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From Stephen Elliott
Gawker reports on a London movie theater’s new tactic to keep moviegoers well behaved. The Prince Charles theater offers free movies to those who agree to don a black leotard, covering their entire body, and maintain order throughout the screening. If audience members begin to talk, use their phones, or behave in any other distracting manner, the “cinema ninjas” will attack.
...moreWe are no fans of Amazon here at The Rumpus. When we link to books we review, we link to small publisher websites or spdbooks.org or Powell’s. We’ve written about the online behemoth’s desire to avoid collecting sales taxes in California multiple times.
...more“What the Gawker ethos (i.e., the sneer) comes down to is this: Everyone is a phony, except presumably those writers at Gawker who labor tirelessly to point out this phoniness (think Holden Caulfield gone a little sour, and getting a little old).”
At Slate, Katie Roiphe critiques Gawker, providing an analysis of their mode of operations.
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Emily Gould may be the queen of oversharing—but you’re the one reading this review of her book.Did you know that GQ recently published a groundbreaking story which questions “the official line” on the 1999 bombings — supposedly committed by Chechen rebels — that Vladimir Putin used as a springboard to put himself in charge of Russia for the last decade?
...moreThis week, the book blogs are obsessed.
They really, really want to tell you everything about William Vollman and Thomas Pynchon and their new wondrous masterpieces of weird. I love both authors and look forward to reading both books, but this week, the blogs talked so incessantly about them that I will make this roundup a Vollman and Pynchon free zone, with one exception.
...moreFollowing Stephen Elliot’s post http://bit.ly/32Mt06, I began covering Dan Baum’s Twitter story relatively late in the game,
three days after his first tweet about being fired from The New Yorker.
May 8, 10:46am: “People often ask why I left the New Yorker.
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Sheila McClear is blogging about being laid off from Gawker, at Gawker. “I was lucky to spend a year being a smart ass for a living, although it would be irrationally hubristic to view Internet news aggregating and the snark-blogging fishbowl as anything more than a Dadaist experiment.”
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