After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week. The decision to close Gawker comes days after Univision successfully bid $135 million for Gawker Media’s six other websites, and three months after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal campaign against the company.
What drama! What intrigue! What mystery! What emotion! Oh, sorry. I was just thinking about my trip home for Easter. Now where were we? Oh, right. The Hills. Yes. Spencer and Heidi are no more.
Too bad if you didn't like that My Melancholy Whores book. It's most likely going to be legendary Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez's last. His agent says he doesn't expect another book.
Well, as you may have read elsewhere, today is my last day as a Defamer. Your Uncle Grambo isn't really the commiserating type, so I'm going to keep this tidy. I'd like to thank everyone on the immediate team during my stay — Mark, Seth, Molls, Molly, Douglas, Stu, Kyle, Nick and Tricia — for contributing their blood, sweat and tears (but mostly their tears) to making Defamer such a smart, savage and essential read for hundreds of thousands of pop culture enthusiasts each and every weekday. I'd like to thank the Dark Lord Denton for letting me take the reins of the site, and I'd also like to thank you, the loyal Defamer reader, for picking up what we've been throwing down for the last nine months and change. When I agreed to join the team last December, my primary charge was to give the site a booster shot of energy and enthusiasm. And if the readership numbers are any indication, it looks like we successfully accomplished that mission. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm late for an appointment to Diving Bell the Butterfly out of some hotties at the club. Until next time, au revoir!
"'If you want to be sure to be included in a will, always send thank-you notes for all presents,' said Jeffrey Condon, an estate-planning lawyer in Santa Monica, Calif. " And on that note, everyone's favorite bitchy gay uncle Bob Morris ends his 'The Age Of Dissonance' column in the Sunday Style section forever! See why we'll miss him?
You may not have realized it, but at just a couple of minutes before 11 p.m. last night, the final credits rolled on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, ending Aaron Sorkin's bold, ill-fated experiment in melding the light-hearted Hollywood world of late-night sketch comedy shows with the absurdly high geopolitical stakes of his Emmy-winning White House drama, The West Wing. And while a lesser showrunner recently chose to cloak the last moments of his beloved series in frustrating ambiguity, Sorkin was confident enough in his creative choices to allow a metaphorical Man in the Members Only Jacket to wander the halls of the darkened studio, bringing each storyline to a satisfying conclusion with a bullet to the back of every character's head. Because we suspect that many of you missed the series finale, we're happy to run down how each of your favorite players finished up his or her primetime existence. [Warning to the DVR users whose selfish insistence on time-shifting the show kept it from reaching its Nielsen potential: There are spoilers ahead.]
