Gawker - Sports tip

A possibly genius idea.

I thought of a way to make basketball better. Or, well — either a way to make it better, or a way to make it so much worse that it would be unplayable and unwatchable.

You know when you’re watching a basketball game in an effort to be nice to the people in your life who enjoy watching basketball, and one of the teams is losing, and then they start to suck even more than they were already sucking? Dragging around their mopey asses, all sad and defeated, fucking up, attempting shots they were never gonna make and then feeling worse. Wah, we’re losing, we suck; I guess we’re just gonna keep sucking and being worse and shittier ‘til we lose, why am I even a basketball player, I suck at this.

On the flip side, you know when a team is winning, and it’s like they’ve got an extra jolt of ability? They’re confident, they’re focused. All the energy they’re putting out into the universe is the energy of a team that is sure they’re going to secure a win. As we learned from The Secret, the universe has no choice in this sort of situation but to deliver that win to them. We are winners, they say to themselves, and we will win. And indeed they will.

But what if they all didn’t know the score?

Nine people have left the website since March. Those we spoke to cited executive overreach and dwindling resources

In March, G/O Media — the parent company of several former Gawker Media websites including the feminist blog Jezebel — hired former Forbes and Marie Claire editor, Lea Goldman, as their Deputy Editorial Director. On LinkedIn, Goldman describes herself as “a maestro at converting ideas into sellable franchises” who makes “killer content.” She also notes that she’s “a talent spotter who loves mentoring.”

Since Goldman joined the company, nine of the website’s employees have quit — about 75 percent of its editorial staff. Those employees include the editor-in-chief, deputy editor, features editor, and six full-time writers. When Gawker asked them about the departures, several sources pointed to Goldman. “I don't have much to say about Jezebel at the moment,” former features editor Stassa Edwards told Gawker in an email, “but I do think it's worth pointing out that nine people have left the site since G/O Media hired Lea Goldman.”

It’s what’s for dinner

Despite the dish’s fussy reputation and appearance, making a soufflé is the definition of doing the most with the least. All you really need is flour, milk, butter, eggs, and something extra for flavor. Although there is a bit of technique required, it's nothing beyond the skill level of an average cook. If you’ve ever whisked eggs into foam or made béchamel for baked pasta, you can make a soufflé. And should you endeavor to do it, you will be rewarded with a puffy tower of steaming custard that is substantial enough to stand in for dinner any night.

I made my first soufflés as a pastry cook at a restaurant in France where, for an entire month, we served individual dishes of airy passion fruit soufflés that rose to perfect cylinders in our high-tech oven. One night my boss, the pastry chef, called out sick, so I worked with Philippe, the chef de cuisine, for the first time, preparing for the night’s service. When we had finished and it was time for staff meal, I watched him combine the remaining soufflé base and egg whites with such nonchalance compared to the way he handled the diners’ desserts that I was taken aback. He then dumped the entirety of the batter into a rather wide baking dish and threw it in the upstairs kitchen oven to cook until it was brown all over.

Her antics, unbearable on screen, come alive on the page

This year, for the first time since I was a little girl, I was unable to finish a season of Real Housewives of New York City, largely due to the behavior of Ramona Singer, a woman I once considered The People’s Princess. Born in dysfunction to parents who lived in the knot of a freakin’ tree surrounded by 70 acres, Singer worked her way out of the woods and into the buying department of Macy’s, her inspirational rise reminiscent of the life of Lady Diana Spencer, for the purposes of this blog post.

It’s no surprise, then, that Singer was moved to attend the premiere of “Diana the Musical” on Broadway this week, which reviews have since described as “tabloid trash,” “a royal mess,” and evocative of the “car crash” that famously took Princess Di’s life. Fittingly, Ramona felt right at home. According to Page Six, she shirked mask protocols, placed her drink on the stage, and arrived late to the second act after grabbing a drink at intermission.

They're not great

I recently purchased a bed frame, which used to involve going to a furniture store and saying “that one looks nice” but has been made both much cheaper and much worse through the necessity of having to spend time on the computer. There are many websites that sell bed frames, and they all look pretty okay to me, but the idea that one is moderately or even slightly more okay than the rest is a haunting proposition, which fuels a kind of manic, clicking-back-and-forth fugue state that is the fundamental condition of spending time on the computer.

I found one, eventually, though it has not arrived so no telling yet if I made the right decision. I made a decision, which is often good enough. Mainly what prompted me to finally say “fuck it, this one will do” was the increasingly unbearable state of bed frame reviews, where helpful people want to convey that a bed frame is either adequate or inadequate to the task of “having sex on it” without actually uttering the word “sex.”