Since Jezebel shut down, I cannot tell you how many people have joked, semi-seriously, that I should buy it for a dollar.
I will admit the temptation. As the media obits say, Jezebel was “an antidote to the superficiality and irrelevance of women's media properties that dominated the late 90s and early aughts” (that one was actually written by the lead executive and friend of the Horse Anna Holmes on the site in 2010).
Since Jezebel shut down, I cannot tell you how many people have joked, semi-seriously, that I should buy it for a dollar.
I will admit the temptation. As the media obits say, Jezebel was “an antidote to the superficiality and irrelevance of women's media properties that dominated the late 90s and early aughts” (that one was actually written by the lead executive and friend of the Horse Anna Holmes on the site in 2010).
Bandcamp isn’t dead. But maybe it’s time for a eulogy. After last year’s surprise acquisition by Epic Games, the profitable online record store and community was sold last week to Songtradr, whose core business is licensing music to brands who want that magic track to make their latest content pop. Half of the staff was laid off. The Bandcamp union was gutted. The editorial team at Bandcamp Daily, which had music recommendations from real dedicated listeners rather than algorithms, was hit hard. What’s next is unclear, but for Songtradr the wealth of influential, genre-rich music on the platform is a drool-worthy mood music content library, not art.
Phew, did Clare Malone skewer Hasan Minhaj in The New Yorker last week. She didn’t intend to — she only wanted to profile him around his new standup special. But in the course of The New Yorker’s notoriously rigorous fact-checking, the team found that he had fabricated a number of the personal stories he tells onstage.
Last week at the Online News Association conference I caught up with many peers and colleagues about the state of news (not good). Most of the people I talked to are extremely talented and deeply experienced. Many of them are locked into long-term roles at organizations where their careers are unlikely to grow further. Virtually all of them will retire from the industry in the next 15 years.
I grew up a summer kid in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin — which basically meant I appeared spontaneously in some other kid’s ecosystem arbitrarily on most weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day. We waterskied and nearly drowned several times a summer, and I caught the same, sad bluegill under the pier over and over and over again while reflecting on whether or not Wisconsin ever got hot.
When I was 16, my parents moved up there permanently and my brother became a kid who actually lived there. I came along less willingly and got a horse, Copenhagen, as a bribe. He was cheap and is legendarily indestructible at the ripe old age of 32.
But first, know this: I never had a sex ed course. And the ones I’ve heard about sound pretty underwhelming. Diagrams of inside parts. Condoms on bananas. Abstinence and fear.
Absent actual pedagogy, most of us learn what we need to know by seeing and doing, through porn, the internet, and, well, regular TV
As we approach 2024, a looming fear looms larger: What would we do with a GOP-led country? What would that actually look like? And under such a circumstance, how might we harness a progressive agenda?
As Western Regional Political Coordinator for the Teamsters labor union, Phil Freedman is working to pass progressive legislation in the 13 western states, from Republican-led swaths like Montana to blue giants like California. For him, the most interesting state is Montana, which sometimes comes down to a matter of 1-2 votes for big legislation. But his work has had a material impact on politics in each state where he works.