Gawker - Pritzker 2024

The presidential case for the Hyatt heir who brought you “ToiletGate”

In mid-June, Crain’s Chicago Business published an article about Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has held the state’s highest office since 2019. The headline read: “Is Pritzker considering a presidential bid?” Pritzker was traveling to New Hampshire for a speech at a party convention, signaling to some that he had bigger plans after his re-election campaign this fall. It was a local story, but it got picked up by a new Twitter account called “Socialists for Pritzker.”

That was the account’s first tweet. In less than a month, Socialists for Pritzker has become an online mouthpiece for the governor’s still-hypothetical presidential campaign, racking up thousands of followers in a matter of days and getting a shoutout in Dave Weigel’s politics newsletter, The Trailer. The account — a mix of Chapo-inflected jokes, fairly sincere political commentary, and memes about Pritzker’s Midwestern, average-guy affect — somewhat resembles the stunt campaign to get former Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel on the debate stage during the last Democratic primaries. Here was another guy boosting a dark horse candidate, somewhat wryly, for his apparent progressive bonafides. Continue reading

And I'm all ears

Jordan Peterson’s work is not for me. First of all, I think 12 rules is too many to remember, and most crucially, I am not an incel. But I have now been confronted by some Peterson material made specifically for me. Specifically, his most recent Youtube post, titled, “Message to Muslims.” It’s an honor.

We open on Peterson sitting in what appears to be a cabin with logs of chopped wood behind him, which makes it hard for me to imagine I didn’t just wake up after blacking out and being kidnapped. My eyes slowly open to him saying, “Hi all.” Continue reading

It's a bit late for reassuring joint statements

I promise that we will stop writing about Funny Girl on this website as soon as they stop doing things worth writing about. It’s not my fault that they cannot stop digging the hole that they’re in. The latest update comes to us via the first joint statement from the Funny Girl producers and Beanie Feldstein’s rep. Nothing says “we need to clean this up fast” like a People exclusive.

Feldstein’s team and the Funny Girl producters are now trying to dissuade people from thinking that the actress’s announcement of her departure was a surprise to anyone.

"The producers of Funny Girl were not blindsided by Beanie's social post," both parties told People in their statement. "The producers decided to take the show in a different direction and end Beanie's contract on September 25th, 6 months earlier than anticipated.”

They went on, saying, "A month after that decision, Beanie decided it was best for her to leave on July 31st. The producers were aware of and in support of her decision. The producers and Beanie worked on this together professionally, respectfully and graciously." Continue reading

A history of how one term became so critical to American conservatives

“‘Critical race theory,’” conservative activist Christopher Rufo told the New Yorker in May 2021, “is the perfect villain.” Before landing on that term, “critical race theory” (or “CRT”), Rufo had in fact been cycling through other, less-than-perfect options for a while: “political correctness,” for one, a term which now sounds slightly quaint in the post-Trump media landscape and which, he added, “doesn’t apply anymore”; “cancel culture” (“a vacuous term” that “doesn’t translate into a political program”); “wokeness” (“too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside”). Obviously both “cancel culture” and “wokeness” have had staying power, but it’s hard to deny that Rufo was right to identify CRT as his “perfect villain,” if only because of the swiftness with which CRT was slotted into position as one of the central MacGuffins of the contemporary American culture wars. Just what was it about this term that made it so potent?

Although CRT often arrives packaged together with “wokeness,” “cancel culture,” and other buzzwords — “cultural Marxism,” “social justice warriors,” and so on — Rufo correctly understands that they perform different, albeit related, kinds of ideological work for the right. Take “wokeness.” As Sam Adler-Bell has defined it, this word indexes “the invocation of unintuitive and morally burdensome political norms and ideas in a manner which suggests they are self-evident.” If wokeness is thus the practice of invocation — along with, per Sam Kriss’s argument, the “cluster of postures and affects” involved in that practice, rather than “a cohesive ideology” — then CRT names (at least according to right-wing activists) the “cohesive ideology” that’s being invoked. Moreover, CRT is understood as institutionally, and more specifically pedagogically, disseminated: educators teach CRT, the story goes, and thereby use a combination of authority and social pressure to turn ordinary, thoughtful American students into a mindless horde, “the woke.” As Rufo put it: “It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits, they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race.” Continue reading

A guide to from someone who’s spent the past seven years living with strangers from the internet

Welcome to Miss Type, a column about etiquette in the digital age. This week: How do you search for — and convince — a nice internet stranger to share a home with you?

Finding people with whom you can peacefully cohabit requires luck, genuine skill, and a willingness to humble yourself on roommate listing groups. I value my relationships with my actual friends too much to risk ruining them over shower shelf dynamics, and living alone is a right I sacrificed when I chose to pursue an MFA during an economic crisis. Consequently, I’ve spent the past seven years living with strangers I found on the internet, and honestly, they’ve been some of my best roommates. Sometimes these living situations have resulted in lasting friendships; other times I move out and never think of the person again — which is also a form of success.

There is a specific art to it: You have to identify a good roommate from little more than some words and pixels on the web, demonstrate that you’re also normal and okay to live with, and then enter a deeply intimate situation after meeting only once or twice. The best resource for learning how to do this is just a naturally good intuition about who you get along with. But in lieu of that, I offer this guide to finding a roommate online: Continue reading