Breakups have a way of robbing you of your identity, especially when you’re the one who’s being broken up with. If the union was worth joining in the first place, severing it disrupts your habits, your decision-making, your system of loving. It erases the mutations your love has engendered. You don’t even get to keep them in a jar of formaldehyde. Your best chance at preservation is art.
On May 5, 2010, Gawker received an unsolicited intern application letter from a woman who billed herself as “The (Potential) Intern From Heaven?” Her name was Leah Beckmann.
There are hundreds and hundreds of people out there who believe that, secretly, they were David Carr's favorite. And maybe we all were. He had the rare emotional capacity to make each of us his favorite, one by one by one.
Walking is the only pleasant form of traveling by land. You need no special equipment, training, money, e-tickets, antidepressants, or Twitter followers. Whatever clothes you're wearing will do fine; a hat and shoes are optional. When I've got a few days to spend somewhere, I spend them walking around. So I spent a few days walking around Silicon Valley.
Long after the floods or the fires have reduced our cities to rubble, long after the plague or the asteroid strike or the famine has killed off the human species, long after even our sun has boiled the seas dry and, in its own death throes, engulfed and annihilated every dust mote of this world we like to think of as our safe and stable home, a three-quarter-ton assemblage of metal will be sailing through empty interstellar space—on its way to nowhere, effectively from nowhere. A year ago, Voyager 1 crossed out of our solar system. It took us till now, painstakingly deciphering its available signals, to figure out that it had done so. Voyager 1 will continue communicating with us until perhaps 2025, when it is expected to run out of power and fly on in silence, all on its own, while you and everyone you know die and are forgotten. It will be carrying an analog audio disc containing, among other recordings, "Dark Was the Night" by Blind Willie Johnson.
Mean old sexy hack and legendary Post guy Steve Dunleavy had his retirement party last night. Or as it was apparently called, his "wake." But uh, long life and good health, Steve! The Observer showed up (and was banished to the outside) to chronicle Rupert Murdoch's send-off to his favorite attack dog:
The preponderance of outstanding evidence has finally and inexorably built up to the point that no reasonable person can avoid coming to the conclusion that "Alternadad" author Neal Pollack, who enjoys both chronicling and defending his decision to chronicle his young child, is just not much of a writer at all. Despite his background as a professional writer with the Chicago Reader, McSweeney's, Vanity Fair, GQ, and other respected outlets—as well as his ability to convince publishing houses to pay him money in order to write books—it is now impossible to deny the fact that Pollack is just not cut out for this whole writing thing. The scale-tipping work is his new Men's Journal profile of Woody Harrelson, in which the sheer lack of insight, or even cleverly redeeming turns of phrase, has us vowing never to read anything by this fucker again.
Readers love lists, according to the Gawker Media Editorial Guide. So, on the occasion of my last day here, you're bound to love this list of the best things I ever did at this website! Yoga teaches us that within our greatest failings, our greatest strengths can be found. Breathe deeply and enjoy.
Click through for our Community Calendar. If you have events send them to calendar@gawker.com and we'll list them, even after January 1st which will be my last day here at Gawker before I spend a month in London with a "lady" "making a go of it" or whatever ridiculous but essentially true thing that I told the Observer.
