Gabe Bullard

It's amazing how many tricky problems of writing can be solved by moving a paragraph, then deleting it.

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.

Podcasting

Piano Trio No. 2 "Payne Hollow"/winterloops, by Daniel Gilliam/NouLou Chamber Players 5 track album

Humbly presenting to the void: today is new album release eve. Tomorrow you can get hear my second piano trio "Payne Hollow," inspired by Harlan and Anna Hubbard who lived deliberately on the banks of the Ohio. Recorded by local group NouLou Chamber Players. fictivemusic.bandcamp.com/album/piano-...

With less than one month to go before the paperback release, I am sharing a review a day. Today's review is from the esteemed Olivia Liang in The Financial Times.The FT was actually the first review to appear outside of a trade publication and it was a huge relief to see it reviewed so well overseas

This is a really fun look at a great comic.

The End of the Bowling Shirt Saga All meaning is gone

Part three of the cultural history of the bowling shirt. Folks, we've got swing revival, Two and a Half Men, fake irony, and a gallon of Donkey Sauce. gabebullard.substack.com/p/the-end-of...

one will soon sink, unrecorded, in the sea

Eating figs and singing ”I got figs” to the tune of ZZ Top’s “Legs.”

the doom of boats, and ships, and men

And Lebowski, of course.

Further Adventures of the Bowling Shirt Guy Nostalgia’s Nasty Nineties

Still writing about bowling shirts. This time, I touch on the swing revival, old Mac games, that Lit video, and the false idea of a 20-year nostalgia cycle. open.substack.com/pub/gabebull...

Happy birthday!

Speaking of film formats, I recently published an article on Pola-Lite, a largely unnoticed and under-researched single-strip 3-D format, in Film Atlas, an encyclopedia of every film format ever.

I had a blast researching this. It has everything! Monsters, Douglas Sirk, questionable origin stories!

I encourage anyone working in a creative field who is concerned about AI replacing them to not aid in AI's replacement of people in other creative fields.

If you're a freelance writer, ask your editor how they'll illustrate your story—with stock images, illustrations, new photos, or AI.

Reading a post critiquing AI podcasts and the image appears to be an AI-made illustration.

I see this a lot. People in one medium critique the use of AI in their field, but then use it to do things they can't do or they don't want to hire out—like audio producers using AI images.

When we started Defector, we set out to make a sustainable business out of providing people things to read during their workday. Thanks to the efforts of my colleagues and the support of our subscribers, we have achieved that goal. It didn’t even take that long to find ourselves standing on solid ground. Within a year, it was clear this was going to work—we would write blogs intended to entertain, inform, clarify and challenge, and people would pay us a few bucks a month to read them. The simplicity of all this has had something of a deprogramming effect on me. I got into this business during the hothouse days of the 2010s, when it was taken for granted that the true purpose of every media company was to achieve a nine-figure valuation. The collapse of that industry demanded a new way of thinking about what a media company can and should be, and my hope is that Defector has provided a useful example of just one way of doing things.

Five years of Defector: defector.com/five-years-o...

Listeners Like Who? How public radio has perpetuated racial inequality since its founding—and how journalists of color are challenging white dominance in the workplace and on the public airwaves

Many congratulations to Laura Garbes (University of Minnesota) on the publication of her pathbreaking sociology of the culture, idealism, and contradictions of public media. Out today on Princeton University Press.

Don't trust anyone* who shows up to work in the morning with their tie already loosened.

*Anyone who isn't a musician†.

†A good musician.

Maybe I need to stop on these book edits. I just imagined I wrote the phrase "Load o' Laundry."

So much of mainstream American journalism has just been finding the "iconoclasts" to ensure you're "adding something to the conversation."

So you end up with 3 kinds of interviews:

Future installments get into the Swing Revival, fake irony, etc.

A collage of newspaper ads for bowling shirts from the 1940s and 1950s.

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...

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.

Going deep on bowling shirts. gabebullard.substack.com/p/what-happe...

The 99PI Anniversary Special: 15 for 15 Podcast Episode · 99% Invisible · 09/02/2025 · 51m

Hey Beautiful Nerds! @99pi.org is fifteen years old tomorrow! Hard to believe. We used the occasion for me to talk about our editing process, my design hill to die on, and foot measurement devices

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/9...

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.

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.

gabebullard.substack.com/p/this-isnt-...

Rural Stations Seek Support in the Wake of Federal Cuts - Nieman Reports Despite a surge in donations, stations like KAXE in Northern Minnesota still face an uncertain future.

The big question facing stations now is whether this surge of giving can last, and fill the gap Congress created.

📝 Story by @gbullard.bsky.social

niemanreports.org/rural-statio...

The Future Of Podcasting Is Here, And It Sucks | Defector This week, Left Of Dial published its Essential Listening Poll, a compilation of the 100 best podcasts of all time, according to industry creators, writers, and scholars (Disclosure: I was invited to ...

"It’s hard to make good work, period. It’s harder when you’re working in an abstract medium like audio where you literally can’t see the thing you’re editing. The work necessarily moves slower." 👇 defector.com/the-future-o...