Runner's World "editor" Jennifer Acker is not just a coward but completely inept at everything her job once required
Corporate publications, no matter the genre, are nothing but clown-cars of varying sizes driven and occupied by frazzled social vandals
Jennifer Acker is a member of the editorial staff at Runner’s World, where according to her RW mini-bio, she landed in January 2022. One of her first actions in her new role was to replace an Internet article I had written for RW in September 2020 questioning the efficacy of nasal-only breathing for runners with an article she wrote herself promoting the efficacy of nasal-only breathing for runners. RW didn’t even bother to change the URL.
Not only did Runner’s World fail to explain to its readers the about-face in its stance on this vital exercise-physiology issue, but no one at RW even bothered to tell me about the change. Since discovering this move and beginning to bitch about it, I have applied pressure through different means to different figures previously or currently associated with the publication. The latest of these is Acker, whose personal website’s contact form I used to make an inquiry about the matter on June 24, over two and a half weeks ago.
Whether Acker’s move was self-determined or the result of external forces remains unknown, at least to me. She has had plenty of time to respond, and may have known of my burgeoning campaign to settle this issue—nearly 100 percent of which I freely admit is motivated by spite and resentment—before I pestered her directly. Regardless, the silence continues. Part of this may be the result of my using words like “cunt” in e-mails to representatives of Hearst and calling people like Jeff Dengate faggots in blog posts, but since the silence only makes these already on-target labels look more and more apt, I can’t see apologizing or even changing my style. Although something someone does might make me do that, and I keep sending signals on this front, to no avail.
Making this treachery especially untenable is the startling fact that Runner’s World considers me a colleague. It must, because its website has a page dedicated to me with thirty-nine articles with my byline on them, all written for Running Times, which was purchased around fifteen years ago by Rodale, Inc. from the CEO of Cruella de Vil Industries. Some of these pieces are from late in a bygone century. Running Times, for which I was senior writer for around a dozen years, was discontinued c. 2014, and the Rodale enterprise was sold in its entirety to Hearst in 2018.
This is a genuinely bizarre shift in professional standards. I understand that the professional-class jobs once given to people raised to adhere to one set of interactive norms are now occupied by people trained to treat adversarial input, however on-point, as some combination of safe-space violation or MAGA overture. It has simply become de rigueur for nominal editors from pussified and stupefied demographics to treat corporate publications like personal or group blogs, and for the people paying these flailing and skittish dingbats to ignore their various professional solecisms. But it still makes those responsible cocksuckers, even of every one of them can deploy a version of the Nuremberg defense to explain their unethical conduct.
They would be redeemable cocksuckers if they weren’t so eager to hide, hide, hide. This should serve as a significant carrot, not a stick, in terms of those responsible rising to the level of minimum professional standards. Doesn’t everyone want to be known as an earnestly striving doofus rather than a lazy doofus, given that producing or achieving anything creatively or intellectually noteworthy is off the table for these folx in all cases?
This unpalatable shift in norms has compelled or at least justified my own intentional forays into being an asshole in ways meant to inconvenience people in ways they are likely to find most distressing. Enough people read this “newsletter” so that if I dedicate even a post or two to someone in the industry, that material will soon appear near the top of Google search results for that person’s name, unless the person is so well-known that he or she has been mentioned by CNN, The New York Times, or People. So far, none of the people I have focused on is remotely famous from the perspective of search engines. And this class of fragile individual probably has an above-average distaste for seeing unflattering and undeniably true material about them online.
So, rather than treat this state of affairs as a stalemate or a stand-off, I’m going to handle all of the public relations for everyone concerned. Anyone mentioned in my PR and research efforts is of course welcome to comment on them at any time, publicly or privately.
Acker has written a number of flavorless and often misinformation-laced pieces for RW since joining the staff. (She’s far from alone in this regard, but none of the other waterheads writing for that shambolic borg has annoyed me lately.) Her first contribution was “Exercise May Increase Antibodies After Flu and COVID-19 Vaccines, Study Suggests,” dated February 18, 2022.
By midwinter of 2022, it was clear that the covid mRNA shots were both a failure in their putative role as vaccines and far more dangerous than Fauci, Inc. and its eagerly pliant, paid-off media would admit. At the time, a standard normie not following a helpful information track could be excused for being ignorant of the second problem, but no one with a pulse should have believed by this time that the vaccines helped stop either transmission or infection of the expanding and weakening C-19 family of viruses. And while some people remain sadly convinced to this day that the shots were useful to a sliver of older, higher-risk people, the readership of Runner’s World can be safely assumed to include almost no one at risk of dying or even getting seriously ill from the effects of a virus that affects the human body much like a typical influenza virus does.
Yet the RW editorial position in February 2022, not likely set by Acker, was clearly that everyone should get a covid shot, no questions asked. Acker’s article frames the discussion entirely within the bounds of “You’re getting a covid shot; how is your body going to handle that?” You won’t find a legacy publication or any media platform owned by a corporate entity that behaved any differently.
It’s a shitty and pointless article, just an exhortation on behalf of pharma. But Acker managed to leave a personalized stamp of incompetence on its many banal paragraphs. She apparently edits her own stories, because this one boasts the following passages (emphases mine):
90 minutes of exercise outdoors consistently increased serum antibodies (an essential component of your immune system that helps keep you from getting sick from these illnesses)
A few processes may be at work that affects the immune response from exercise
The piece opens with this:
A recent study published in the Journal of Brain, Behavior, and Immunity found that active adults who exercised for 90 minutes post-vaccine had increased serum antibodies, yet no increase in negative side effects after the initial dose of influenza and Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.
Wait. What “negative side effects”? Everyone from the CDC to the drones administering these shots have continued to claim to the present that there are no negative side effects of consequence from what we now unequivocally recognize to me toxic shit-soup that never should have been injected into human beings. Notice how the veil drops briefly when the attention of an incompetent dupe or propagandist is briefly distracted by pushing a different bad idea within the same pseudo-scientific family.
From here I skipped forward in time past another sixteen or so Acker pieces to this March, when Acker supplied “Daylight Saving Time May Negatively Impact Your Health.” This one opens with “Whether you like it or not, the clocks are going to change this weekend,” a dire warning soon amplified by “not all that glitters is gold, not even the late afternoon sun shining brightly.”
The article includes these distinct claims:
AASM cites evidence that the body may not adjust to DST for several months.
Changes in the light take about a week for the body to get into a satisfactory rhythm again.
Zorn says it will take about a week, or even two, for your body to feel normal.
So, first of all, what's the problem if people naturally adjust to the change? That is, how can DST be framed to have a negative impact on health when it is described as an easily accommodated inconvenience? And second, does that adjustment take about one week, around two weeks, or several months?
The syntax is too uniformly precarious that it is hard to single out any one sentence of passage for ridicule. But this one was among my favorites:
Along with feeling extra tired from a lost hour of sleep, sleep experts say that this causes a drop in overall motivation.
Why should I trust sleep experts who themselves are “feeling extra tired” from sleep deprivation? This would be like taking marathon-training advice from an obese, non-running Instagrammer whose bowel movements probably weigh more than the average elite female Ethiopian distance runner, and who even occasionally posts photos of herself producing these mammoth stinklogs. Even better would be a collaboration between Runner’s World and such a morbid figure.
The titles of other Acker stories promise similar inundations of sloppily assembled, noncontributory-to-harmful dreck, but I didn’t click on any of them, even if a few titles look darkly promising. If you choose to read them, or anything else on the Runner’s World site, don’t forget to copy the URL into the helpful box at archive.ph so you can both read articles for free without limitation and deny Runner’s World a few page impressions.