#emma carmichael

[transpondster]

At Gawker, They Battled a Billionaire. 10 Years Later, the Scars Are Still Healing

Their weaponized wit made enemies, minted stars and helped define the internet as we know it. A decade after Peter Thiel engineered the site’s spectacular collapse, Nick Denton’s diaspora is still shaping media — and haunted by what happened.

[Cord] Jefferson and [Max] Read had sold a scripted series to Apple titled Scraper that was based on the inner workings of Gawker, and the quartet, along with a handful of, as [Emma] Carmichael puts it, “very accomplished, amazing screenwriters and playwrights on Broadway,” were producing scripts for the first season. 

Scraper was not a hagiography. Carmichael, who became Gawker’s managing editor in her early 20s, describes the show as “Industry meets Succession,” with characters based on the characters who worked there. “We were telling the story honestly,” says Jefferson. “It was a morally queasy place, and that makes for interesting television.” 

Jefferson and Read say they went into the deal knowing that there was no love lost between Apple and Gawker, the website co-founded by British journalist, blogger and entrepreneur Nick Denton that published a series of blogs in addition to its flagship. In 2010, one of those blogs, Gizmodo, which covered the tech industry, infuriated Steve Jobs when it obtained and published photos of an iPhone 4 prototype that an engineer had left in a restaurant. The next year, another Gawker-owned site, Valleywag, outed Tim Cook in a story headlined, “Meet Tim Cook, the Most Powerful Gay Man in Silicon Valley.”

“Max and I had been concerned about that when we sold the project to Apple,” says Jefferson, but the executives developing the project “told us there was a very protective firewall between the TV side and the tech side.”

But a month before the writers room wrapped with scripts for the first season’s eight episodes, Jefferson recalls, “an executive called me and said word had reached Tim Cook that we were doing a show set in a world similar to Gawker, and he had put the kibosh on it personally.”

Jefferson and his 3 Arts Entertainment manager Jermaine Johnson (who also represents Read and Carmichael) say they heard about but never saw an email in which Cook allegedly referred to Gawker as rife with “vile human beings.” (Cook did not respond to requests for comment.)

In August, when Jefferson — who was nominated that July for the Emmy he won for his writing on the HBO miniseries Watchmen — informed the writers room of Scraper‘s fate, Carmichael says, “I wish I had a screenshot because the playwrights and Hollywood people were, jaws on the floor, gasping, ‘What?’ And all the Gawker people were like, ‘This happens all the time.’ “

Of course, Cook was not the first tech titan to exact revenge on Gawker....

Nor was he the last.

[ostensiblynone]

This was a short-lived respite. At the beginning of the third grade I looked around and noticed I was the only girl in my class regularly sporting skinned knees and dirty fingernails, and that it was no longer considered normal to hang with the boys like that. If I wanted to fit in, I would have to adjust accordingly. So I grew my hair long, got my ears pierced; I wore a jean skirt and even a headband for class picture day. I selected and developed a crush on an appropriate member of the boy band du jour. I stopped playing football in the park across the street and started putting teeny-bopper posters from J-14 on my wall. I mimicked the more conventional forms of girlhood on display around me and did my best to play the new part. In the fifth grade I was one of only two girls to make it onto a Little League roster, an accomplishment that was treated with such over-the-top approbation that it immediately acquired the undeniable stench of tokenism. It was obvious, even to a kid, that the highest honor I could strive for was to play in a sport that would systematically exclude me in a few short years, and that it was my responsibility to make everyone feel good by smiling and putting on the green polyester A’s uniform every Saturday in spite of this fact. What I wanted was something that didn’t exist yet: to be considered exceptional on my own terms, not theirs. I quit after one season.

—Something To Play For: Coming of age as a 90s "tomboy" | by Emma Carmichael | August 5th 2025

[therumpus]

I’ve been made to believe that a natural progression from a close encounter with death is to have a new perspective on things, maybe a steelier resolve. On some level, this must be what people mean when they ask me now how I’m doing, or if things are back to “normal” yet. Molly and I talk about how our version of “normal” has necessarily shifted, but that’s a functional blanket for an infinite number of things that have slowly moved around, not a sudden tectonic rupture. It’s not that deep, but neither of us are the same.

At The Awl, Emma Carmichael writes about still recovering and making sense of things after being hit by a truck earlier this year.

[fritfilter]

At some point I guess I got a little shook because I remember getting a drink with my editor, the hoodie'd genius Tommy Craggs, and telling him that I was starting to feel like I was "faking it." The "it" meant everything writerly: I'd gotten convinced by a bunch of anonymous cowards on the internet that I was, at least in part, playing at my knowledge, my authority, my ability, that I had every reason to quit sportswriting and the internet and find another career. Craggs, instead of attempting to convince me that I was deserving and talented, told me to shut the fuck up, because "everyone is faking it sometimes." It was a simple, hard reminder, but it served as a real moment of clarity for me that I come back to every now and then when I doubt myself or where I am in my career and at my age: no one knows everything. Everybody sweats sometimes.

Do You Have Impostor Syndrome? | The Hairpin

[transpondster]

Twitter bombphoto

[athleticscomplex]

And now, back to sports.

IS THIS OUR FIRST CRICKET POST?!

[athleticscomplex]

Another tribute to Roy.

[marjoriemeows-blog]

WARNING YALL, this is long and probably uninteresting to anyone who is not currently grappling with being a feminist who enjoys OF. feel free to skip dis and look at my pretty pictures instead woo yeah!

this article, titled "With the Ladies in the Back at an Odd Future Show," bothered me, so i wrote about it.

  "I went to the women’s room and, being, I guess, one of the few actual bitches in the audience, found no line."

one of the most awesome things about shows like this: you wait two minutes tops to pee. why is this something to complain about? i was in and out of the bathroom faster than my male friends.

"I’m drawn to Odd Future because they’ve done something that feels seismic in its influence, in a way that I think hip hop must have felt Back When. And they’ve done it without bending towards the simple rhyme schemes and easy misogyny of the mainstream rap I try to ignore until I get the chance to dance to it in a dim room. (“Party staff baffled, askin’ where her ass go/In my room, redefinin’ the meanin’ of black holes,” as Earl raps in “Earl Sweatshirt," carries a different weight for me than, say, “Gurl, shake dat Laffy Taffy.”)"

this part i agree with, although i think she meant as Earl Sweatshirt raps in "Earl." in certain songs the misogyny is so buried under clever lyrics that it takes a few listens before you can even think of being offended. other times it is completely clear (see: Bitch Suck Dick, Epar, Sarah, etc.)

 "In the back, the area Tyler had earlier fingered as the place where all the bloggers (or the “hipster-ass faggot-ass niggas”) were standing, there were actually women. We watched from a distance as a fan grabbed Tyler’s T-shirt so hard he ripped it, and as the young (mostly white) men raged to the young black men rapping about bitches and fags."

just to clarify, because there were lots of women near her she's saying that's where all of the women at the concert were. mmmkay

"I learned that being back here, with most of the other women, made me, already a bitch, more of a faggot-ass, because I was a new Odd Future listener standing in the back of the room and not a committed Odd Future listener pushing other committed Odd Future listeners in the front."

no one at this show called you a bitch because you're a woman other than you, just now, calling yourself one. if anyone called you a bitch it's because you were a new OF listener and it was obvious in your demeanor and the fact that you didn't enjoy being close to the stage. the "committed listeners" understand that he's joking and some "new listeners" maybe don't get that yet, which either means that they're extremely offended by the lyrics or enjoy them. enjoying music about rape while thinking that the lyrics are serious and that the people singing are actually rapists, murderers, misogynists, etc. is the dangerous part.

i think it's also important to note that many males were in the back too. after the show i spoke to a few guys who were surprised that my (male) friend and i had managed to stay towards the front. they said they jumped around a little but then comfortably enjoyed the rest of the show in the back, watching and singing along from a distance. the back was not just for the women and the old folks. it was for anyone who didn't want to risk getting hurt, which i can respect.

"This is the paradox of the Odd Future narrative, and of the people who so eagerly consume it. That includes me. The young men rap about bitches, and about fucking them and raping them and rubbing glass on their clitorises, but the “bitches” aren’t in their videos. They’re not onstage in any intentional way, as in an orchestrated moment at a Drake show. Unless their name is Syd and they’re in charge of every song and of the show’s momentum, the bitch in the verse exists in some theoretical plane where anything can be done to her, or it, and no one has to be hurt.

The words don’t match up with the spectacle."

again, i'm not sure what it is she's complaining about. OF raps about violence towards women but doesn't show it in their videos or live shows. this is a very very good thing. it would be better if they didn't rap about it at all, but then they would be an entirely different group and this post would be moot because their concert would not have been written about.

during the show whenever a male fan was lucky enough to safely make it onto the stage from crowd surfing, tyler and the rest of the guys would immediately shove them right back in. they really pushed these fans, it was definitely not a light tap. these guys would fall quickly back into the crowd. when one particular girl made it onto the stage and stayed for a while (for no reason), tyler attempted to talk her off the stage. when that failed and she continued to stand up there he came toward her with his hand out and gave her such a gentle push that she literally just walked away from his hand and remained on the stage. he looked embarrassed that he couldn't get her to leave, but he just kind of waited for her to get bored and stage dive. he didn't lay a hand on her again. he was kind of a gentleman about the fact that some random girl was interrupting his show for no reason other than she made it to the stage and didn't know what to do next. other than the fact that he started a "show your titties" chant. not so gentlemanly. but also should be completely expected by anyone who has heard an OF album.

"Young white men, Tyler masks strapped on, were clamoring for that right on Friday, while the women tried to find a place for themselves. That meant either dancing awkwardly onstage, because that’s what seems true to the form, or retreating to the back, amongst the stripper-bitch-faggot-asses, and watching passively from a distance."

UHHH. where to begin. OF gets a lot of shit because in their songs women are forced into this ridiculous virgin/whore dichotomy. every woman participating in our society faces this constantly. you're a slut or you're a prude, take your pick. what i don't understand is why, in an article written by someone trying to make an intelligent observation about how women are treated in this genre/field/movement/whatever you want to call it, this virgin/whore bullshit is laid out yet again. the majority of the crowd was male, yes, but i was definitely not the only woman in the crowd. we were not either a. onstage with our clothes off or b. in the back with earplugs in. we were few, but we were fucking everywhere.

TO CONCLUDE THE LONGEST POST I'VE EVER WRITTEN THAT NO ONE WILL READ AND EVERYONE WILL JUDGE ME FOR, i will tell you that the women at this show were indeed located in various places! here is a list of them:

waiting in line for the show for a couple hours

waiting in line for the bathroom for a couple minutes (yessss)

in the back, being/with the “hipster-ass faggot-ass bloggers"

onstage, being awesome (syd)

onstage, being awkward (blonde girl, frank ocean's unnecessary back-up dancers)

and last, but not nonexistent:

in the fucking crowd, bitch.