Gawker - There can be 100 groundhogs in a room

Happy hog day, and best wishes for the next six weeks of winter. ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

Happy hog day, and best wishes for the next six weeks of winter. We won’t know until next week, however, if we’re in for seven more weeks of the greatest Oscars campaign in history. Punxsutawney Phil wishes he could be Lady Gaga. If you, like Punxsutawney Phil struggle with comparing your insides to everyone else’s outsides, you might be interested in today’s essay about depression, medication, and the question of whether suffering is valuable. Anywho, remember Lexi Featherston, “a legendary New York party girl”? She fell out of a window in the third-to-last episode of Sex and the City, and thank god she didn’t live to see how boring the girlies’ lives have become. But some people yearn to be boring. Stable. Some people owned marshmallow companies whose whole gimmick was printing images on the marshmallows, and when they received requests to print Nazi imagery like swastikas and pictures of concentration camps, they did it. And that person is the Queen’s granddaughter-in-law’s brother, James Middleton, who just sold the company. End of an era, but don’t cry just yet– he already has another company on the way. Oh, and one last thing: MOTHER IS NOT A SLUT. She's just putting herself out there.

Groundhogs Are Out, Gaga Is In

By Olivia Craighead

The real winter forecast will come when we learn whether or not Lady Gaga is getting an Oscar nomination

You may have heard that Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow, meaning that we are in for six more weeks of winter. You may have also heard that Staten Island Chuck, the B-list groundhog, didn’t see his shadow, meaning that we are in for an early spring. What are we to believe? Well, the thing is that a groundhog cannot tell us anything about the future, but you know who can? Multi-platinum recording artist and actress Lady Gaga.

You see, the Oscar nominations are on February 8, less than a week away. Only then will we know if we are in for seven more weeks of the greatest Oscars campaign in history. If we all wake up on that Tuesday to find that Gaga hasn’t been nominated for her role in House of Gucci, winter (which in this case is defined as the months we have spent listening to Gaga say just about anything to get a soundbite, and look fabulous while doing so) will be over.

I don’t know about you, but I love winter. Specifically, I love Gaga’s winter, and am praying that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences allows her to stick her head out next week and officially decree that it will continue on until March 27th, the night of the Oscars ceremony. Just think about all that this Gaga winter has given us so far.

My Daily Pills

By B.D. McClay

On suffering, and not.

Every day, unless I forget, I take two pills. One is oblong and beige and burns my throat quite badly if I attempt to swallow it dry. The other is round and white. They are antidepressants, though different kinds. I have been doing this for years.

Quite a lot is said and written about psychiatric medication. For people who don’t have much experience with them, medication for a condition like mine tends to be a philosophical problem: if you could take a pill to be happy, should you? Here we are in the realm of thinkpieces about anxiety and depression and medicalizing normal human experience. On the other hand, when it comes to mental conditions that are genuinely stigmatized and feared, like bipolar or schizophrenia, meds are the thing we are assured separates your coworker from an axe murderer, and refusing treatment for these conditions should be something where the law is allowed to take a firmer hand.

The truth is that medication is both overprescribed and somewhat stigmatized, with the levels of each fluctuating depending on what sort you need. It is unclear how the pills work, or even if they do. They can come with side effects that are almost as bad or worse than the condition they are meant to help — and seem, anecdotally anyway, to be far more likely to cause side effects the more necessary they are for a person not to spend their life in and out of hospitals. But pills can also work, as mine do for me, with minimal negative effects in my daily life except for very vivid and unpleasant dreams. For other people, they do nothing at all, not even as a placebo.

Whatever Happened to FUN?

By Melissa Rich

'And Just Like That...' the fantasy of Carrie Bradshaw's New York disappears.

“Carrie Bradshaw. Where the fuck have you been hiding?” a voice booms over Vogue editor Enid Frick’s civilized cocktail party in the third to last episode of Sex and the City. Kristen Johnston stands holding an unlit cigarette as Lexi Featherston, “a legendary New York party girl” from Carrie’s Tunnel nightclub days and one of the most important fictional characters of our time. Throughout the night, Lexi grows increasingly frustrated with the “geriatrics” at the party. No one does coke, everybody’s stopped smoking and everyone’s paired off. She monologues belligerently to a stunned room, smoking near an open window in what used to be the greatest city in the world, declaring that New York is, in fact, over. “No one’s fun anymore! Whatever happened to fun?!” And with the finest last words ever written for a character — “I’m so bored I could die” — Lexi’s heel slips in her Manolo Blahnik. To no use, she grips for Enid’s likely expensive floor length curtain and precipitously falls to her tragic death — “the first time she ever left a party early,” Carrie’s voiceover tells us.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Carrie Bradshaw’s New York. One of my first jobs when I moved to the city was as a tour guide for the Sex and the City bus tour. I’d put on heels and a fur, often hungover, and hold the door at The Pleasure Chest for a parade of fifty women and gay men to go buy a dildo with their friend or sometimes family member. You may think you have an idea of how many bachelorette parties I’ve seen, but it is, in fact, far more. The tour taught me how to navigate the city and left me with an encyclopedic level of arguably useless knowledge. I also learned a lot about the show’s die-hard fanbase. As I’d lead them into Magnolia Bakery, women from the Midwest donning pink tutus would tell me how they married their Mr. Big. I’d meet fans from Australia who’d named their sons Aidan and women from Ireland whose primary reason for visiting the city was to pose on the steps of Carrie’s apartment at 66 Perry Street, arms wide, heels popped. All of them claimed to be the “Samantha” of their friend group. It was very obvious what drew them to dedicate their lives to this series — the fantasy. The characters in Sex and the City lived in a child-like state of dress-up adulthood, each of them delusional in their own way, running around the city like they just got let out for recess. Any heaviness was brief and either salacious or healed by friendship and humor, like when Miranda’s mom died and Samantha’s couldn’t cum.

James Middleton’s Nazi Marshmallow Company Sold to Estonia

By Allie Jones

Boomf!

Remember 2013? It was then that the Duchess of Cambridge’s unemployed younger brother, James Middleton, decided to start a company that would print people’s Instagram photos onto marshmallows. He named this exciting enterprise Boomf, and referred to himself as the company’s “Wonka-in-Chief.” The business expanded and contracted over the years, losing millions of dollars in the process, and in 2019, the company was forced to apologize after a whistleblowing employee revealed that the company was sending out marshmallows with Nazi imagery when requested. (After this revelation, a British news agency ordered a box of marshmallows printed with “the image of a swastika, concentration camp gates, Jewish graves and the neo-Nazi slogan ‘Blood and Soil’” as a test. Boomf fulfilled the order.)

Amazingly, Boomf carried on for two more years after the Nazi incident, but the party’s over now: The Daily Mail reports that company went bankrupt at the end of last year and was sold at a major loss to Otkrytka Limited, a firm founded by British-Estonian businessman Stepan Galaev. The price? Just £300,000. According to the Mail, Boomf owes almost £800,000 to creditors. Investors, including Middleton’s brother-in-law James Matthews, will not see a return. Boomf.

Let’s Discuss ‘This Is Us’: Mother Is Not a Slut

By Kelly Conaboy

She's just putting herself out there.

Everyone is dating, or upset. A piano rings out in an empty home. Blind children sing Lorde with Mother’s accompaniment. Uncle has a girlfriend now. (He met her on a plane.) And what else? Let’s take a look.

HAS MOTHER SURVIVED?

Yes, Mother has endured another week.

TODAY IN GAWKER HISTORY:

02/02/12

Why Two Airplanes Are Fucking on the Cover of BusinessWeek

By Ryan Tate

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