Emergency staff take over at Gawker: Leah Beckman steps up as editor-in-chief, Hamilton Nolan steps in as her deputy, and John Cook has agreed (apparently after some hesitation) to be the new executive editor. The International Business Times got hold of Cook’s reassuring memo to the troops: “I’m not going to blow smoke up anyone’s a— and say we’ve weathered the storm and hop on board we’re headed to victory. But we are all still here . . . and we have at our disposal—right now, at your fingertips—an immense and powerful machine for illuminating, skewering, praising, and changing the world around us.” So there you have it: At least in theory, Gawker’s still skewering.
If you missed the first installment this week of the New York Times Magazine's Disenfranchised, a series on attempts to roll back the Voting Rights Act, don't let it happen again.
The week of his memorial, Mary Norris, the New Yorker’s Comma Queen, remembers the writer James Salter as someone who had “very strong feelings about punctuation,” even if Norris herself “thought some of his commas were unnecessary” and said so in public.
Hillary Clinton is hiring from Buzzfeed now: her new social media director, Julie Whitaker, has just been poached from a position as managing editor of BFF.
Meanwhile, seems there's a lot more to style website Refinery29 than we thought.
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen is now a play, opening tomorrow at the Fountain Theatre in LA. One of the cast, Tina Lifford, describes the first day’s table read: “Everyone at the table knew we were signing on to dig into our own racist conditioning.”
