Running's "white supremacy" "problem" seems to have magically disappeared

Clickbait generators for fitness websites either have nonexistent memories, or—get this—they're continually inventing new grievances to mine for corporate handouts

In early 2018, I was contacted by someone from Leaf Media about an upcoming science-writing project of uncertain duration. Between 2009 and 2013, I had done a lot of off-and-on chum-generation for some of the brands of Leaf Media’s predecessor, Demand Media, including LIVESTRONG. Because my work had been rated highly by Demand Media’s dubiously qualified editors, I was being recruited to contribute to Leaf Media’s new Sciencing.com brand.

Over the next two years, I wrote over 600 articles for Sciencing.com on topics ranging from to physics to molecular biology to chemistry to environmental science.

The titles of all articles were provided in advance, and were associated with three word-count tiers (600, 1,200, and 1,800) offering $60, $120, and $180 per piece, respectively. Exceptions began to appear in late 2019, when “Deep Dive Renovation” assignments were offered for $100, $200, and $300 at the same three word counts.

The total you see in that Google result doesn’t include thirty-seven articles I completed and was paid thousands of dollars to write, but were never uploaded to the Web after Leaf Media suddenly ceased all Sciencing.com operations in early April of 2020. To this day, I still have login access to my Sciencing.com “Content Lab.”

The provided titles were distributed evenly among the three word-count tiers, but I leaned toward choosing longer assignments whenever possible. Between this bias and the brief availability of 16.67-cent-per-word articles along with the standard 10-cent-per-word offers, I wound up averaging around $130 per piece.

This means that, in a two-year period, I managed to earn over $80,000 (~650 times ~$130) from a single clickbait market, averaging close to one article a day including weekends. It was the easiest money I have ever made; I did almost all of it literally lying in bed. And I take more pride in that work than in most of what I wrote for better-known outlets. I’m calling these articles “clickbait,” because that’s precisely what they are, but they were meticulously edited and fact-checked. The person who edited most of my physics articles was a physics professor. at a minimum, they’re reliable and sometimes informative, if obviously unoriginal.

After the covid-19 circus started in March 2020, my project leader at Sciencing.com assured all of us contractors that as a digital media company, Leaf Media was likely safe from any impending economic disruptions, and that Sciencing.com would continue unmolested. Less than a week later, however. the same person sent an e-mail announcing that all Sciencing.com operations would be suspended immediately. He couldn’t give an explanation because, he said, he hadn’t been provided one himself from on high.

For obvious reasons, the main one being my not owning a crystal ball at the time, it took me a while to appreciate why Leaf Media decided to shift its emphasis. It was because America was going 100 percent Wokish by Davos/BlackRock/Deep State fiat, and online media companies were on the absolute vanguard of this blitzkrieg of disorienting bunkum.

Leaf Media’s WELL + GOOD brand has been around in some form since 2009 and under Leaf Media’s ownership since June 2018, but it really took off in 2020. Since April 1 of that year, WELL + GOOD has churned out hundreds of articles about racism (including “anti-racism”), with around three dozen pieces including the term “white supremacy”; hammered home the message that being fat not only carries no health risks, but the epitome of wellness and goodness; and unfurled a truly astounding—albeit inescapably symbolic—number of releases including the word “poop.”

The sudden demand in the wake of the George Floyd protests for humans willing to generate racist, idiotic chum provided writing gigs for people traditionally considered abominable writers, lazy thinkers, and all-around assholes. Thanks to the systematically burgeoning wackiness of Western social contexts and mores, half-literate racist clowns such as Emilia Benton could plausibly begin regarding themselves as journalists and social progressives. Why not? Someone was paying them to feign behaving morally.

In June 2021, Leaf Media was acquired by the Graham Holdings Company; the fact that Slate is one of its brands should be sufficient to convey a sense of the editorial direction of the company's media channels. And within the past week, Leaf Media rebranded itself World of Good.

World of Good’s cast of primary players makes one wonder what kind of dirt Paul Rohwer has on the others shown.

I really can’t complain about the death of Sciencing.com. The way I look at it, it was an opportunity that arose out of the blue and was a great ride while it lasted. The fact that I was doing other work at the time and banking almost all of the money is what allowed me to coast as a gloriously underemployed windbag for close to three years after Sciencing.com was shuttered.

Admittedly, it’s impossible for me to bar my own ego from this equation. Benton, remember, considers me to be a bad writer, because she has been published in “official” outlets such as Runner’s World (unlike me) and focuses on serious topics. But as the raving product of bizarre cultural incentives and her own intellectual limitations, not only was Benton destined to be a self-parodic goon in 2023, she also has every reason to be excited about how many outlets will feature her work. She can’t know that, until around five years ago, anything she submitted to an editor would have gone at least two-thirds unread before the editor shot back a “Thanks, but we’re well, and good, for now.”

When I compare, say, this article about fossil fuels to anything in the portfolio Benton has assembled, it makes me want to issue her a challenge: I will edit any article she’s written in an honest effort to make it better and submit it to a neutral third-party editor for analysis, and she can do the same with any of my Sciencing.com articles (or for that matter, anything she finds with my name on it). We’ll see who’s more proficient at turning the verbal equivalent of bilgewater (I've laid some turds in my day too; many are quietly moldering in hard-to-find Internet grottos) into Coca-Cola or even Bud Light.

That was an overly long introduction to a WELL + GOOD article published today, but I’ve been meaning to get my history with Leaf Media out there for a while. It’s a better look to sneak resentful bitching into a post about something else and call it relevant background than write a stand-alone gripe that makes its author look like he’s openly playing the victim-card.

It is easy to get stuck in the inanity of the “pace inclusivity” thesis. For example, if all nonzero paces can be classified as running, then isn’t everyone who is not standing completely still, and whose motion is not the result of externally applied forces, running? And are there really haters out there who really sit around looking to define a line between “running” and “not running”?

But forget that part. In Mirna Valerio’s haste to condemn race directors for allegedly making a big show of removing the timing mats whenever she’s the last finisher in a race, she—or really the author, Rachel Kraus—forgot to call anyone racist. Kraus came right up to the edge, noting that Valerio is black, yet failed to make the usual accusation. (Also, wouldn’t this would-be shade-throwing only be a real problem if race officials were removimg the mats, with or without a derogatory flourish, before Valerio was crossing finish lines?)

This is a weird shift, considering that most of running’s loudmouths, from the remarkably shallow Rich Roll to the incomparably moronic David Roche, have leveraged Valerio’s skin color to broadcast synthetic virtue in the service of generating real cash.

We longtime, earnest social progressives should draw solace from this. Were Valerio—who needs to get on the horn with folks like Alison Desir and Latoya Shauntay Snell to tell them it’s finally safe to be around white people—an ongoing victim of racism, she wouldn’t be able to do anything about that except bleach herself like Michael Jackson did. And not only does she probably not want to emulate The King of Pop (better role models exist), but the process might be beyond even Lululemon’s knothole-humping budget.

But because she’s merely slow, she can always do something to speed up, like switch to the roads for a while (in some trail races, 12 minutes a mile is killing it). But being “discriminated against” for being slow probably doesn’t actually bother her that much; she knows what runners faster than herself usually look like—and how, in turn, most distance-race eaders would fare in a contest of brute strength.

Valerio, however, has little impetus to lose weight—which would be difficult for her to do anyway; as well as having the coolest name in history, the woman gets out there and trains—and all the incentive in the world to remain someone easily portrayed a victim who claims to trudge along at tectonic-scale velocities, but could evidently run as fast as 11-minute pace for 5K somewhat recently and isn’t that slow. She also doesn’t shy away from challenging terrain, preferring trails to roads for all the same reasons most sensible people do.

I wonder exactly what makes some slow marathoners believe that race directors should keep courses open for longer than, say, seven hours. That costs money. Would slower people be willing to pay higher entry fees? I think large marathons should fix entry fees, in U.S. dollars (soon to be worthless, but never mind that now) at the number of minutes their validated marathon entry times translate to. Most of you can figure out this scheme, but for Emilia and her friends, that means a five-hour marathoner would need to pay $300 (60 minutes per hour times 5 hours equals 300 minutes).

Perhaps entrants should also have to sign waivers allowing the race to charge their credit cards an inconvenience fee if they loiter and flap around on the course after the sag-wagon has trundled by them. And while I’m at it, marathoms should charge $26.22 for all DNFs, no excuses, just so I don’t get the idea to ever run one of the damn things again myself.

Sadly, the fact that it’s painfully easy to expose grievance-only “journalism” for the scam-stream that it is doesn’t mean the flow of this gore will be stanched or even ebb anytime soon. The more of an apparent victim someone is—even if she doesn’t act like one, which Valerio, left to her own devices, does not—the more angles dingbats like Benton and Kraus can find to exploit and the more sponsorships fringe characters can attract in this market of purposefully inverted standards and tastes. But in terms of underscoring the comprehensively sham nature of Wokism, it can be as helpful to point out what’s expected but curiously missing from a given article as it is to highlight whatever foolishness it actively foments.

And it’s all openly, gleefully foolish. What else could explain this article directly following the one about Valerio on the linked WELL + GOOD page?

I don't blame Mirna Valerio for taking everything she can from Lululemon. She didn't ask to be a token of white-owned operations slinging mostly superfluous apparel and gear that falls outside the price range of 90 percent of American blacks. But she did, and I hope she spends those companies’ money on nice things before eventually calling them out for being the Wokewashing jokes they are. Whovever her mamma is did not raise a fool in the slightest.