It feels a bit strange to say this now, but in the spring of 2014 there was no better place to work than Gawker. For a certain kind of person, at any rate — ambitious, rebellious, and eager for attention, all of which I was. Just over a decade old, Gawker still thought of itself as a pirate ship, but a very big pirate ship, ballasted by semi-respectable journalism, and much less prone to setting itself on fire than in its early days, when its writers had a tendency to make loud and famous enemies and when its staff was subjected to near-annual purges — unless they were able to dramatically quit first. It managed to be, in a way it never had been, the kind of place about which you could say, “I could see myself being here in ten years.” Which I did often enough for it to seem funny now, since I myself would end up dramatically quitting in the summer of 2015, a little more than a year after being promoted to editor-in-chief and a little less than a year before the company would declare bankruptcy and auction itself off to the highest bidder.

What Gawker was depends a lot on whom you ask, but at the start it was a media-gossip blog; Elizabeth Spiers, its first editor, covered the people and politics of the still-powerful institutions of New York media — Condé Nast and the Times in particular — with equal parts obsession and skepticism. But the “media” qualifier was always secondary to the gossip core. The noblest version of Gawker’s premise was — as its founder, Nick Denton, repeated many times — that the version of a story journalists would tell each other over drinks was always more interesting than whatever was actually in the paper.

Gawker wasn’t the first publication to treat gossip as an intellectual pursuit. But it was the first to do so in the format that now seems completely natural for it: an endlessly scrolling, eternally accessible record of prattle and wit and venom that felt less like a publication than like a place. In this sense, the hook of Nick’s “barroom story” elevator pitch wasn’t the story but the barroom: a loud, sociable space for people to gossip, argue, joke, and whisper, a place where decorum and politeness were not only unnecessary but actively objectionable.

To what Vanessa Grigoriadis called in New York Magazine, in 2007, “the creative underclass,” this was a revelation. Gawker was as obsessed with, and scornful of, the powerful as the editorial assistants, interns, freelancers, and other young and precariously employed people at the bottom of a rapidly deteriorating ladder were. As an intern at the Daily Beast in 2009, I read Gawker precisely because it had such gleeful disdain for the social rituals (“kindness”) that propped up the lame, the stupid, and the fraudulent...

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/08/did-i-kill-gawker.html

SIMON: Daniel, why is this happening now? Ramadan, the Israeli elections?

ESTRIN: I think all of the above, Scott. All surrounding Ramadan, there have been a lot of Palestinians in the streets. The city is emerging from the pandemic. And there have been almost nightly clashes between Israeli police and Palestinians. Police saying they were attempting crowd control, but Palestinians say they see this just as an affront to their very existence in the city. I almost drove through a street clash, one of many, two nights ago. Young religious Jewish men throwing stones at Palestinians - I mean, it's just happening all over the city.

And there have just been a series of events - a far-right Israeli march through the city shouting death to Arabs. There have been protests in a neighborhood where Jewish settler groups are claiming ownership rights, Palestinian families slated for possible eviction - on the backdrop of a feeling of a leadership vacuum. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a government. His rivals are now trying. That could unseat him, and some pundits are even saying Netanyahu, who's considered Mr. Security, benefits from a rise in tensions, may be somehow luring right-wing politicians to rally around him and to keep him in office...

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/08/995014328/conflict-between-israelis-and-palestinians-continue-in-jerusalem

Opinion | Netanyahu and Trump Still Pose an Enduring Threat to Israel and America
Israel's Netanyahu and America's Trump, narcissistic, ethno-nationalist, would-be kings, continue to fail upward despite their toxic legacies. And that sends an important message about our times

The problem with narcissistic, anti-democratic, ethno-nationalist, arsonist would-be kings is that the will of the people is not a very big deal for them. Neither, apparently, is the rule of law or historical precedent.

Sadly, the acute awareness of this fact is yet another bond shared by the people of Israel and the people of the United States.

Tags:
Benjamin NetanyahuDonald TrumpIsrael - U.S.Opinion

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-netanyahu-and-trump-still-pose-an-enduring-threat-to-israel-and-america-1.9787010

TV’s only Asian-American superhero opens up about the need for representation onscreen—and why her band of SHIELD agents totally belong in Marvel’s movies.

Four years ago, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD star Chloe Bennet was known professionally as Chloe Wang, aspiring actress and teenage dabbler in Shanghai pop stardom. In the states, however, Hollywood casting agents were less than welcoming...

https://www.democraticunderground.com/12503317