Gabe Bullard

Checking the notes and citations of my manuscript. I remember doing this before the age of citation managers. How did people do this before word processors?

Hard to believe, at one point a bunch of people were paid yearly salaries to watch and reflect about how they felt about movies. And some of the writing was pretty great.

Jeff Bezos’s wealth has increased an average of $70 million every day of 2026, meaning that he could have offset The Post’s losses with what he’s made since Monday.

Look no further.

I’m careful with “genius”—I’m even careful with “artist”—but Catherine O’Hara was both and we scarcely deserved her.

This was inspired by seeing someone using Excel on their phone. What are we doing here?

Being anti-phone is cool. But what about being pro-desktop? I love having a big screen, a solid keyboard, and not being able to take it with me anywhere.

Musk’s Chatbot Flooded X With Millions of Sexualized Images in Days, New Estimates Show

We set out to determine how many images of women and girls Grok created during its nudifying spree. What we found was “industrial-scale abuse,” experts said. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/t...

Looking at Instagram on a Desktop Solved All My Problems “The medium is the massage”

“Vertical video is a format of necessity that rewards users’ inattentiveness…Instead of making something worth the mild inconvenience of rotating a phone, posters go for whatever is safest, easiest…It’s a design choice that sacrifices artistry so users don’t have to use their wrists.”

Lovely little reflection on breaking the death grip of Instagram and our appified attention spans from @gbullard.bsky.social.

To Feel at Home in a New Place, It Helps to Think Like a Snail

I wrote about snails, Switzerland, and fitting in for the NYT Magazine.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/m...

To Feel at Home in a New Place, It Helps to Think Like a Snail

I wrote about snails, Switzerland, and fitting in for the NYT Magazine.

www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/m...

It’s one of the most influential social psychology studies ever. Was it all a lie? A classic book on UFO believers and their "cognitive dissonance" after aliens failed to land is called into question.

NEW: When Propecy Fails is one of the most famous social psychology books of all time, a look at a small group of UFO believers when the “spacemen” failed to land. I wrote about a new study from an independent researcher who says the book is not what it seems. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Would love to hear a segment about this publication or other TV supplements that used to come in local papers.

YouTube video by The Dick Cavett Show Orson Welles Performs A Monologue About Noah's Ark | The Dick Cavett Show

Happy 89th Birthday Dick Cavett, thank you for making television that would absolutely never be made by a major broadcast network any more, like letting Orson Welles perform a 9 minute monologue on ABC

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...

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

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.