Why are the Zuckerbergs here? What are they doing? Follow the lede to find out

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Why are the Zuckerbergs here? What are they doing? Follow the lede to find out

12 October 2026

Jeremy Stern introduces his fifteen-thousand word essay, published in Colossus, about Meta CEO, and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, with a lede so succinct it must be the envy of any writer:

There they are. The Zuckerbergs.

Ledes, also called hooks, are a brief sentence that entices someone to read a newspaper or magazine article. The longer the piece, the more important the hook.

They were something I struggled with during my extremely short career a freelance newspaper writer. I was fortunate to be working with an editor who helped me out a little.

“Try again,” he’d say, patiently after I sent through idea after idea. The rest of what I’d written was fine, but it took awhile to get the first line right.

But Stern’s lede is a classic.

Even though I know who the Zuckerbergs are (or thought I did; take a look, you’ll see what I mean), I still wanted to read on to learn just where the Zuckerbergs were, and what they were doing there.

But Stern’s Zuckerberg write-up is replete with hooks. Of sorts. As it must, to sustain interest in a fifteen-thousand word long article. Particularly in 2026. But not hooks in the conventional sense.

They’re enticements to continue reading. Subtle — suspenseful even — builds up to the next part of the story. The constant piquing of a reader’s curiosity.

Ledes aren’t seen often in blog posts, though there are writers using them. The environment online is different, the blogosphere another realm. Titles are what matter. A blogger’s primary instinct is to appease the SEO gods. Their favour must be curried. Perhaps then the gods will bestow good fortune on the blogger through favourable placement on a search engine results page.

This is achieved by post titles, not ledes or hooks.

Readers of blog posts don’t necessarily need, or want, to be lured in. They’ve come to read what a blogger has to say. Either the subject matter interests them, and they read on, or it doesn’t, in which case the reader goes elsewhere.

The writer of an article published in a newspaper or magazine, doesn’t always have that luxury. So the lede it is. Build it baby, build it. And keep honing the craft, because sometimes you’re only as good as yesterday’s hook.

Facebook spent billions on the metaverse and all they got was a new name

10 June 2026

A postmortem, perhaps, of the metaverse, particularly as envisaged by Meta, by Nick Heer.

A number of other big tech players also had visions of an all encompassing immersive, digital realm, but aside from sometimes considerable expenditure, not a whole lot came of it.

From where we are now, several years later, the connection between the COVID pandemic, and Facebook’s announcement they were effectively going all-in on the metaverse, couldn’t be clearer.

The world was in the midst of seemingly endless lockdowns, and stay at home mandates. The metaverse pitch was certainly persuasive. We couldn’t live in the real world, so how about instead a vast virtual domain? Who couldn’t help but be excited by the prospect?

I went as far as setting-up a metaverse tag here, which tellingly, hasn’t been used in three years.

But the world we find ourselves in, nearly five years later, couldn’t be much further removed from that of late 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and CEO of what was then Facebook, unveiled his vision of the metaverse.

But let’s give Zuckerberg some due here. He had known something big, something groundbreaking, was in our future, declaring three years earlier in 2018, that “every ten to fifteen years or so, there’s a major new computing paradigm.”

The thing of course is this new paradigm turned out to be something else all together.

The Metaverse, one step closer to the Holodeck

1 November 2021

Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the social network company he co-founded in 2004 will be known as Meta. Later, in his keynote presentation at the company Connect event, he unveiled a raft of technologies in development that have the potential to change the way we live and work.

The Star Trek geek in me could not help but make comparisons to the Holodeck, a room on the star-ship Enterprise allowing the crew to realistically create, or re-create, almost any situation they could imagine. If you have a spare eighty or so minutes, check out Zuckerberg’s keynote. Tech analyst Ben Thompson interviewed the Facebook CEO shortly before the keynote, and if you have another forty-five minutes to spare, it’s a conversation well worth listening to.