Gawker - Tom Brady's innermost thoughts

By Tarpley Hitt

Welcome to the world, from your friends at Gawké

ℹ THE NEWS

The website Semafor, founded by former New York Times media critic Ben Smith and former CEO of Bloomberg Media Justin Smith (no relation) launched Tuesday morning, after months of anticipatory coverage in media outlets, particularly the one where Ben once worked, plus Gawker, and two million promoted tweets that look like this.

The newly launched homepage has a yellow background and a lot of clocks on it, so you can see different time zones. Semafor also released a backlog of articles from its new contributors, and an explainer on what it’s calling the “Semaform,” or a redesign of “the atomic unit of written news, the article.” The Smiths spelled this out in a blog titled “What is a Semaform, anyway? And why should you care?,” and a short video from Semafor executive editor Gina Chua.

The Semaform, the site explains, “separates the undisputed facts from the reporter’s analysis of those facts, provides different and more global perspectives, and shares strong journalism on the subject from other outlets.” This is how it works:

We’re breaking articles into:

— The News

— The Reporter’s View (or analysis)

— Room For Disagreement (or counterargument)

— The View From (or different perspectives on the topic)

— Notable (or some of the best other writing on the subject)

Let’s dive in.

Let’s dive in. Continue reading

By Olivia Craighead

We're here to answer any questions you might have about that

We are three days out from the release of Taylor Swift’s Midnights album, and there still isn’t a note of music to be heard. That does not, however, mean there’s nothing to talk about. In fact, it frees us up to talk about the more important things. Namely, what is Zoë Kravitz doing with a songwriting credit on the song “Lavender Haze”?

The songwriting credits for Midnights are now available on iTunes, and alongside the usual suspects — Swift, Jack Antonoff, “William Bowery” a.k.a. “Joe Alwyn” — is the High Fidelity star. I know you have questions, so I’ll answer them now.

Taylor Swift and Zoë Kravitz Know Each Other?

Yes, obviously. They have been friends for years, and even quarantined together in 2020. Kravitz was shooting The Batman in London, and Swift was in her pod. We know this because Swift had to assist in a Zoom photoshoot (remember those?) Kravitz was doing for Women’s Wear Daily.

We even have proof that they have been in the studio together before, because Jack Antonoff shared some photos of that happening. Continue reading

By Claire Carusillo

Archetypes takes on the word 'bimbo'

Meghan Markle had another kind of royal on her podcast Archetypes with Meghan this week: the hotel heiress, paparazzi princess, Bored Ape babe, and distant cousin to the late Queen Elizabeth herself, Paris Hilton.

Before you ask: No, our hostess with the mostest didn’t ask Paris exactly what her mom Kathy said in the Sprinter van coming home from the Caribou Club in Aspen with only Lisa Rinna as a witness. Instead, the two businesswomen talked about the archetype “bimbo,” which is not a word that people use much these days (when I’m calling out blonde women, I prefer “dumb slut” or “prostitution whore” or “fascist”). This is a problem with Archetypes week after week: Every pernicious term that Meghan and her guest spend an hour deconstructing is dated by about a decade. They say that famous people are emotionally stunted at the age they achieved stardom, and perhaps Meghan’s astronomical rise to Canadian celebrity in 2012 shielded her from a cottage industry of Dolly Parton prayer candles, otherwise she might know that self-aware dumb blondeness is actually kitsch — not to mention, hot — now.

Paris, too, has become somewhat of a redeemed folk hero since her 2020 documentary This Is Paris, which explores her advocacy in the Troubled Teen Industry. As she explains to Meghan and in the documentary, her parents sent her to boarding school in Utah when she was 16, not long after the family moved to New York City from Los Angeles. The school was billed as a therapeutic place to ride horses and escape the paparazzi, but Paris — after being kidnapped from her bed and whisked away in the middle of the night, under order from Kathy Hilton — suffered horrific abuse there. Continue reading

By Kelly Conaboy

For the second time this month, the athlete was spotted without his wedding band

Stop — cover your eyes! Leave only a sliver of sight available to read this blog post — for the sake of decency! What I am about to tell you is not for the faint of heart, nor is it for any American under the age of 21. (Europeans may hear the news earlier.) New England’s Florida Queen has been spotted au naturel, in the buff, exposed, and Page Six was there to witness the scene firsthand and spill all the indecorous details to us — its loyal readership! Take heart, and come with me — to the next paragraph!

In a defiant display of public hand nudity, Tom Brady was spotted without his wedding band on Sunday. The indecency happened as he boarded a bus in Pennsylvania, en route to the Sunday night game his Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers. (You remember — he was emotional about it.)

According to Page Six, which nabbed the photographs of the hideous event, Brady was wearing a white T-shirt under a light blue button-down, and he was carrying a camouflage duffle bag in his left hand. What his left hand wasn’t carrying, though? Why yes, you already know — a wedding band.

While we do not have the license to show you these naughty, almost pornographic bandless images, we have done our best to recreate them in somewhat of an expert manner. Please look away if you must. Continue reading

By Clare Coffey

On Angela Lansbury's most iconic role

Welcome to Cabot Cove, Maine, population 3,650. In this pleasant coastal community, you can enjoy lobster stew, old-fashioned doilies, a close-knit community of gruff and eccentric New Englanders, the occasional nor’easter, and approximately one hundred murders per year.

Such was the premise of Murder, She Wrote, a show that ran twelve seasons between 1984 and 1996 and starred Angela Lansbury as the small-town widow turned mystery novelist turned improbably productive crime solver.

Angela Lansbury played so many roles, of so many kinds, in so many different types of production, that it is impossible to write a concise and comprehensive summation of her career. I first heard her sing as a motherly talking teapot in Beauty and the Beast; I first saw her as Elizabeth Taylor’s less horse-obsessed, more boy-oriented older sister in National Velvet; She had a knack for finding the roles that become family staples, searing the actor’s presence into your psyche.

But for me, and I think for many people, Murder, She Wrote was the baseline Angela Lansbury vehicle, the gateway Lansbury experience. I used to watch it — as I imagine others did — with my grandmother, sometimes snuggled in her big four-poster bed, sometimes in the TV room under chenille throw blankets that seemed to me the height of elegance.

Like many grandparent shows serialized during the daytime — Matlock, Columbo — it played on the perverse coziness of the murder plot, but with two key differences as far as I was concerned. Murder, She Wrote was not just a grandparent show, it was a grandmother show. And unlike many of its peers, which were interesting to me as a child mainly insofar as they afforded a chance to watch grown-up television , Murder, She Wrote enthralled me. Continue reading