I'm not like a regular media sociologist. I'm a cool media sociologist. • Associate Prof Journalism & Comm @LehighU • Near-term futurism scholarship on digital media, internet culture, and society • Exvie wanderer • M-I-Z • http://jeremylittau.substack.com
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Also doubles as a great gift to give people that write a jacket blurb. Obviously I’m volunteering here because I have a good feeling about the NBA futures odds.
Thanks!
Started Week 8 with a 15-minute recovery jog. Next three weeks are the hard stretch of the training I’ve been eyeing, as it’ll be pushing my long run distance up about 2.2 miles to 12.5. So I’m trying to take it easy on recovery runs in particular. 48 days until my first half. #hmtraining #runsky
Pay off your loved one’s gambling debts, as a present!
Don’t you dare say America has lost its spirit of innovation.
I was uncertain about being ready for this distance. I am so tentative about pushing it since COVID made me unable to do much of any physical activity for about 8 months. But I think if I'd kept the initial 10:45-11:00 pace for all 9 miles, I *could* have done a half today. The training is working.
This was the first long run I experimented with gels since I'm going to need something as the runs get longer (10 each of the next two Sundays, then 12.5 in 3 weeks, then backing off). But my longest run ever before today was 8.5mi before COVID decked me in '22. Getting to 9.3 was huge for me.
Weird, I’m suddenly being told by right wing family members who formerly sported Let’s Go Brandon hats and cried because I injected nanorobots into my blood with the jab that “We should all stop reading politics”
Halfway done with my training! Today was the long run and it happens to be the furthest I’ve ever gone without resting: 5K/9.3mi I again worked a lot on pace discipline in prep for the race. Ran first half in 10:45-11:00 range then turned it up. 49 days until my first half. #hmtraining #runsky
I went to work on my lecture over some ramen and the server asked if I worked in healthcare, because she’s a cancer bioinformatician who can’t find a job and is in now in tenuous visa territory. I’m so sad and angry about this country, and it keeps hitting me at the moments I don’t expect it
The ACC's bobblehead commercial is cute and fun. But I don't know why conferences tell lies such as "best quarterbacks, best fans." Not even these mascot bobbleheads believe these things have ever been true about the ACC. Get honest bobbleheads that proclaim "widest geography, most Cook-Outs"
Don't worry he'll probably be dead in 25 years and then you'll be free. *Probably*.
Bluesky right now ...
In the time you e known me have I EVER looked fancy? Really this is just about fit. Most of these things fit a tall body like I’m wearing a bra. I’m not a bass player like Roland.
It’s going to be so satisfying when Taylor swift bankrupts Mark Zuckerberg
Fleer always had that "me touching an SLR camera for the first time in photojournalism elective and squeezing off random shots just because" energy. (I realize most of that sentence dates me terribly)
All the quality control guys that word at Fleer in 1982 are now at Boeing.
Most of the ones I've tried on feel like a shirt that is too tight and too short because the bottom clasps connect right at the base of my rib cage. Awkward feeling I'd like to avoid.
I'm looking for recs for a running vest that won't ride up on my ribs if you've got one. Bear in mind I am tall. The ones I have tried on are made for midsize folks and I want one that extends down a bit lower for comfort reasons. Something w/ 2-3 pockets and can hold a water bottle, nothing fancy.
I think it's outrageously funny that Peter Thiel keeps unironically naming his companies after Tolkien lore. He's starting a bank named Erebor! 😅
So many of the people building our current technology environments and infrastructure grew up watching sci-fi and reading/watching cyberpunk material and it's just like, wow did you really miss the point.
This is basically an episode of Star Trek Voyager. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critica...
I got an NYT push alert about Taylor Swift getting engaged, but not about the United States spying on Greenland
Makes it clear, makes it easy, makes it inarguable: The landlords who say they "can't afford" a rent freeze sure did somehow find *$2.5 Mil* to give to the dude who wants to *raise* rents. You want your rent to go up, or you want it to stay the same? Stop running to the right. Stay left, & fight.
Belgium Broom Bro will always be the true Bluesky mascot.
Speed run workout: Pyramid intervals Start with 5:00 warmup jog 1. 1:00 at mile pace, 1:30 recovery walk 2. 5:00 at 5K pace, 3:00 recovery walk 3. 10:00 at 10K pace, 3:00 recovery walk 4. 5:00 at 5K, 2:30 recovery walk 5. 1:00 at mile 51 days until my first half. #hmtraining #runsky
I’ve got my broom and am ready to be captured on Street View.
I miss the old brand #CDC
i find this image so fascinating. it is both a literal example of authoritarianism but also a second-hand reproduction of the aesthetics of other authoritarian states. it's like a simulacra of authoritarianism whose purpose is to attempt to make the simulacra real.
Some bigger papers have tried reducing print days per week but outright ending it was really the move small outlets were making in an effort to survive. AJC is a major metro stage.
Inevitable, but noteworthy that it’s now happening for papers this large.
We could short their stock if we weren’t spending all our money on tariffs.
God yes
Revisiting this, it’s even funnier now that a brand in dire need of a refresh to bring in younger customers went with “Can’t stand up to a bunch of crybabies” as their new image. 😂 Sometimes being an expert in my field is just about sitting back and taking in the farce.
Recovery run for 31 min. Was supposed to be easy pace but I decided to push the back end of the first 5K to see if I could beat my race PR of 29:36, and did it in 28:45 before slowing down. I probably have a 27-minute 5K in me; training is working. 52 days until my first half. #hmtraining #runsky
I’m glad people are realizing that Project 2025 is for killing people but it would have been great if they listened like, last year, when just about every marginalized person you know was screaming about it. But hey, welcome, big tent, I guess.
Worth reading this whole letter. What a great American—you could teach this in school, if schools ever accurately cover this period in history
Always wear a helmet, kids.
Speed workout today, focus on gear-shifting. 5 minutes with 1:00 walk in between. 1. 5:00 warmup 2. 4:00 at recovery pace, then 1:00 at mile. 3. 3:00 at 10K, then 1:00 mile 4. 2:00 at 5K then 1:00 mile 5. 1:00 at 5K then 1:00 fastest sprint 53 days until my first half. #hmtraining #runsky
Nobody: Marketers:
This is something you find out when you’re 14
You know it’s fall when they roll out the pumpkin spice wiper fluid.
Week 7 of the training program. Simple 15-min recovery jog today. 54 days until my first half. #hmtraining #runsky
I also emailed an assignment to the wrong class. I'm about to get reassigned to the team's extended spring training complex.
Spent 10 minutes today trying to troubleshoot why my USB hub wasn't charging my wireless keyboard, then realized it was because my hub wasn't plugged in to a power source.
The discussion: Yes this is Really Dumb and not worth spending time arguing, but you also are downhill from its effects regardless.
Every day the dude makes us have to redesign our entire class.
First day of classes. I decided to lead my "Digital Life & The Search For Meaning" seminar with Cracker Barrel. 😂
Happy first day of college teaching for those celebrating today. ❤️
Thank you! Sorry to hear about the infection. This is my favorite book to use as an opening to my senior seminar. ❤️
It's kind of funny to think of the version of this that involves Trump taking a very long bike ride with Barry Bonds.
Area Baseball Expert Spells It As “Strike-outs”
Yet another swim season concluded without my kids discovering the neighborhood pool has a snack bar. We are playing with house money at this point.
Charlie *does* seem like a guy who can't grill a steak.
I cold always have them buy the book (and do recommend it) but I liked having a free option for my students who struggle to pay for textbooks.
Does anyone know what is going on with the website for The Cluetrain Manifesto? I have used the website (cluetrain dot com) for class reading for over a decade now and it appears to be not working. Would be sad to lose that material; it's always been Week 1 reading for my Internet Culture class. 🫤
Meanwhile the sitting vice president talks about “Cultural Marxism” and “the Cathedral” and uses esoteric White Power jargon all the time but his language is not a liability
Speed training today, 20 intervals with 1 min of walk recovery between 1: 30 sec at 5K pace (~8:30) 2-10: 30 sec at mile pace (~7:00) 11: 30 sec at 5K pace 12-20: 30 sec at mile pace Six weeks of training done, eight weeks left and 56 days until my first half. #hmtraining #runsky
SO MOVED
I will be sitting this one out. I have to save my energy for the War On Christmas.
Anyhow, Cracker Barrel isn’t even that good. No, I’m not going to go eat there because I must like something the other team hates, as if Gavin Newsom suddenly turned into a restaurant.
Makes me wish I’d done that in high school instead. Knowing your teen is doing a sport and surrounded by good kids is such a relief.
You could ask someone expressing anger about this change and it’d take a minute for it to devolve into sputtering nonsense. They can’t even tell you why they’re mad. They certainly don’t know anything about marketing.
This is some genuinely funny performance art. A meaningful moment in my life RUINED by a logo change lol. You can see the game being played here. Of course he doesn’t think this. The audience demands this type of performance, as Goffman would say.
Instead being “outraged” it’s just performance. I see people on my team mad, and so now I am mad. I mean, people get angry at logo changes all the time. But in a sign “Woke” has no meaning to these people, they can’t articulate why removing a dude and a barrel for a minimalist design is Woke.
I’m mystified by the stupid Cracker Barrel fake controversy. Not because conservatives latching on to some ginned-up outrage is novel, but rather that usually they try to at least articulate a why. They aren’t even bothering to give a reason here, like we are supposed to just *get* why they are mad.
Thing is, these networks have been around long enough that mere follower count is an elementary and somewhat useless metric. As Dave notes, quality of the network should be recognizably better in places with some history, and Twitter’s experience was degrading significantly by 2024.
fwiw I think the user decay problem at Twitter is a big part of the differential. "active followers" looks real different from "followers" for a decades-old social network
It feels a lot like the adult running community here, very supportive. That we can transmit those values is encouraging.
🧵 👇🏻
Well this isn’t true. Nobody else will hateread and liveskeet dumb books written by Nate Silver. You’re a public good at this point. 😂
2/2 Maybe it's the running community's disposition or just generational (or both) but I saw kids lining the finish line cheering for runners from other schools. Seniors came up to my kid, a 9th grader, to tell him he did great. What I'd have given for that type of support, but I am glad he has it.
1/2 Yesterday was my son's first XC meet of the season. I didn't run in high school and most of my 1990s experience with high school sports was an unsupportive jock culture, so I wasn't prepared for the type of supportive community I saw around those kids. ...
"Student arrivals from India plummeted 46% while China posted a 26% decline." I'll point out that #India immigrants who came to #US to study and stayed have: - become CEOs of 16 Fortune 500 companies with $1 trillion in revenue - founded 72 startups worth $195 billion and employing 55,000 people
This is my first ever half so this was the first run where I’m playing with paces to figure out what I should aim for in the first half of the actual race. I’m settling on around 10:30-10:45 and hoping I can pick it up on the back end.
Long run, 8 miles today. Will admit I had doubts I could add 1.8 miles in 5 days after Sunday’s run was such a struggle. But I learned from it and had a plan: first half at easy pace and then increase the pace in the back half. And look at those splits, baby. 58 days to go. #hmtraining #runsky
lol NYT www.nytimes.com/2025/08/21/n...
Some incredibly good news: One year ago this week, The Onion returned to print. In that one year, we’ve grown to the 13th largest print newspaper in the United States, just ahead of the Boston Globe, and growing fast. In short, it’s working. So… thank you. Thank you for helping save this thing.
I will always remember James Dobson by how he described beating his dog to inspire millions of parents to beat their children.
The upshot is Christian bookstores became The Culture for this sector. Writing, music, TV, eventually pods/social. It's a whole parallel culture you are impacted by even if you don't know about it. Completely insular, anti-intellectual, and hostile to unapproved ideas. Big driver of how we got here.
Dobson was a trailblazer of modern Christianity, Inc. Fundamentalism became industry, so infused with and corrupted by capitalist greed that they were inseparable. Evangelical Christian writers and musicians self-censor all the time because they need to be on Christian bookstore shelves.
Churches in the '80s and '90s were filled with parents outsourcing all their thinking on parenting to Dobson. He rivals Falwell Sr. in terms of his destructive influence on the church. The "sex talk" I got was being handed a Dobson book about adolescence. Even teen me knew the writing was bad. 😅
We get to do the Office Space scam for real!
Spreadsheet users, famous for being agnostic on incorrect values. I don’t even turn on autocorrect in Word. Enabling AI to do work for you unchecked is 100x worse.
Very little distance but it was fast. Speed training on hills. Five-min jog followed by 3 sets of the following intervals: 1:00 uphill at 10K effort 2:00 recovery jog down 0:45 uphill at 5K effort 1:30 recovery jog down 0:30 uphill at mile effort 1:00 jog down 60 days to go. #hmtraining #runsky
it's not an "immigration crackdown" if they are 1) revoking legally granted visas for 2) temporary student residence. it's not a crackdown, it's a policy change; and it's not about immigration, it's about weakening the universities and education more generally and signaling white supremacy.
"It is absurd to treat Al-Debs's injuries as a separate incident from his starving. The very mechanisms that deprive him of nutrients are the ones that injured him in the first place:" @mckinneykelsey.bsky.social with moral clarity, on that awful Free Press propaganda piece.
Highly recommend texting your spouse/partner saying you purchased the kids’ school photos, then do what I did and say this is the background you picked.
Recovery run for 45 at easy pace. I focused on 4/10 effort and having the best split after the halfway point, when my mind tends to wander. Best split was in the third quarter, so a win there. (There also were WOMEN WORKING and they were dusting me. 🙃) 61 days to go. #hmtraining #runsky
Now all we need is a Whompp account!
Prince Fielder has more career inside-the-park HRs than Rickey Henderson.
there's a few free options I mention in my giant migration thread (towards the end)
It does appear freebie people like me can take the audience we built but any new iOS add means you need to market the switch. Ghost ports are seamless judging from some of the writers I follow who made the switch.
You should read through Anil’s thread. Selling iOS subscription options as a good thing for writers is dishonest given the take Apple takes. And so it looks like a fake value-add that allows Substack to do a backdoor trial run on ending subscriber portability for all by creating lock-in norms.