:25:42
Before anyone starts patting the Trump administration on its back for one good typographic decision, take a gander at the hard-to-believe-this-is-real new signage at (and alas, on) the White House. This is the sort of signage that typically spells “Business Center” across from the check-in desk at a Courtyard Marriott. The Biden State Department replacing Times New Roman with Cabrini was a typographic misdemeanor. Festooning the White House with signage set in gold-plated Shelley Script ought to land Trump in the Hague.
(The idea that the Oval Office ought to be explicitly labeled “The Oval Office” — whatever the typeface or signage style — brings to mind this classic Far Side cartoon, which I think aptly illustrates the president’s mental faculties.)
2025-12-11 10:01:56
The fifth of five rules in Matthew Butterick’s “Typography in Ten Minutes”:
And finally, font choice. The fastest, easiest, and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to ignore the fonts already loaded on your computer (known as system fonts) and the free fonts that inundate the internet. Instead, buy a professional font (like those found in font recommendations). A professional font gives you the benefit of a professional designer’s skills without having to hire one.
If that’s impossible, you can still make good typography with system fonts. But choose wisely. And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy. Not by typographers. Not by you.
2025-12-11 07:53:51
I’m a big believer in reading original source material. For example, when Apple provided me, alongside only a handful of other outlets, with a statement regarding their decision to delay the “more personalized Siri” back in March, I ran the full statement, verbatim. I added my own commentary, but I wanted to let Apple’s own statement speak for itself first. It drives me nuts when news sites in possession of a statement or original document do not make the full original text available, even if only in a link at the bottom, and choose only to quote short excerpts.
With regard to today’s news regarding Marco Rubio’s directive re-establishing Times New Roman as the default font for U.S. State Department documents (rescinding the Biden administration’s 2023 change to Calibri), I very much wanted to read the original. The New York Times broke the news, stated that they had obtained the memo, and quoted phrases and words from it, but they did not provide a copy of the original.
The State Department has not made this document publicly available, and to my knowledge, no one else has published it. I have obtained a copy from a source, and have made it available here in plain text format. The only change I’ve made is to replace non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) with regular spaces.1
Please do read it yourself, and do so with an open mind.
It seems clear to me that The New York Times did Rubio dirty in their characterization of the directive. The Times story, credited to reporters Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, ran under the headline “At State Dept., a Typeface Falls Victim in the War Against Woke”, and opens thus:
Secretary of State Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces on Tuesday with an order halting the State Department’s official use of Calibri, reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Mr. Rubio called a “wasteful” sop to diversity.
While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.
Rubio’s memo ran about 950 words. Here are the full quotes the Times pulled from it, consisting of just 56 words, aside from the memo’s subject line (“Return to Tradition: Times New Roman 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper”):
“wasteful”
“radical”
“restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.”
“informal”
“clashes”
“was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of D.E.I.A.”
“accessibility-based document remediation cases”
“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence.”
“generally perceived to connote tradition, formality and ceremony”
Rubio’s memo wasn’t merely “mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation”. That’s entirely what the memo is about. Serif typefaces like Times New Roman are more formal. It was the Biden administration and then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken who categorized the 2023 change to Calibri as driven by accessibility. I do not have access to Blinken’s memo making that change (under the cringe-inducing subject line “The Times (New Roman) are a-Changin”), but it was first reported by John Hudson and Annabelle Timsit at The Washington Post, where they wrote:
The secretary’s decision was motivated by accessibility issues and not aesthetics, said a senior State Department official familiar with the change.
Rubio’s memo makes the argument — correctly — that aesthetics matter, and that the argument that Calibri was in any way more accessible than Times New Roman was bogus. Rubio’s memo does not lash out against accessibility as a concern or goal. He simply makes the argument that Blinken’s order mandating Calibri in the name of accessibility was an empty gesture. Purely performative, at the cost of aesthetics. Going back to that 2023 story at the Post, they quote from Blinken’s memo thus:
In its cable, the State Department said it was choosing to shift to 14-point Calibri font because serif fonts like Times New Roman “can introduce accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities who use Optical Character Recognition technology or screen readers. It can also cause visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities,” it said.
The bit here about OCR is utter nonsense, a voodoo belief. No OCR or screen-reader software in use today has any problem whatsoever with Times New Roman. That’s just made-up nonsense, and I’d like to see sources for the claim about “visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities”. I don’t think it’s true, and citing it alongside a provably wrong claim about OCR software makes me even more skeptical.
Rubio brings actual numbers to make his case, which is more than can be said for anyone I’ve found arguing that Calibri is somehow more accessible than Times New Roman. Rubio’s argument is alluded to in the Times’s article thus:
But Mr. Rubio called it a failure by its own standards, saying that “accessibility-based document remediation cases” at the department had not declined.
Here’s the full passage from Rubio’s memo:
And although switching to Calibri was not among the Department’s most illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful instances of DEIA (see, e.g., Executive Orders 14151, 14173, 14281, and Memorandum on Removing Discrimination and Discriminatory Equity Ideology From the Foreign Service (DCPD202500375)) it was nonetheless cosmetic: the switch was promised to mitigate “accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities,” and employees were promised, “Your adoption supports the Department’s commitment to create a more accessible workplace,” but these promises were false. In fact, the number of accessibility-based document remediation cases at the Department of State was the same in the year after adopting Calibri as in the year before (1,192 cases in FY2024 versus 1,193 cases in FY2022). And the costs of remediation actually increased by $145,000 in that period — nearly a 20% jump. Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the Department’s official correspondence.
2024 was a Biden year, not a Trump year, so there’s no reason to think the remediation numbers were counted differently. The change to Calibri was the worst kind of accessibility effort: one that was founded on nothing more than feel-good performance. It was a change everyone could see and notice, but one that had no practical benefit whatsoever. Good on Rubio for rescinding a bad decision, and even better for doing so with a fair and informative explanation.2 (His memo even explains, “Fonts are specific variations of a typeface.... Through common use, the word font has come to mean both typeface and font.”)
The memo, per State Department standards perhaps, uses two spaces after sentences and colons. In the original copy I received, those double-spaces were sometimes in the sequence NON-BREAK-SPACE + SPACE, and other times the other way around: SPACE + NON-BREAK-SPACE. There were also a handful of seemingly random non-breaking space characters between words, mid-sentence. All of them, I suspect, just invisible-to-the-eye detritus from Microsoft Word. I replaced all of them with regular spaces, preserving, in plain text, two spaces wherever two spaces were intended. ↩︎
Do I think it was “fair and informative” to describe all of the Biden State Department’s DEIA initiatives as “illegal, immoral, radical, or wasteful”? No. Did I bother reading any of the documents Rubio referenced as proving such? No. Do I think this particular memorandum, specific to changing State’s font back to Times New Roman, would have been stronger without that line, leaving his defenestration of the Calibri font change to speak for itself? Yes. But that line was just one aside in an otherwise focused, sober, and, yes, fair and informative memo. ↩︎︎
2025-12-11 01:04:43
Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz, reporting for The New York Times:
While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork.
In an “Action Request” memo obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Rubio said that switching back to the use of Times New Roman would “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.” Calibri is “informal” when compared to serif typefaces like Times New Roman, the order said, and “clashes” with the department’s official letterhead. [...]
Then-Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken ordered the 2023 typeface shift on the recommendation of the State Department’s office of diversity and inclusion, which Mr. Rubio has since abolished. The change was meant to improve accessibility for readers with disabilities, such as low vision and dyslexia, and people who use assistive technologies, such as screen readers. [...]
But Mr. Rubio’s order rejected the grounds for the switch. The change, he allowed, “was not among the department’s most illegal, immoral, radical or wasteful instances of D.E.I.A.,” the acronym for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility. But Mr. Rubio called it a failure by its own standards, saying that “accessibility-based document remediation cases” at the department had not declined.
“Switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence,” Mr. Rubio said. He noted that Times New Roman had been the department’s official typeface for nearly 20 years until the 2023 change. (Before 2004, the State Department used Courier New.)
When Blinken ordered the change to Calibri in 2023, I wrote:
It is correct for the State Department to have a house style for documents. I’m not sure what font they should use, but it wasn’t Times, and it shouldn’t be Calibri. Off the top of my head, I’d suggest Caslon — a sturdy, serious typeface that looked good 250 years ago, looks good now, and should look good 250 years from now.
While neither is a good choice, between the two, Times New Roman is clearly better. Unstated in my post from 2023 is acknowledgement that the choice might be limited to the default fonts in Microsoft Office. Limited to those fonts, Times New Roman might be the best choice. I just think it’s stupid for an institution with the resources of the U.S. State Department to shrug its shoulders at the notion that they should license and install whatever fonts they want on all of their computers. Anyone making excuses that they “can’t” do that should be fired. It’s the job of IT to serve the needs of the organization, not the organization’s job to limit itself to what makes IT easiest.
Calibri does convey a sense of casualness — and more so, modernity — that is not appropriate for the U.S. State Department. And I do not buy the argument that Calibri is somehow more accessible for those with low vision or reading disabilities. People with actual accessibility needs should be catered to, but they need more than a sans serif typeface, and their needs should not primarily motivate the choice for the default typeface. Dyslexics need typefaces like OpenDyslexic; people with low vision need font sizes much larger than 14-point. Those would make for terrible defaults for everyone.
2025-12-10 06:42:45
From Apple’s iMessage Security Overview:
Apple iMessage is a messaging service for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro. Relying on the Apple Push Notification service (APNs), iMessage lets users send texts and attachments like photos, contacts, locations, links, and emoji. Messages sync across all devices, enabling seamless conversations. Apple doesn’t store message content or attachments, which are all secured with end-to-end encryption so that no one but the sender and receiver can access them. Apple canʼt decrypt the data.
This thread on Mastodon, prompted by my wondering why Russia is blocking FaceTime but not iMessage, suggests that because iMessage messages are sent via APNs, a network (or entire nation) seeking to block iMessage can only do so by blocking all push notifications for iOS. That’s why on airplanes with “free messaging” on in-flight Wi-Fi, you usually also get all incoming push notifications, even for services that aren’t available on the free Wi-Fi.
Here’s a support document from GFI Software, which makes network appliances for enterprises and schools:
The Exinda appliance gives administrators multiple options to stop or throttle applications that can use a lot of bandwidth in the network. An application that many would consider discardable or able to be easily limited in bandwidth is iMessage. When blocking or discarding iMessage traffic, users may experience an issue where all push notifications on iOS devices that have traffic going through the Exinda, i.e., on WiFi, will stop displaying.
Root Cause: Apple uses the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) to allow application creators to push out information to iOS devices. This includes mail servers being able to push out notifications of calendar and email, or app creators to be able to push text-based messages straight to the device.
Apple might have architected iMessage this way to make iMessage veto-proof with cellular carriers, who, at the time of iMessage’s announcement in June 2011, were already promoting iPhone push notifications as a reason to upgrade from a dumb phone to an iPhone with a more expensive plan. The carriers might have been tempted to block iMessage over cell networks to keep people using SMS, but they couldn’t without blocking all push notifications, which wouldn’t be tenable. But this architecture also makes iMessage hard to block in authoritarian countries where iPhones are even vaguely popular. (Maybe this helps explain why iMessage isn’t blocked in China, too?)
Draw your own conclusions about cellular carriers and enterprise network administrators being similar to authoritarian governments.
2025-12-10 06:17:20
Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, back in 2009:
The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.
A related adage I heard, and internalized, recently: “We’re not thinking creatures who feel; we’re feeling creatures who think.” (Via Jason Kottke.)
