Gabe Bullard
LightNews LightNews
banner
gbullard.bsky.social
Gabe Bullard
@gbullard.bsky.social
350 followers 320 following 180 posts
Journalist and critic. I study nostalgia in pop culture and politics. I'm writing a book about convenience. I'm on the radio. Everything is at gabebullard.com. Basel, CH.
Posts Replies Media Videos
gbullard.bsky.social
Podcasting
A still of Kurt Russell from the John Carpenter film The Thing (1982). Russell looks tired and is talking into a microphone. There is a tall glass of whiskey on his desk.
October 11, 2025 at 6:24 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Part one of my cultural history of the bowling shirt is one of the most popular essays I’ve published in a while. I guess people like it?

gabebullard.substack.com/p/what-happe...
A collage of newspaper ads for bowling shirts from the 1940s and 1950s.
September 8, 2025 at 2:35 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Going deep on bowling shirts. gabebullard.substack.com/p/what-happe...
Thirty years ago, a bowling shirt was a signifier of an obsession with kitsch or an addiction to irony. The vintage-shop owner played by John Waters in a 1997 Simpsons episode wears multiple bowling shirts. Ethan Hawke’s character wears one in Reality Bites. In less than a decade, the bowling shirt changed from the uniform of alt hipsterdom to the button-up equivalent of a bleached-blond soul patch. A Flair Hair visor for the torso. Now its image is something like Fieri—derided in some corners for absurdity and tastelessness and appreciated in others for earnestness. It’s simultaneously steeped in irony but too sincere to dismiss as frivolous. Fieri’s influence on the shirt’s image is notable, but it’s just one part of a decades-long nostalgia cycle that has left the shirt a little more faded with each turn.
September 5, 2025 at 6:23 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
gabebullard.substack.com/p/this-isnt-...
Every so often, in conversation with a friend, one of us will mention a paid newsletter/podcast/Patreon/etc that we mutually subscribe to. The reference meets a blank stare. “I haven’t kept up,” one or the other of us says. The reason is always the same: There was just too much.
August 23, 2025 at 11:46 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
It's so odd to me that we have hours and hours of video podcasts where a host talks to a guest, and none of them look half as decent as TV did 50 years ago. The technology exists!
August 14, 2025 at 9:02 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
niemanreports.org/local-truste...
“Maybe 20% of the country is effectively going to lose any concept of itself as a place within the next 10 years without public media,” Shepperd added. “They're essentially all going to have national ideology on the local level, and no local memory and no local experience. They won't have the history, they won't have the funding from [the National Endowment for the Humanities] for the history museums. They won't have public media to interview people in their own community,” he said. “They'll be decentralized, but they will have Fox News.”
August 8, 2025 at 5:39 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
I wrote an essay about this rock. gabebullard.substack.com/p/a-solitary...
A scratched stone on a wooden floor.
July 25, 2025 at 4:10 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
The "Tesla Diner" looks terrible, but in a significant way. It's supposed to be some retro-future idea, right? The update of the old futurist/Googie designs of the '50s, but for the electric car age? It has none of the imagination, daring, or sense of fun of old designs.
An image of the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles. It is a two-story silvery-gray building with a neon stripe around the first floor. A Googie-architecture car wash with bright pillars extending beyond the roof. A Googie coffee shop with a sharply angled roof. Norm's diner, with a large sign and angular roof.
July 22, 2025 at 10:37 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
A still from a New York Times Opinion video. In it, Ezra Klein is sitting in a red armchair, looking directly at the camera. His palms are turned up in a welcoming gesture. The caption says "God says: Welcome." It is captured from a joke Klein told at the beginning of the video.
July 18, 2025 at 11:00 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
I'm really glad we traded things like reading articles, watching TV shows, or listening to radio for hourlong videos with shots like this.
A still from a New York Times opinion video. It shows writer Ross Douthat speaking into a MacBook. The computer is on a plastic stand. Douthat is wearing large headphones. His computer has a webcam clipped to the top of it and a large microphone to the side. The wires of both are visible.
July 18, 2025 at 8:02 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
My latest. www.watchingtogetheralone.com/p/in-defense...
The pitfall of developing a signature voice is that people will recognize it. Once they do, they stop looking for anything else. They watch, read, or listen in hopes of finding a way to feel smarter than the work—even if they ostensibly enjoy it. This is how recognizable themes become “obvious,” how a logical plot becomes “formulaic,” how a style becomes a copyable meme.
July 17, 2025 at 1:23 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Almost two years in, I'm really happy with how Together, Alone is going. If you're wondering where to start, try @ariellebernstein.bsky.social's essay on Sabrina Carpenter and how we talk about popular culture. www.watchingtogetheralone.com
A screenshot of the homepage of the website Together, Alone. There are five stories featured: "The Uncanny Valley of Digital Pop Culture Discourse"; "The Persistence of Commodified Memory"; "In Defense of Artifice"; "The Age of Robot Women"; "I Don't Want To See You, You Seem Bored."
July 17, 2025 at 1:17 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Who put a PDF called "Ian MacKaye" into an Apple demonstration video?
A screenshot from the Apple Liquid Glass demonstration video. It shows a MacOS Finder window with four files. One is labeled Gears, another Ian MacKaye, another Improv, and another Index.
June 10, 2025 at 10:20 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
Reject the anxiety of Hi dreaming about missing his flight. Normalize the Wizard of Id enjoying a martini in his chair.
A panel from a Hi and Lois comic strip in which Hi is sitting in his pajamas in bed, looking wearing, saying "I had that dream again about missing my flight." A cropped panel from The Wizard of Id showing the titular Wizard sitting in an armchair and holding a martini.
April 11, 2025 at 10:46 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
Really I guess there's nothing stopping me from doing this.
March 24, 2025 at 10:57 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
Rock-Ola was a big brand of jukebox, but the name didn't come from rock music, or the fact that the jukebox's antecedent, the player piano, was called the pianola.

Rockola was the founder's name. He started making jukeboxes in the 1930s.

The name might've influenced the coinage of "rock and roll"
A photo of a Rock-Ola brand jukebox from the early 1960s. It's mostly chrome with the word "Rock-Ola" in light-up letters.
February 17, 2025 at 12:00 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Never gonna happen.
A MacOS prompt says "Ready for Apple Intelligence" "Time to experience the new personal intelligence system" with a button that says "Set Up Apple Intelligence"
January 15, 2025 at 11:43 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
Why I love sad Christmas music. Click for the picture of me as Santa. Stay for the short essay. gabebullard.substack.com/p/muddle-thr...
A Polaroid photo from 2005 shows the author dressed as Santa Claus, wearing a red suit, fake beard, and Converse sneakers.
December 19, 2024 at 2:57 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Oh wonder! How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world that has such people in it!
A screenshot of a social media post from The Wirecutter that says "This nifty little tool turns an ordinary canned soda into a beautiful cocktail-esque beverage. We put the viral device to the test on nearly two-dozen cans. Here's what we learned" with a still image from a video of a gray plastic device that removes the entire top of soda-style cans. A social media post in which a user writes "google just dropped veo2 and it is outperforming sora significantly" followed by a star eyes emoji. The post includes a side-by-side video labeled "Google's Veo 2 vs OpenAI Sora." Each video shows a knife cutting a tomato. The video is paused.
December 17, 2024 at 11:59 AM
gbullard.bsky.social
www.watchingtogetheralone.com/p/generative...
A paragraph from the linked essay that reads: "So don’t. Don’t use generative AI. Do not give another inch to this technology. No curious clicks. No quick images to put atop a post. No get-a-load-of-this-garbage screenshot fodder. In two years of showing off their latest parlor trick, the venture-capital-backed plagiarists who profit from AI have done nothing to further the arts, nothing to strengthen the humanities, and nothing to improve any human endeavor that doesn’t make them personally wealthy, famous, or powerful. Don’t give them another user to exploit. Leave them to their sad lives of reinventing the city bus."
December 16, 2024 at 12:31 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Living the Dream.
A carnival ride sign reads “Disney-Dream” and hands over a life-size model of the Simpsons.
October 26, 2024 at 3:11 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Secretary of Labor James Mitchell and Murrow both smoked through their interview.
Then-Secretary of Labor James Mitchell at his desk in the documentary Harvest of Shame. Mitchell is holding a cigarette. Then-Secretary of Labor James Mitchell talking with Edward R. Murrow in the CBS documentary Harvest of Shame. Both are smoking cigarettes.
October 23, 2024 at 1:25 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Ah, here it is. Murrow's smoke is drifting over Sen. Harrison Williams's cup of pencils. In a wider shot, you see Murrow smoking through the interview.
Then-Senator Harrison Williams sitting at his desk in the CBS documentary Harvest of Shame. Cigarette smoke is drifting into the right side of the frame. Then-Senator Harrison Williams talking to Edward R. Murrow in the CBS documentary Harvest of Shame. Murrow, sitting across the desk from Williams, is smoking.
October 23, 2024 at 1:22 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
Murrow wore his microphone, when he could have very easily clipped it onto the cigarettes he constantly smoked on air.
A still image of Edward R. Murrow from the CBS documentary Harvest of Shame. In the image, Murrow is wearing a microphone on the front of his shirt and holding a cigarette.
October 23, 2024 at 12:45 PM
gbullard.bsky.social
I like dubs when they're in a language I'm trying to learn, when I can turn on subtitles, and when I've seen the movie so many times, I know what they're saying in English.
A photo of a TV showing The Big Lebowski in French. It's the ending scene when the Dude is talking to the Cowboy. The subtitle says "On change pas le Dude."
October 15, 2024 at 3:42 PM