Gawker - Red check blue check green check murder

By Claire Carusillo

It did more for my career than grad school

Elon Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has a brilliant new money-making scheme that amounts to clout-based extortion from all the “blue checks” on this “bird app” “dumpster fire” “hell site.” The Verge reports that verified badges for users — which basically function as an ID card to prove that the tweeter’s really who they claim to be — will soon cost actual money, rather than just the simple debasement it currently costs to ask one’s social media manager to submit a request for verification on your behalf. Having a blue check mark next to your name will be priced at $19.99 a month via an expanded version of Twitter Blue, a year-old membership tier of the site that has thus far had negligible benefit and no relation to verified badges.

According to The Verge, “verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark.” That’s good news for all the culture reporters living within a 12-foot radius of a Blank Street Coffee who still haven’t made up their mind about whether or not they want to shell out in order to cling to their one avatar of self-worth. The timeline is less generous for the actual Twitter employees working on the project, who were apparently told on Sunday that they have until November 7 to launch the feature or they will be fired, per The Verge. Never let anyone tell you that Musk does not know how to motivate his labor force.

This is a real gloating moment for Twitter obsessives (a.k.a. dorks who failed to get together a good client roster after graduating with a PsyD and are now pivoting to front-facing confessional comedy) who have resisted the siren call of a blue check, despite having a big enough following to merit one. This sort of person is too punk to have the albatross of a blue check hanging around their necks because it would’ve meant choosing status symbols and belonging to an elitist organization over total fuckin’ free speech freedom. These badass chicas don’t want institutional recognition, they want to spend all day Photoshopping Jair Bolsonaro into different Victorian rest cure situations from anonymous monikers that are probably some combination of the word “bimbo” and “420” and is also somehow a pun on the name “Chasten Buttigieg” (Twitter made being a dumb slut cool, if you’ll remember). Continue reading

By Tarpley Hitt

She's practicing wellness by defending her tax bracket

Gwyneth Paltrow has built a hugely successful brand around giving advice. Until now, that advice has largely been on matters of the private sphere (quite literally in the case of the $55 jade eggs she recommended people put in their vaginas), but Paltrow has recently ventured into areas of public interest.

Back in March, she released a video endorsing billionaire mall tycoon Rick Caruso for Los Angeles Mayor, despite the fact that he registered as a Democrat shortly before entering the race, after years of donating to opponents of abortion. Then on Thursday, she posted a voter guide, where she managed to endorse a rundown of Southern California’s worst candidates. It made plain what has been obvious since at least her role in Iron Man (2008) — that Paltrow is just a conservative with dewy skin.

In the caption, Paltrow called the upcoming midterms our “most critical election in recent times.” And while the electoral superlatives are starting to get old, it’s true that this one could be pretty dire for anyone who cares about voting rights, abortion, or climate change. But to offer some of our own advice: Do not vote for (almost) any of these candidates. Continue reading

By Kelly Conaboy

Let’s see what he has to say

If there’s one guy who should have watched Click, the Adam Sandler comedy about time travel that makes men surprisingly emotional, it’s Tom Brady. Crying about Adam Sandler prioritizing work over his little kids and hot wife really could have changed things for him, I think. Sad to consider what might have been…

Last month, the quarterback decided losing football games in Florida was more important to him than his family, and on Friday he and his now ex-wife Gisele Bündchen announced their long-rumored (by them) divorce. Brady broke his two-day silence about the decision on Monday in an episode of the podcast he unnecessarily hosts. And don’t worry — he still loves and is more committed than ever to his family, just kidding; he still loves and is more committed than ever to football. Continue reading

By Claire Carusillo

The podcast doyenne tackles the “good mom” and "bad mom" archetypes with Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau and Pamela Adlon

On the latest episode of Archetypes with Meghan, the Duchess of So Much Fussess talks with Canada’s First Lady Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau (“For homies, Sophie G. in the house,” as she intros herself), Better Things’s Pamela Adlon, and SNL’s first Black lesbian writer Sam Jay. Dream bundt cake rotation!

(Meghan “Oh Gosh” Markle loves baking and hates impropriety; when her mother Doria Ragland called her unexpectedly during the record in the stu she goes, “Oh sugar, my mom is FaceTiming me,” a creative workaround for the word “shit.”)

Today, Goody Markle is deconstructing two archetypes and then smashing the binary all together. Can one person be a good mom/good wife and a bad mom/bad wife, or are we all just one thing all the time?

I’ve listened to eight episodes of Archetypes with Meghan, so I know the answer. Continue reading

By Olivia Craighead

The View celebrated Halloween with something even scarier than Meghan McCain weighing in on free speech

Is there anything worse than a child dressed up for Halloween in a costume clearly thought up by an adult? I’ll answer that: no. If your kid wanted to be a racecar and you dressed them up as the concept of free speech (t-shirt with lips, $0 price tag attached), you are the problem.

The issue becomes less black and white when the child in question is presumably getting paid real money instead of candy to appear on a daytime talk show in a costume that is only funny to adults. This happened today on The View, when children participated in a segment called “Boo! Are You Wearing?” in which they were outfitted in costumes paying tribute to the year’s news headlines, such as “inflation” and “the raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.” Continue reading