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2 months ago | 
numlock.com | Walt Hickey |Julia Alexander |Walter Hickey
By Walt HickeyWe are off Monday in observance of Washington’s Birthday. Have a great weekend!Romance novels generated $1.5 billion in revenue in 2022, and individual market niches within the broader romance genre have popped up again and again. One of the latest to do so is crime-romance, where a heroine is attempting to solve a crime or evade a criminal all while having a romantic relationship.
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Jan 23, 2025 | 
postingnexus.substack.com | Rashid I. Khalidi |Julia Alexander
I’ve read so much about Elon Musk’s hand gesture that I feel like I’m Barbara Streisand Effecting myself. In times of uncertainty, I come back to the king, George Orwell. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” I’m going to assume that if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, well, you know. Charlie Warzel over at The Atlantic argues that what matters is how people saw it. White supremacists felt empowered.
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Jan 19, 2025 | 
postingnexus.substack.com | Julia Alexander
Okay, so TikTok’s “gone.” It’s a day many people saw coming, and a day that many people argued could never happen. The internet, folks. But with TikTok’s early demise now one of the only conversations happening online, it’s a good time to study what made TikTok’s continued growth so successful outside of its original video feed.
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Jan 13, 2025 | 
postingnexus.substack.com | Julia Alexander
Back in the early 1900s, the United States government, the Bell group, and a relatively new company called AT&T agreed that access to communication via devices like the telephone and the radio were a public utility. These devices and services connected tens of millions of people across the country. Presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt would go on to deliver fireside chats to Americans during World War II, and phones were used to update farmers about weather conditions in the days ahead.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
postingnexus.substack.com | Julia Alexander
Welcome back to another edition of Halftime, the links roundup counterpart to my weekly Posting Nexus essay. This week, it’s the NFL season and The Athletic has your Super Bowl predictions, a Polygon reporter’s husband had sex with a clown (!!) in Baldur’s Gate 3, and some personal thoughts on Meta’s decision to say “fuck it” when it comes to content moderation and fact checking.
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Dec 20, 2024 | 
postingnexus.substack.com | Julia Alexander
Alas, as the old saying goes, what is old will someday be positioned as brand new under the odd assumption that one will be the wiser. For example, a guest column in The Hollywood Reporterthis week posited that legacy media companies were going to lose basically everything if they didn’t enter the short term video world by hosting their own vertical feeds. Jeffrey Katzenberg, you were simply too early seems like the underlying message. It’s also a total misread on the short form space.
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Dec 9, 2024 | 
postingnexus.substack.com | Julia Alexander
Taylor Swift, if you haven’t heard, is a superstar. She’s a supernova. She’s a fucking black hole, swallowing up entire galaxies and star systems that drift into her orbit. She isn’t just the center of all attention; she is the definition of attention. It’s no surprise that Swift’s new book about her world breaking Eras tour is also breaking publishing records.
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Dec 2, 2024 | 
postingnexus.substack.com | Julia Alexander
I approach every trending new social media with the same mindset: if this thing actually takes off for longer than six months, it’s gonna be ruined in a few years. This is social media’s ouroboros problem. An ouroboros is an image that all of you are familiar with even if you don’t know it by name. A snake eating its own tail; something that has appeared on coins, on hastily designed t-shirts sold on Instagram, and perhaps even on a flag adorning a man’s apartment wall (run).
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
postingnexus.substack.com | Julia Alexander
Discover more from Posting Nexus A semi-regular series dedicated to the nexus of incentive structures that unite the pillars of our online ecosystems: attention, identity, and platforms. If you’ve watched Netflix’s latest viral documentary, Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, you’ll understand the fundamental reasons companies like Amazon employ UI/UX designers, engineers, and psychologists at higher-than-average salaries to help Amazon build the perfect one-button solution.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
postingnexus.substack.com | Julia Alexander
Information is an addiction. We don’t often think about it that way because we don’t often align our scrolling habits with collecting information. We position it as social media is an addiction, or media is an addiction. But we don’t call out that obsession for what it really is — information, even if it’s wrong or tied to something as harmless as TV series or video games. We love collecting, reacting to, and building our identities around the vast, infinite information that floods our feeds.
