Gawker - Body talk

CEO Jonah Peretti announced cuts to the editorial staff in March

Two of BuzzFeed’s political editors have taken voluntary buyouts from the site, several of the site’s staffers confirmed online and to Gawker.

The layoffs came two months after BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti announced in an earnings call that the editorial team would be downsizing, cutting between 25 and 50 roles by way of voluntary buyout. At the time, the company was engaged in active contract negotiations with the news division’s union, which the union claimed restricted BuzzFeed’s ability to downsize.

But on May 6, BuzzFeed New Union announced that they had ratified their first union contract — a three-year CBA that would raise salary floors, cap healthcare costs, bar the use of NDAs in sexual harassment cases, and, notably, expand severance and buyout packages.

“Near the end of our process, we faced yet another attempt from management to gut our newsroom through buyouts,” the shop wrote in a press release, “but we once again fought back to secure better terms for our members.”

With negotiations over, it seems buyouts have resumed under the terms of the agreement. Continue reading

The bouts of episodic immobility say nothing of Charles's readiness to lead

The life of a sovereign isn’t all old Hollyroodhouse glamor and admiring the way light refracts off of the gloss of exquisite teapots. Prince Charles, the king-to-be, learned that this morning when he took over one of the more staid responsibilities of the Queen’s this morning, the Opening of Parliament. It’s an event she had to forgo due to “episodic mobility problems,” and one that she hasn’t blown off since she was pregnant with Prince Edward in 1963. According to Buckingham Palace, though, her mind is still sharp as the emerald edge of Queen Mary’s tiara that was gifted to her by the Saudi empire.

Royal historian Robert Lacey told People, "The sense I get from everyone I speak to is that the Queen remains totally in control of her faculties and of everything at the palace. The problem is physical mobility — and that is not a constitutional or regency issue. She is in charge."

Hm. It seems to me that The Firm, in a Franklin D. Roosevelt throwback, doesn’t want the public to see sprightly Lil in a wheelchair. Continue reading

We have

There’s a lot of full-frontal nudity in the Tony-nominated revival of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out. This gift requires audience members to, upon entering the theater, put their phones and smart devices in a sealed Yondr case; the unopenable bag canceled comedians enforce the use of while they hone their post-cancellation material. Of course, though, thirst finds a way.

A video of Take Me Out star Jesse Williams and his substantial penis has made its way to Twitter last night. Here it is: Continue reading

Finally

Songstresses, what a wild ride it’s been. Watching this show for the last eight weeks has been an exercise in bafflement, and this finale was no exception. I feel safe in saying that this was, without a doubt, one of the most confusing, bizarre, and anticlimactic episodes of television I have ever seen. I understand now why people were so upset about the Lost finale.

Despite all that, there is a lot to cover from last night, so let’s get right to it. The show opened with Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg performing their own songs live, which they honestly should have been doing every week. There was immediately an energy that had been missing from nearly every episode, and an energy that would not return for the rest of the show.

They then got right into performances, but before we cover those, I’m going to go over how they explained how voting for a winner worked.

With the help of an animated man who was supposed to look like Snoop Dogg, we learned that everyone voting at home during the show was voting on behalf of their home state. The song with the most votes from each state got the maximum number of points, 12, and every following song would get a slightly smaller amount of points — this system is almost identical to that of the original Eurovision, where the allotment of points among countries occasionally also functions as a sort of very soft diplomacy. The jury votes worked the same way until last night, when they decided to give “America’s votes more weight.” Continue reading

Elon Musk is making one of the tech world's most useful idiots relevant again

Last week Tim Urban, the creator of the blog Wait But Why, tweeted an infographic summarizing the federal state of abortion access in a post-Roe v. Wade universe. No one had sought the opinion of Tim Urban, the creator of the blog Wait But Why, on the federal state of abortion access in a post-Roe v. Wade universe. But where others had seen the leak of the draft Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe as a call to arms, Urban took it as an invitation to advertise his particular brand of panglossian, happy-go-lucky artistic whimsy. The infographic drew post-Roe America as an undifferentiated mass of ponytailed women, some of whom have access to abortion and some of whom – hey, sucks but that’s the way things go! – don’t. It claimed a federal abortion ban was “not on the table,” despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Why Urban felt compelled to share these thoughts in public was not immediately clear. Six minutes after he posted his tweet came an explanation of sorts. Elon Musk replied, “Accurate.” This was an automatic indication that almost everything about the illustration was wrong.

But the endorsement also provided a kind of vindication for Urban, who has spent the weeks since Musk announced his intention to buy Twitter reaffirming his status as Silicon Valley’s most loyal in-house philosopher. Urban has described Musk as “the world’s raddest man,” and the admiration is clearly mutual. Urban came charging out of the gate in favor of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, declaring to any of his 563,000 followers suspicious of the rad man’s motives: “I've spent a lot of time talking to him and I wholeheartedly believe his heart is in the right place in his endeavors.” The two have busily amplified each other’s tweets in the weeks since, a full-court online press designed to legitimize Musk’s supremely stupid takes on free speech, the public sphere, and political polarization. The relationship works for both of them: Musk’s attention boosts Urban’s profile, and Urban helps assure Musk and his fellow founder-gods that they’re engaged in a noble quest for knowledge rather than the grubby pursuit of profit. The tech world needs its useful idiots, and in Silicon Valley, Tim Urban is among the most useful idiots of all. Continue reading