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Steph Brown

@stephbrown.bsky.social
1.5K followers 1.3K following 389 posts

Assistant Prof of Com and Media Studies @ Washington College | current Delawarean | I do work on gender, space, media, and belonging and also comedy studies | she/her

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Steph Brown
Shaily Patel @vox-magica.bsky.social · 6h
LWT is usually good, but this episode is a standout and worth watching if you don’t already know about the chaotic, and therefore cruel way states administer lethal injection. its only role is to sanitize state-sponsored killings for *us.* so *we* don’t fully register the horror.
youtube.com
Lethal Injections: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
YouTube video by LastWeekTonight
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
finally, some good news
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
My one take about the NYT TV list so far is that I literally forgot about The Queens Gambit five minutes after I finished it and on the other hand the town I used to live in is “turning into” Stars Hollow this weekend.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Liane Moriarty’s author’s note before Big Little Truths (sequel to Big Little Lies) talks about the TV’s shows affect on her thinking about the sequel and would be a *great* example for a class discussion of adaption and paratexts (noting for myself for next semester).
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Tanya Goldman @tanyagoldman.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Join @scmspedagogy.bsky.social on September 18 @ 1pm ET for our "Pedagogies of Care" virtual roundtable! Sign up via original post. ❤️
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
I fell into a doomsday prepper rabbit hole a few years ago on TikTok and panicked about living in an apartment and not a rural, self sustaining homestead…..so this hits real close to home
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
gonna make a poster of this for my office
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
I have an extremely rough and 4,000 words too long draft of an article I’ve been working on forever, that has felt so much harder to write than usual. But at least I’m starting to believe in a reality in which I finish it.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
It took me a bit to warm up to Adults its first season, but I’m loving the second, and trying to space the episodes out. I agree with Vulture that I’m begging networks to bring back longer seasons for sitcoms. We need more time to hang out!
vulture.com
Adults Has Outgrown Its Awkward Phase
In its assured second season, the FX comedy graduates from imitating a great hangout sitcom to actually being one.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
I’m helping @scmspedagogy.bsky.social crowd source some tips for grad students (and beyond) who struggle start writing a teaching statement. I’d love anyone’s thoughts, especially about biggest mistakes you see.
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Lisa Diedrich @lisadiedrich.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Dolly's gender performativity: "And her flamboyant style has turned all the devalued symbols of womanliness to her own ends."
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The @scmspedagogy.bsky.social is excited to bring back our virtual roundtable in conjunction with the JCMS Teaching Media dossiers! Our first one of the fall will be feature contributors to the recent issue on "Pedagogies of Care" on September 18 @ 1pm ET / 10am PT. Sign up below!
docs.google.com
"Pedagogies of Care" Virtual Roundtable Registration
Please join the SCMS Critical Media Pedagogies SIG for a virtual roundtable on "Pedagogies of Care" on September 18 @ 1pm ET / 10am PT. This event brings together contributors to the JCMS Teaching Med...
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
I’m an elder millennial AND I have at least a passing familiarity with most of these folks. And I’m a big fan of a few (Anania, in particular, is great). Funny that a list full of lots of young(ish) people and people of color inspires such vitriol in the replies!
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
You also get to pick a cute little avatar that bops around the map! And it works with Apple Car Play!
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Every podcast ad I’ve heard this week is for AI and/or weight loss. Every search I’ve tried to do for images or video is full of AI nonsense. I guess this era’s upside is that it’s going to quickly wean me off the internet.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Fat jokes about bad people just further associate body size with morality, which hurts all fat people! Who are not more likely to be evil than thin people! And in fact, are more likely to be marginalized in other ways! Why is it so hard to just make jokes about the bad things bad people do?
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Reposted by Steph Brown
James Hell Brooks @kleinman.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Every hour there's a story of like a Norwegian death metal guy saying hey I never met Dolly Parton but she sent me a handwritten note saying she loved our song Corpse in the Copse and to keep speaking our truth
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Great encapsulation of POV + storytelling perspective 🎦
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 23/08/2026
Just did a talk on feminist comedy research at the Lady Laughs Comedy Festival. I think all comedy festivals should start booking academic lectures / we should all start pitching ourselves to them more. Film fests are already good at this.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
We need to bring back low concept TV. Low stakes family drama, friends on couches in apartments, workplace banter. I can’t subsist on crimes, superheroes, first responders, and increasingly esoteric spin-offs of The Big Bang Theory.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
You would think Amazon would want to take advantage of those of us who just saw The Rivals of Amziah King and wanted to check out Patterson’s first film The Vast of Night, but they took it down and it doesn’t seem to have ever been released on DVD. I really hate the streaming era.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
If ya need a slice of something nice today, highly recommend this week’s Hyperfixed. It’s a reminder of the unique role serialized audio plays in people’s lives. Also a good entry point to get into the pod. open.spotify.com/episode/1sZZ...
open.spotify.com
ReTell All
Hyperfixed · Episode
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
I am so very much a secondary source person (I spent last night reading reddit takes about Dropout TV to observe patterns) and I’ve never seen it articulated this way. Great article! defector.com/humanists-ha...
defector.com
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector
For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, ...
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Ended up venting my frustration in a blog post that updates an article I wrote a decade ago about fat jokes in sitcoms in the absence of fat characters.
steph-brown.net
Invisible Fat Women + Pop Culture — Dr. Steph Brown
I’m a big fan of up-and-coming director Cooper Raiff’s first two films Shit House and Cha Cha Real Smooth . They’re both small films where the stakes are feelings and some might find a bit too “twe...
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 03/08/2026
Ended up venting my frustration in a blog post that updates an article I wrote a decade ago about fat jokes in sitcoms in the absence of fat characters.
steph-brown.net
Invisible Fat Women + Pop Culture — Dr. Steph Brown
I’m a big fan of up-and-coming director Cooper Raiff’s first two films Shit House and Cha Cha Real Smooth . They’re both small films where the stakes are feelings and some might find a bit too “twe...
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Ben Siemon @benjaminjs.bsky.social · 01/08/2026
We're in the 2nd year of a horrible crime and yet no one will stop "Project Runway" for putting the eliminations at the beginning of an episode. People need to pay.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Very excited for this! www.phillyvoice.com/wildwood-sho...
phillyvoice.com
FX picks up 'Wildwood,' a Jersey Shore comedy from creator of 'Derry Girls'
Irish screenwriter and playwright Lisa McGee's next project is a sitcom set in the summer of 2000.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
Mean film reviews are fun when most of the rest of the reviews are glowing! Gives us some fun discourse. With the collapse of film criticism and the rise of access entertainment journalism where everyone is nice all the time—I say we need *more* overtly critical reviews to keep us on our toes.
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Josephine beckbook.com Riesman @josie.zone · 27/07/2026
Omg. Omg omg omg. Emily Wilson (as in, the famed translator of Homer) just published her take on Nolan's Odyssey in @lrb.co.uk... and it is SWEET, JUICY HATERADE: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
Hadestown isn’t my favorite musical, but the proshot was excellent - especially after the travesty that was the Merrily proshot. They made such smart decisions about shots, editing, and audience inclusion. Perfect mix of taking advantage of cinematic affordances without overshadowing the staging.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
While my husband sees The Odyssey today, I’ll be attending the counter-programming Greek mythology for alt theater nerds (Hadestown proshot)
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Kathryn VanArendonk @kvanaren.bsky.social · 24/07/2026
but SOME OF US weren’t READY for this conversation and no I am NOT still mad about it
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
I started noticing this phrase when I taught at a tech-y/design camp for 5-8 graders around 2017 and now those kids are early 20s - so makes sense! (It still sounds weird to me though).
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Reposted by Steph Brown
Frankie Huang 黄碧赤 @ourobororoboruo.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
I really need more people to understand fiction about machines gaining sentience are meditations on HUMANITY and its various conditions, not speculation on future robot civilizations jfc
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
I hate when a TV show is nuanced and endlessly sympathetic to its characters and their flaws and then just casually tosses off a fat joke. Shows what characters writers don’t see as fully human.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I’ve started to try to bring back my old blogging hobby and combine it with my new collage hobby. Here’s one I wrote as a way to work through my thinking on a journal article I’m writing about body positivity in the creator economy.
steph-brown.net
The Emotional Treachery of Digital Body Positivity — Dr. Steph Brown
Is it anti-feminist to express negative feelings toward your body? Is writing about your own low self-esteem detrimental to the cause of fat liberation? Too often, feminism is collapsed into a set ...
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
I’d like it to be known that I don’t want to see The Odyssey but for normal reasons (I hate road trip movies and cyclopses).
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Aubrey Gordon @yrfatfriend.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
One of the many ways we've gotten in the wayback machine on conversations about fatness: straight size people think once again that they are the primary targets of anti-fatness. Those objections to the anti-fatness they feel comes wrapped up in profound anti-fatness against plus size people.
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rax ‘levon honkers’ king @raxkingisdead.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
pointing out the hypocrisy of people who are lying about what they actually want will never get you anywhere. smugly owning them for the gaps in their logic. it's an exterminationist project, not a rhetorical one
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
My computer ate my journal article edits from yesterday (I swear I saved them!), so I’m going to stomp around for a few minutes and then try to redo them.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
I’m in this book about civic engagement and media literacy that my colleagues at Wash Coll put together talking about my digital storytelling class/place-based stories. If you also don’t have access to a decently large library and want a chapter, hit me up! www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/1...
taylorfrancis.com
Media and Information Literacy as Civic Practice | Lessons from the Co
This edited volume offers a resource for instructors who are interested in developing innovative and effective teaching practices at the intersection of
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
Was in midtown Manhattan this weekend, and the AI menus, posters, tents, ads etc were everywhereeeeee.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 13/07/2026
I know the state of audio funding is dire, but it’s still jarring to hear the kinds of ads podcasts are OK with running. I’d love to enjoy an NPR film review without an ad for a “diet that mimics fasting.”
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Yes. This is so many issues. Another: DEI programs were often bandaids used to avoid doing structural change and they put a lot of the onus on marginalized folks in those orgs to do the work (see Sara Ahmed). When we have to fight the right, it makes it harder to improve or have nuanced convos.
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
I had this exact conversation. Then redownloaded Blue Sky for a short break of my social media break.
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Alex Goldman @agoldman.bsky.social · 14/04/2026
Hi I’m Alex goldman and I host a podcast called @hyperfixedpod.bsky.social that is like long form documentary journalism. If you’ve ever listened to Reply All before it’s sorta like that cuz I used to host that too. I’m asking you if you like the show to please share with your friends.
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Doug Sackman @dcsackman.bsky.social · 12/04/2026
I'll say this for AI: it makes me much happier as I read papers written by students with very undeveloped writing skills, and as I put together the comments that I hope they will be able to use to become stronger writers. I'm so, so happy you wrote this yourselves, students!
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 10/04/2026
Came across a hallucinated article attributed to me once doing a peer review (along with a few others). 💀🫠
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 07/04/2026
one small thing that’s making me happy this week are the remixes of Project Hail Mary and the Artemis II mission and the way they are referencing one another. It illustrates the interplay btw science and pop culture. The humanities and STEM are co-projects! www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8g8E1Kg/
tiktok.com
Project - Artemis II #artemis #projecthailmary #edit #space
TikTok video by hornz.central
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Steph Brown @stephbrown.bsky.social · 27/03/2026
If you missed our #SCMS26 workshop on writing in the media studies classroom - you can check out our handout complete with keywords, slides, and assignment shares! Thanks to everyone who came for a wonderful discussion (and sometimes vent session). docs.google.com/document/d/1...
docs.google.com
Making Writing Matter in the Media Classroom
Making Writing Matter in the Media Studies Classroom SCMS 2026 Workshop leaders: Stephanie Brown, Washington College Peggy Davis, UCLA Lisa Wells Jacobson, Georgia Tech Laurel Westrup, UCLA Vocabula...
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