DateLab would have saved the Washington Post
a Valentine's Day late Sternal Journal screed
Read Time: 4 minutes. Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections + Housing.
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Shows!
***last 100 Julian Sterns for a minute! Come to this one! Last one was a blast!***
[Santa Monica, CA] 100 Julian Sterns. Saturday February 21, 8PM.
[Santa Clarita, CA] Peak Comedy Show. Thursday, March 26.
[Canton, OH] Headlining Canton Comedy Boom! Friday May 8.
[Future Shows] Fill out this form to lemme know what city you’re in if you wanna see me perform there! Takes 5 seconds! 22 people have done it so far! Could you be 23?
Hello Sternal Journalists and Happy Valentines Day to those who celebrate. Two quick administrative notes:
I’m still chasing the regularly scheduled Stern Journs, so this is technically your Sternal Journal for Sunday February 8th. You don’t care about that, but I need to say it in order to keep myself accountable.
It has come to my attention that replies to the Sternal Journal have been going into my spam! And people have actually been replying! So (a) thank you for the nice and/or thoughtful words, and (b) if you replied with any sort of ask longer than a month ago, I may have missed it because spam is deleted! Apologies, I would never leave a Sternal Journalist on read!
Alright, for our content today, I would like to make a Valentine’s Day-relevant comment upon the recent mass layoffs at The Washington Post. Many writers who are astronomically more equipped than I have commented in great length about this. They cut the Sports section, which trained many of today’s greatest writers (including, I just learned, editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick—Crazy!). They gutted the international desk at a time when they’re claiming they want to focus on politics. Everywhere you look, you can find smart and in-the-know people commenting on how absolutely absurd these decisions are.
But I’m here to talk about DATELAB! If you lived in the DC area any time in the mid aughts, you surely remember the Washington Post magazine feature in which matchmakers at the Washington Post set up D.C. singles on blind dates and interviewed them about the whole affair after.
I was leaving high school and going into college when DateLab first dropped (2006) and always looked forward to it. I’m honestly not sure why. I think there was a little bit of “Oooh, this is what being an adult will be like” and there was a reality T.V. element, as the dates could end romantically or cringily.
And to be clear, it wasn’t the greatest piece of magazine journalism. It was mostly mindless fluff, but it was our mindless fluff, and to the point I am here to make, it was a mindless fluff that presaged most of the mindless fluff which has captivated us for the two decades since.
DateLab was a column, sure, but really, it was fuckin’ CONTENT! Repeatable, discussable, schadenfreude-able, DateLab was everything that a social media “creator” in 2026 is looking for when coming up with a format. And it was TWENTY YEARS EARLY. They did not reinvent the wheel. They were basically ripping off the reality show, Blind Date, which I’m sure was ripping something else off.
So it’s frustrating to learn that, in an age when anyone can spend $50 on a lav mic and use their phone to turn a shitty formulaic idea into millions of views, that the Post didn’t do that. Instead, they cut DateLab in 2022. I’m not saying that, if they had properly attempted to bring DateLab into the viral age, we wouldn’t have lost so many foreign correspondents and entire sections of the paper that an entire city relies on. But for a company whose owner also owns an entire media entertainment company and is clearly obsessed with optimization, I’m just saying it is weird and annoying that they didn’t. Godspeed WaPo. RIP DateLab.
Inspirations (formerly recs)
Spike Lee. I started watching his new(ish) movie, Highest 2 Lowest, on a plane and loved the opening, where you hear the entirety of Oklahoma’s “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’” as you see soaring shots of New York City. I obviously should watch the whole movie before recommending it, but even if I had seen that opening as a weird conceptual video piece, I think I would have loved it. It was cool! He does cool things!
Cunning MC. Another entry in the “Julian barely understands this because it’s a lot of British cultural references, but boy does he love the song” hall of fame is “Slazenger” by Cunning MC. It’s basically UK grime version of Mickey Avalon’s millennial risqué anthem, “My Dick.” Now if any of my UK readers can please explain to me what Slazenger is, that would be nice.
GeoRainbolt. I’ve seen this guy’s social media videos where he’s extremely good at guessing locations just from random pictures, but I enjoyed this longform conversation with Pablo Torre on Torre’s podcast. It literally just gave me “he seems like a nice young man” vibes, which is refreshing for someone who is also somewhat obsessed with optimization and internet bullshit. He’s the anti Mr. Beast.
Derek Thompson. If you’re looking to get a primer on the events and prevailing analyses of the WaPo insanity, his conversation with Jim VandeHei (founder of Politico and Axios, former Post reporter) is not a bad place to start. God, why am I such a nerd?
Alright, SternoJournos! Much love to all, especially any victims of the Washington Post firings (which in some ways is all of us!). I’ll be back either tomorrow for regularly-scheduled SJ or in a few days to space it out. Excited to share my story about MCing the first ever coatrack reveal party. Here’s a pic as a tease:
<3 Julian!