Gawker - Ye old nose knows

It's all in the jewels darling

Every girl member of the royal family has got to have a cause célèbre. Lady Diana Spencer’s was the AIDS crisis. Meghan Markle’s is the ineffable concept of women. The Queen’s is pudding, and occasionally donating $16 million to alleged sex offender rights.

And now Kate Middleton, who is best known for her face framing layers and being a role model to her younger bro with a failed marshmallow company, is supporting Ukraine amid the ongoing Russian invasion. How? She’s reusing jewelry that she’d already worn once in October 2020.

Gross! But I guess it was for a good cause.

Let me explain. On Monday at Westminster Abbey, Kate attended a Commonwealth Day service commemorating the British Empire’s own invasion of 54 different countries. She wore a blue coat and hat, but according to People, “it was her earrings and necklace that appeared to be a subtle message supporting Ukraine amid Russia's ongoing invasion of the country.”

A spreadsheet leaked to Gawker listed the salaries of its entire editorial staff

In late January, Insider’s Global Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Carlson announced a new series on Twitter called “Salary Journeys.” The anonymized collection of stories would “demystif[y] pay and compensation” from a range of “occupations, workers, experience levels, and salaries.” In the inaugural call for submissions, Insider explained they aimed to “create even more transparency for job seekers at a time when taboos around pay are quickly breaking down.”

When Carlson boosted the submissions request, an Insider tech reporter named Becky Peterson replied: “What is your salary, Nich?” The question had some weight, in part because the Insider Union has been conducting an internal pay transparency campaign, where workers could voluntarily submit their pay for comparison with their colleagues. (A spokesperson for the Insider Union did not immediately get back to us). Carlson had not weighed in, and he also declined to do so on Twitter.

But according to a spreadsheet obtained by Gawker, Insider had been transparent about their staff pay — though inadvertently. As recently as November, a spreadsheet listing the names, job titles, start dates, salaries, bonuses, and bonus award dates of 640 Insider employees — the entire editorial staff — had been sitting on the company’s shared Google Drive, accessible to anyone with a company email. The document’s most recent “bonus dates” end on Nov. 15, 2021. But three sources told Gawker that their own salary information, and that of at least seven others, was accurate as of December.

“We believe in employing great people and paying them as well as we can,” Insider spokesperson Mario Ruiz told Gawker. “We try to pay at the ‘high end of market’ for each person's role, responsibilities, and effectiveness, from entry-level through our senior team.”

Carlson’s salary, for those wondering about his salary journey, is $600,000, with an annual bonus of $600,000 (the spreadsheet indicates that his last bonus went out on Jan. 1, 2019). Pretty good for the leader of the newsroom. According to the Economic Research Institute, the average newspaper editor-in-chief in the U.S. makes $107,766 a year, with an average bonus of $3,933. Glassdoor’s estimated average salary for an editor-in-chief in New York City is $95,936, with a base pay of $75,968 and an average additional pay of $19,969. Of course, the title’s meaning varies, and not all EICs are in charge of 600-odd people, like Carlson. But still, pretty good.

The supermodel wishes she could undo the nose job she had at 14

Bella Hadid has long denied having had any plastic surgery, even though there are pictures of her from the past that look different than pictures of her in the present. It’s okay. We’re not here to pry; in fact, we never have been. Mainly we look inward. What Bella Hadid’s face looks like is the business of Bella Hadid’s team and Bella Hadid’s team alone. Except when it comes to her nose.

Her nose is our business now!

Bella Hadid’s nose covers Vogue’s April issue, and in the accompanying story, Hadid admits (for the first time) to having gotten a nose job at age 14. I don’t think one would be out of line in assuming this decision was made at least in part under the weight of motherly influence, although Hadid does not say as much herself. She does regret it, though. “I wish I had kept the nose of my ancestors,” she says. “I think I would have grown into it.”

Aww. Really makes you feel lucky to have the nose of your ancestors, doesn’t it, if you do? (Also the buccal fat of your ancestors.) That’s the only surgery Hadid is copping to, though. “People think I fully fucked with my face because of one picture of me as a teenager looking puffy,” she told Vogue. “I’m pretty sure you don’t look the same now as you did at 13, right?” And you have to admit: right.

Stewart himself has become an old rock we're over-relying on

Because no one is tuning into The Problem with Jon Stewart when it drops on Apple TV+, I only just learned about last week's episode on climate change, where he took the brave stance of… siding with fossil fuel companies?

I will forgive you for not watching that whole thing, it is seven minutes long and will only make you regret ever thinking that you and Stewart might be on the same team. The thesis of the whole thing can be summed up by Stewart asking the question, “100 of these [fossil fuel] companies make 70 percent of our global emissions. Wouldn’t it be better to hold our noses, to not villainize them, to understand that no industry is ever going to cut its own throat and take away its profits?” I’m not a scientist, but I think the answer is no, it would not be better.

He then turns to Katherine Dixon, a former VP of Strategy for Energy Transition at Shell, and asks, “If you had to sit down with a guy from Shell and ask them a question, or get them on board, what would you say?” Wasn’t that her whole entire job at one point? Can’t she just text Jim from Shell and ask him? Dixon answers in earnest, agreeing that being “combative” with fossil fuel companies is never going to work, and that we need to focus on “cooperation.” Spoken like a true Shell executive.

'A Previous Life' is one of the best books the 82-year-old novelist has written

John Updike once said that as a novelist grows old and declines, he’s not haunted by death, but rather his own past. That meant, above all, his previous work: “He is burdensomely conscious that he has been cast, unlike his ingénue self, as an author who writes in a certain way, with the inexorable consistency of his own handwriting.” Updike would know, though I’m still dubious of the distinction. To get older is to experience a great narrowing. The past accumulates, and every decision forecloses some other possibility — that is, some other future — until, eventually, there are no more. Death is when the past is all there is.

What about the novelists who never really decline? For some of them, death turns the past into fresh material. Their friends and colleagues die, and with them the bonds of discretion; confidences are free to become characters. That’s true of A Previous Life, the 82-year-old Edmund White’s new novel, and one of his very best. It draws from the lives of the famous and fabulous people White has known, which he finds an ingenious way to deploy: much of A Previous Life consists of the “confessions” that a husband, the Sicilian aristocrat Ruggero, and his younger American wife, Constance, write (and then read to each other) about their sexual and romantic histories.

Fans of City Boy (2009), White’s account of New York City in the 1960s and ’70s, might notice that, in A Previous Life, the wealthy Ruggero sets up a foundation to handle requests for money from the poor artists who frequent his salons, which allowed him to relieve any awkwardness by telling them to just “submit a proposal” — the precise solution arrived at by White’s rich friend, the poet James Merrill. Later in the novel, Constance marries a writer obviously modeled on Harold Brodkey, a cult figure in New York literary circles when White arrived in the city who supposedly was going to be the American answer to Proust. He wasn’t, and he wasn’t exactly straight, either. White met Brodkey after sleeping with one of the two men who lived with him, a domestic arrangement first described in City Boy and faithfully reproduced in A Previous Life.