Over eight years ago, on March 28, 2014, science educator, novelist, and TikToker Hank Green posted a video to the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel titled “New Album, New Channels, New Fabric, New Internet Thing!”
For those who aren’t familiar, Vlogbrothers is a collaborative channel shared by Hank and John Green. The Green brothers challenged each other to post daily videos to reconnect in “Brotherhood 2.0” in 2007. Every weekday for an entire year, Hank and John alternated posting videos on YouTube. If they missed a day or communicated via text or email, they were punished by the other brother.
A community quickly sprang up around their channel, creating the movement known as “Nerdfighteria,” a fandom of nerdy, passionate people who try to “decrease worldsuck” through activism and random acts of kindness. The Green brothers mobilized their community and influence to create educational resources and raise money for charity, donating to causes like Partners in Health, which has had a demonstrable impact on maternal mortality in Sierra Leone.
Hank Green wears many hats
Although John Green was — at least at first — the more “famous” brother as the author of The Fault in Our Stars, Hank is now well-known as a novelist himself and as an educational TikToker, although he wears many “hats.” Hank founded a merch company (DFTBA Records), a crowdfunding platform (Subbable), a game company (DFTBA Games), an online video production company (Pemberley Digital), two conventions (VidCon and NerdCon), an Emmy-winning webshow (The Lizzie Bennet Diaries), and many YouTube channels, including Crash Course, Sci Show, PBS Eons, and Journey to the Microcosmos. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
But rewind to 2014.
In the aforementioned video, Hank discussed the then-recent launch of three new educational YouTube channels (How to Adult, The Art Assignment, and Sci Show: Space) as well as a new album from Hank Green and the Perfect Strangers, his band. (Oh yeah, he’s also an accomplished musician.) Then he proposed another new thing, called #ReviewsdayTuesday:
I wanna make an internet thing, and I’m pretty sure this is how you do it, right, you just say: “I want to make an internet thing!” And then it becomes a thing!
So I love books, and I love receiving personal recommendations for books to read. Well, I wanna make a thing called Reviewsday Tuesday, where every Tuesday you take a picture of a book and then you review it on your Instagram or your Tumblr or your Twitter or wherever you put pictures and words.
And all that needs to happen for this to be a thing is for us to do it!
Not all of Hank Green’s proposals become a “thing,” and Reviewsday Tuesday was one of the many projects that didn’t particularly take off.
That’s not to say nobody participated. Many Nerdfighters began posting using the hashtag #ReviewsdayTuesday across various social media platforms, myself included. But the trend didn’t last long.
#ReviewsdayTuesday
I posted my very first #ReviewsdayTuesday video to my now-mostly-defunct YouTube channel (which has 347 subscribers) on April 15, 2014. I made fifteen videos using the name, mostly in 2014–2015, when I was a freshman at university.
Thumbnail of the author’s first #ReviewsdayTuesday video, posted April 15, 2014, reviewing Russell Hoban’s 1980 post-apocalyptic novel, Riddley Walker
Around that same time, I was active in the Nerdfighter community on Tumblr. (In a few years, none of these words are going to make any sense!) I teamed up with another Canadian Nerdfighter named Aiden to run a tumblog that collected all the #ReviewsdayTuesday book reviews posted to Tumblr in one place.
Since #ReviewsdayTuesday was only being used for book reviews, I started a separate hashtag for movies, #FilmsdayFriday, which did not take off. I made a couple of videos reviewing movies, but mostly I stuck to book reviews. I was an English major. It was kind of my forte.
When I became too busy to film and edit videos of myself, I wrote regular reviews for the tumblog and Goodreads. Slowly, the movement fizzled out. Fewer and fewer people used the hashtag. I left Tumblr to focus on other platforms, including Twitter and, much later, Medium.
The Revival
In 2021, John Green published a book called The Anthropocene Reviewed. Reviewing everything from “Auld Lang Syne” and Diet Dr Pepper to sunsets and Canadian geese, Green’s nonfiction book brought back my love of reviews as an art form. It’s a wonderful book, and I can’t recommend it enough.
In late 2021, I began writing reviews again, this time mostly for classic science fiction movies, including Alien and Predator. I kept it going into early 2022, when I ran out of steam again, due to burnout from school.
Now that I’ve submitted my thesis, I am excited to try my hand at being an Editor again. The previous iterations of Reviewsday Tuesday as a tumblog and a hashtag lost momentum over time. One reason for this, I believe, is because of how decentralized it was. Perhaps the missing ingredient was Medium.
I hope that by making a publication here dedicated to reviews, I can create a friendly space where we can share the books, movies, and other stuff that brings us joy — or, conversely, that we love to hate.
As John Green has shown us, we can review anything we want to. In the spirit of reviewing, I give the history of #ReviewsdayTuesday, personal growth, and third-chances five stars. ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Support the Editor
Reviewsday Tuesday (now also on Twitter!) has been run by yours truly, Casey Lawrence, since its first iterations as a tumblog and a YT playlist. Running a publication is a time-consuming volunteer activity. If you enjoy my work, consider showing your support by buying me a coffee. If you sign up using my referral link to get unlimited access to all of Medium, I receive a small commission, at no extra cost to you.
If you would like to write for Reviewsday Tuesday, check out the submission guidelines. I am eagerly accepting new writers at this time. Follow the publication here on Medium and also on Twitter.