★★★★ Even through the blinds, to eyes without contact lenses, the world was newly brightened all around—not inherently bright, with dawn still under the pall of the gentle storm, but evenly bright, the gray-blue light of the sky shining back from the roofs and the balcony rails and the parked cars. The snow traced the branching, multiplying twigs of the still-bare trees, narrowing yet holding on all the way out to the tips, and it stuck to the sides of balcony railings, for now. None of it would last; the streets and sidewalks had remained black and clear. Things moved on their usual paths. The flakes were almost too tiny to see individually in the early dimness, but they hid the river and brought the city down to the near and middle distance. An upright dark line floated in the sky, like a hawk perched on nothing. It took the binoculars to sort it out: It was the center post atop a water tower, left alone on a blank background as the conical roof below had gone white and vanished. For years the tank roof must have been in view, peeking out of its rectangular bulkhead on the apartment building, unnoticeable until it disappeared. Outside, after the luminous blue had gone over to gray, there were still prettily swirling little flakes. Forty-five minutes later, they could be felt but barely seen. Warmth from the ground had carried up the vertical pickets of the low fences around the tree-planting beds, melting the snow on the plain flat top rail at intervals, so the surviving humps of white marched along in rhythm with the pattern of the city’s approved Type “B” tree guard design. A bit of cloud caught on the spire of the Empire State Building, giving a measurement to the blurry sky. The morning snow was due to be over, yet still there were little flakes showing against dark backgrounds. The barber ran clippers through the neglected thatch of hair around the ears and when it had fallen away, in the mix of daylight and shop light, a little unambiguous spot of silver stayed there, bright and sure as a dime. Someone came in the door and the air that had followed them made the warmth of the hot towel ebb quickly. The snow had truly stopped now below the Flatiron, and patches of sunshine and blue were glimmering into being, yet back uptown the gray had settled in again, and a few new minuscule flakes were on the air. One might somehow have veered between the buttons of the flannel shirt, a ghostly fleck of sharp cold. The ears, meanwhile, were getting chilled steadily. Some of the accumulated snow had slipped away but it still clung to the face of the television on the luxury roof deck. Snowflakes blew more thickly for a while, then subsided as the sky lightened. When it darkened again, what was falling looked like rain. Or was it snow? An arm thrust out the window caught little bits of it in the wrist hairs—some sort of granules, more like snow to look at but falling straight down. At last that went away, too. The trees had lost their tracery, and the furniture of the luxury roof deck, its white covering worn away, lay scattered like debris. The water-tower roof was dark again, with one last streak of white on it. The edge of a metal vent gleamed, and windows cast bright spots on neighboring bricks. Every fugitive bit of light might be the last one. A ray of sun sparkled on lumpy ice on the neighbor’s balcony, crossed over to cut through the living room, and hit the inmost corner of the children’s bunk bed. It lit the magnetic words in disarray on the blank side of the filing cabinet, “she will was us want as has by sun.” That beam thinned as the sun began to descend behind a patch of cloud. Not far below the cloud were the new towers downriver, waiting their turn to shut it off. Sundown proper was colorless and indistinct. There was light, and then it went dark. The children set their alarm: before the next sunrise, they would be up looking for the lunar eclipse.

The Awl was born of the following thoughts: What if there were a website with a wealth of resonant, weird, important, frightening and amusing bits of news and ideas? What if it weren’t so invested in giving you the “counterintuitive take” that it actually stopped making sense? What if it were run by people who actually didn’t care about the way we all allegedly live now?

We believed that there was a great big Internet out there on which we all lived, and that too often its curios and oddities were ignored in favor of the most obvious and easy stories. We believed that there was an audience of intelligent readers who were poorly served by being delivered those same stories in numbing repetition to the detriment of their reading diet. We believed that there was no topic unworthy of scrutiny, so long as it was approached from an intelligent angle. We believed that there was no such thing as too long or too short for the Internet, that stories should use as many words as they needed to be to say what they had to say, and no more. We believed we could make a place where these organizing principles would find a community that felt the same way.

How’d we do?

Well, we’re dead now, so maybe not great, but we went at it a lot longer than any of us thought we would at the beginning, so maybe better than expected. What I can say is that every idea we had about what the site should be was both fundamentally correct and gloriously wrong, and that learning by doing was the most fascinating way to figure out what our creation was actually for.

I have described listening to the last two weeks of tributes to The Awl as like getting to go to your funeral without actually having to die. The most interesting part of it for me was finding out how many different things The Awl represented to people: For some it was an incubator of talent, a place that took a chance on those lacking experience and helped them find a way to express themselves without exploiting them for traffic. For some it was a home to curious and unusual stories that were unlikely to be found anywhere else. For some it was a site to stretch out on a skill they weren’t able to exercise in other areas. For some it was simply a space where they finally found their sensibilities reflected in a way that they didn’t even know they were missing before they discovered it.

The most amazing thing about The Awl was watching the delight everyone took in being a part of it. From commenters to contributors to quiet readers, it was almost as if there was an outpouring of joy each time someone discovered that they were a member of the tribe. I am thankful for every single person who had a hand in this website, even the people who turned up once a month to see what had happened since their last visit. To the extent that anyone made The Awl, everyone made The Awl, and I am grateful to each of you.

Any job, if it’s any good, should start off giving you the feeling that you can’t believe you get to do it every day. Most jobs, even the good ones, end up filling you with the feeling that you can’t believe you have to do it again each morning. I can still remember how much I couldn’t wait to fall asleep each night so I could hurry up and get to the next day and start doing the site once more. It took an awfully long time before that buzz wore off, and I can’t imagine ever again finding something where the joy constantly sprang from the sheer anarchy and mystery and lack of rules and not knowing what was going to happen next. It has been one of the great privileges of my life.

If you’re willing to sacrifice you never have to compromise, and I’m proud to say we did very little compromising over the last nine years. That does unfortunately mean we did a lot of sacrificing, and after a while that becomes unsustainable. The surprise shouldn’t be that The Awl didn’t last, it should be that it lasted as long as it did. And now it’s dead. The archives will remain up, but I hope they degrade in the way everything on the Internet does and that eventually they sink into the vast sea of undiscoverable content so that a decade from now one of you can look at a young person who is ignoring you while she stares at her phone and say, “You can’t find it anymore, but the most amazing thing on the Internet was The Awl. It’s impossible to believe something that incredible existed.” And since everything will have disappeared no one will be able to dispute it. If we wait around long enough our legacy will be legend. We’ll secretly know the truth, but it won’t make any difference then, will it?

Thank you, in advance, for lying about how amazing we were. And thank you, right now, for your attention. You will never know how much it meant.

Photo: Balk

Image: David & Margie Hill via Flickr

JARED, who has a black eye, is looking for an Overton window to jump out of, as his DAUGHTER is happily doling out the Girl Scout cookies she sold earlier this term. The STAFF is lining up to receive their orders. It’s the most crowded the White House has been since that one time BARACK OBAMA invited SANTANA over to celebrate MICHELLE’s birthday, and JOE BIDEN ended up singing the Rob Thomas parts of “Smooth.” EVERYONE, even staff who’ve been fired, even staff who’ve resigned in disgrace, even staff who don’t usually come in on Wednesdays, is here to pick up cookies. NO ONE is much talking about the State of the Union, so little do they care about the state of the Union and so focused are they on gobbling up Thin Mints.

HOPE HICKS [to NO ONE]: She sent me a paragraph-long text earlier. I couldn’t get into it right then. I mean, a fucking paragraph? What is this, The Supreme Court? I was like, I will get you the promotion code as soon as I get back to my desk. Like how hard is that for you to fucking get? I’m not glued to my desk all fucking—

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [from behind the card table GENERAL MATTIS set up for her]: If you have your payment cards out and ready, the line will move much faster.

[HOPE HICKS, SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS and OMAROSA get in line behind GARY COHN. They’re negatively bonding with each other by wondering whether TRUMP tan tans or spray tans. KELLYANNE CONWAY interrupts them. She’s wearing Philadelphia Eagles earrings and bragging about how she is going to the Super Bowl this weekend. But she’s lying. Lie-bragging. She’s typing “lie-bragging—use?” into her Notes app.]

KELLYANNE CONWAY [shoving her phone in HOPE HICKS’s face]: Look—he’s drenching a hoagie in lighter fluid and then fire-bombing the Airbnb he’s staying at. Just like that extremely non-problematic movie the President doesn’t know exists.

[JARED can’t find an Overton window to jump through so he just idles next to the line. Eventually he sits down on the floor. There’s crosstalk as SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS says she has never known a grown person to sit on the ground as often as JARED does. HOPE HICKS asks EVERYONE how old they think JARED is. NO ONE knows.]

GARY COHN [whispering]: Jared, double cut me.

[JARED scrunches his forehead because he doesn’t know what double cut means.]

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [sensibly]: You cut Gary on line and then he cuts you.

GARY COHN [neo-liberally]: That way, I keep my spot on line and you get to skip ahead of everyone behind me.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [conveying to her colleagues that while she may not have attended the State of the Union, she did check Twitter this morning]: It’s the perfect metaphor for the New America.

KELLYANNE CONWAY [reverting back to a strong Philly accent because she’s slightly agitated]: Oh my fucking God. I forgot you all say “on line” instead of “in line.”

[There’s sexist crosstalk, even from the women, as GARY COHN marvels at KUSHNER DAUGHTER’s ability to multitask. GARY COHN takes a phone call.]

GARY COHN [into his phone]: Okay, so look. I agree, but the world isn’t going to actually burn. It’s going to keep heating up. Gradually.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [to JARED]: Congratulations, Dad. You bought the most boxes.

JARED [pulling the order list up to his eyes and recognizes that STEVE BANNON wrote down his name and the number 50 down in the Trefoil category]: This isn’t my handwriting. [JARED realizes his DAUGHTER already knows it’s STEVE BANNON’s handwriting.] What’s my prize?

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [powerfully]: It had been walk-in privileges with Grandpa. But we can’t restore yours per the terms of Steve’s resignation so—[KUSHNER DAUGHTER hands JARED a coin. STAFF gasps because they presume it’s a Bitcoin.]

GARY COHN [still into his phone]: We don’t even notice it. Until one day—[GARY COHN makes a poof gesture with his hands.] Hold on, Joe. [He takes the coin from JARED and examines it theatrically.] This thing is as real as Chronic fatigue syndrome. [He unwraps the coin and bites it. It’s leftover Hanukkah gelt. GARY COHN returns to his phone call and closes the deal.] I voted for your da—your uncle? Your great uncle. I voted for your great uncle. In 1960? Wow. I guess I didn’t vote for your great uncle. Okay, well let’s not let that distract us. But this was a good talk, and I look forward—[JOE KENNEDY III hangs up on GARY COHN, who looks around to make sure no one noticed, and then receives his cookies.]

KELLYANNE CONWAY [truthfully, for once]: Those aren’t Girl Scout cookies. Those are Entenmann’s.

KUSHNER DAUGHTER [conscientiously]: They were sitting there in the grocery store and I felt bad for them.

JARED [to himself]: They’re donuts. They’re not even cookies.

[NO ONE’s even mad about it. When you’re a plutocrat, you can get away with anything including disguising Entenmann’s as Girl Scout cookies. Besides, the way she transformed the boxes, hot gluing the photoshopped Girl Scout logos onto the store bought cookie and donut boxes, seemed pretty ingenious to this bunch.]

HOPE HICKS [pointing to the girl in a wheelchair on her box of cookies]: Do you think this is an actual Girl Scout or, like, an actress?

GARY COHN [avuncular, to JARED]: So, do you want to tell me how you got your black eye?

JARED [quietly]: I ate asparagus.

GARY COHN [moving capital seamlessly across international borders via a few text messages] And then you got a whiff of your own piss, and it made you pass out and you fell into the porcelain. Say no more; I understand completely.

[JARED nods as a loud motor revs. It’s obviously STEVE BANNON, loaded and operating heavy machinery. IVANKA trails him in. They cut to the beginning of the line but don’t even bother with the double cut charade.]

STEVE BANNON [driving a riding lawn mower that was manufactured overseas]: Who doesn’t love a cookie?

SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS [blandly]: Steve, what have you been up to?

IVANKA [showing up to work on a Wednesday for the first time in her entire life]: Besides brewing his own mead?

[KUSHNER DAUGHTER sighs to herself, takes a good, hard look at her six years’ worth of life choices, and decisively tears up her cookie list. She exits, stage left, to star in her own spinoff series on Freeform (formerly ABC Family), which will air, she hopes, sometime before the midterm elections. EVERYONE ELSE waits until she’s gone. Then they pillage the cookies like the pirates they are. Even JARED rips open a box and eats gluten for the first time since he campaigned in Michigan that one time last year.]

I remember the first time I held my daughter’s hand. She was just minutes old, and I knew nothing about babies, so I was impressed to find that even a newborn could hold on. “Look, she’s holding my hand!” I exclaimed to myself, to the air, to anyone in the room. That she could cling to me and me to her was the most natural thing in the world, it turned out. It comes to us from the unknown depths of our biology, pre-birth. Our first skill is hanging on, no practice necessary. What I didn’t know yet was that learning to let go would also come easily, maybe naturally, to her. That she would master it quicker than me.

I know every time I’ve let go of Zelda, in fact, what’s actually happened is that she let go of me, and I simply allowed it, overcoming my natural inclinations to cling, to hold tight. I felt her pull away from me as she stood up on her fat wobbly legs to walk for the first time, and I worried that she would fall. She did, of course, fall down, and though she cried real tears of failure and frustration, and though she looked over at me, she didn’t reach for me. She didn’t need me, not right that second. She told me then what I didn’t want, couldn’t stand to hear, not yet, not yet: “Sometimes, I need you; sometimes I do not.”

I let her arms disentangle from my own in a swimming pool, her confidence in the floaters strapped to her was so much stronger than my own. She floated; she floats.

I remember almost nothing of the first day I took her to school, at 16 months old, beyond the image of her little turquoise dress fluttering in the wind as she took her teacher’s hand and walked away from her father and me without a word of goodbye. The rest of the day, beyond her walking away, the gate banging shut, closing me off, sending me home, is a blur. Many of my best and most acute memories of her are this: she turned away from me.

Just this morning I took her to school a few minutes early, had a conference with her teacher while she played with her friends in the other room. “Come say goodbye, don’t leave without saying goodbye,” she said, looking over her shoulder at me as we split up. Twenty minutes later, armed with the overwhelming joy of her progress report, I wandered across the hall, to where she was now seated with 10 other children, doing a puzzle, where the goal was to put together a bear, only five pieces, dressed in a tutu. She had the head and the feet already locked in, and was puzzling over the middle section when I came to her. “I came to say goodbye,” I knelt down to her, touching her face. I saw her little shoulder shrug me away, her concentration has improved: just last year, her teacher told me in the conference, any interruption broke her away from her work. Now, she is focused, she was focused on the bear, not me. What she requested just minutes before—to see me once more before I left—she no longer wanted or needed. Only I needed it.

People have told me since Zelda was born that she is so much like me, but what I know they mean is this: she looks like me, the way I looked like my own mother. She is not, in fact, like me at all, as far as I can tell. I know she’s only four years old, but it’s so obvious, so pointed and so true. Where I was and am anxious and overly emotional, turned in upon myself and grave, always worrying about what will happen next, she is living just for now, she is talking her way through every day, singing and brave. She isn’t holding back, she is not afraid. I clung to my mother geographically and emotionally until I was nearly 30. I wasn’t honest or open with her, I was merely vigilant. Worried. Worrying. Zelda tells me what she thinks of me every day: comments on my new lipstick, my bad hair, the fact that I seem to be in a bad mood one morning. She doesn’t worry about me because I am less to worry over than my mother was, but also because she doesn’t worry the way that I did, she isn’t like me. She sees strengths in people where I have tended to find weakness.

We look at our newborns, our babies, our toddlers, and we see fragility. We see them hanging on by a thread, felled easily in our minds at every turn. And this danger is, of course, real. My job has been, these past four years, to keep just this one person alive. It will be my job, presumably, until the day that I die. I cherish it, it tortures me, keeps me awake at night when she has a cold. I held back tears as I watched her bravely endure three tiny stitches in her chin, singing “Do Re Mi” as we went. She feared pain, I feared the kind of loss she doesn’t even know about yet. “I’m okay!” is the first thing she says when she falls down now: her job, she sees, is to reassure me. Where I see fragility, there is a quiet and growing strength. There is steel in the veins running through every hope, every tumble off the jungle gym, every waking moment painful to me only because it is both so terrifying and so beautiful.

Letting go of my own mother—really letting go—is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Nothing had prepared me to walk away when I did, and it stung me afterwards to think about it for years. Whether it was hard for her to let me let go, I can’t really say. But the hardest thing I’ve seen Zelda do recently is learning how to write, which is frustrating and tedious. “One of best things to have happened to me,” I told her, “is learning how to read and write.” I don’t remember doing it, really, and I’m sure that it was just as seemingly impossible for me as it seems insurmountable some days for her. But what I said was true: the best refuge I have found in this life is to read and to write, and watching another human being acquire that skill is overwhelming. “You need to practice doing things that are hard,” I told her. “It’s hard because it’s worth it.” Not everything that’s hard is worth it, I know that now, though I hope she has a few more years before she learns this herself. And when she lets go of me, I know she’ll have had lots of practice.

Holding on is what we do, it’s the easiest thing in the world. Letting go is what we must do. And it is not a mark of my confidence in myself that enables me to let go sometimes, but of my confidence in her.

The Parent Rap is an endearing column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting.

As the end rapidly approaches it seems as good a time as any to unburden myself of some of the ideas that I’ve wanted to see on the site but that for one reason or another never came to fruition. Shortly before he bolted Choire Sicha delivered his own list of unwritten work and reading it now in comparison to mine it is pretty clear (if his leaving didn’t already make it obvious) which one of us was the smart one. That said, I still feel like some of these things could have turned out okay, so I will share them with you now. I am about to be out of work so if you wind up using one of them at your organization please send me some money.

Subway Astrology

I basically already dumped this one off here, but briefly: “The premise was essentially that you could forecast someone’s weekly commute in the same way astrology forecasts offer, uh, guidance for their personal and professional week. Your subway sign would be your usual station of origin and then the most common transfer or destination of your trip.” It never happened and then the entire transit system fell apart. Coincidence? Who can say?

The Journal of the American Mozzarella Stick

The idea here was that I would go to various bars around the city (and, if we could get sponsorship, THE WORLD—or, you know, Westchester and stuff, the part of Connecticut easily reached by train, etc.) and review the mozzarella sticks on the menu. This was an idea that was doomed to fail even in its conception, because if you know anything about mozzarella sticks you know that except for the places that make those horrible square monstrosities they are essentially all identical. It would basically be an exercise in reviewing the same thing every time, but whereas Tom Scocca can do that every day and produce magic with each entry at best I could aspire to the kind of low poetry that only occasionally graces my prose, and only then by accident. I have subsequently made some horrible lifestyle changes that would have prevented me from fulfilling any of the duties this task would require, but if I somehow had got it together to spend my days drinking in bars and shoveling mozzarella sticks down my throat as a professional I would be long dead and none of this would be my problem anymore, so it is something of a missed opportunity.

Golden Eras We Never Realized We Were In

When David, Choire and I started The Awl it was in reaction to the Internet of 2009, which at the time seemed like a barren wasteland in which the earth had been set alight and then salted to ensure nothing ever again emerged from it but in retrospect seems like it was written by Shakespeare, designed by da Vinci and aimed at an audience with at least a minimum education level of third grade and a corresponding attention span. Plus there was no such thing as autoplay videos, do you even remember how amazing that was? Anyway, the point is that everything you think is terrible at the time will eventually be some sort of halcyon period at which you look back longingly. Matt Buchanan and John Herrman took this nugget of a complaint from my litany of constant whining and made an incredible list of things which were scorned in their day but were so much better than what came after. We wound up not doing it because there was no way you could pull it off without hurting a lot of feelings, and Matt and John, unlike me, are good people, but a couple of the entries (“Craig Kilborn’s ‘Daily Show,’” “HuffPo sideboob,” “Inside.com”) should give you an idea of what we were going for.

Pussy

At a certain moment (in the ’90s? Slightly later? Nailing the chronology would be part of the piece) it became generally acknowledged by American society that the word we would all use for female genitalia was “pussy.” No one was entirely happy with it but everyone conceded the point. Why did this happen? What brought about its acceptance in popular culture? I have my own ideas and I am sure you do too but there is no way this piece would not be littered with minefields, which is probably why Silvia Killingsworth told me it was a great idea and then let it slowly disappear from the list of possibilities. I am super easy to work around in that once I get praised for something I stop thinking about it, so that is probably why I let this one go. Silvia’s smart in a million ways and this is the easiest one to point to.

The Rural Purge

Because of my belief that up until very recently all change in this country was driven by television, one of my idiot ideas is that you can draw a line under the old America and the one that came after roughly in the space where the Rural Purge happened. (I have a similar theory about ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’ being the program that taught everyone to suck by encouraging them to venerate and elevate society’s most disgusting and grasping individuals which, uh, history seems to have borne out, and could probably still be easily assembled.) Anyway, the Wikipedia entry is already pretty thorough so there didn’t seem like a real pressing need for this one.

The Awl News Quiz

I have a terrible memory, in the sense that there is very little I ever forget and it is constantly at the front of my brain as if it is happening at that moment. (If you see an older man walking the streets, seemingly in a daze, muttering “Oh, you dumb motherfucker” at himself under his breath you are watching me simultaneously recall something awful I said or did last week, last month, last year, in high school, during day care, etc.) Several years ago it became clear to me that the growing barrage of content assaulting us at every second (and it started long before what is happening right now, you just weren’t informed about it by your phone every five minutes) was making it difficult for even someone with my horribly burdensome talent for recall to keep chronological sense of. So the idea behind The Awl News Quiz was that each week you would get 20 or so stories from the last decade and you would need to organize them in the order in which they occurred. Here are some of the items I have in my notes:

Zayn Malik leaves One Direction
Cecil the Lion
Germany opens up to refugees
Beyonce drops Beyonce
Miracle on the Hudson
Chilean miners
BuzzFeed aggregates dress
Christopher Hitchens dies
Russia annexes Crimea
Marissa Mayer joins Yahoo
Sony hack
Gowanus dolphin
People make fun of Jon Ronson for suggesting maybe everyone shouldn’t be such shits on the Internet
Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” speech is revealed
Bill de Blasio kills that woodchuck

There are some obvious ones in there to place first and last but, as you can see, the degree of difficulty comes when you try to remember what happened before what else. I had planned to tech this out by having one of those things where you could use your mouse to drag and move things into position, but other concerns were always more pressing and I am not sure how you would do it now that everyone only reads the Internet on their computer phones. It seems like the screen would be too small to make it all work.

The Nihilist Advice Corner

When a popular singer died relatively young recently I was talking to a friend of mine and I said that one of the strangest things about getting old was discovering that when someone died unexpectedly you didn’t so much feel sad as a sense of relief for them, that everything was over for them now and they didn’t have to worry about anything anymore. “That’s got nothing to do with old age,” said my friend, “that’s just depression.” Well, people of good faith can disagree. Anyway, Heather Havrilesky totally reimagined what the advice column could be when she did Ask Polly for this site. Choire Sicha briefly had his own hand in it with The Concessionist, although in true Awl fashion he abandoned it as soon as it proved popular. My own idea for an advice column was that each request for counsel would be met with the same wisdom: “It doesn’t matter. We’re all going to die anyway. Nothing you do will make a difference in the long run.” Depression or JUST BEING REAL? This would kind of be a one-note joke, repeated ad infinitum, and I was already sort of doing that with almost everything else I wrote. Also the idea of being bombarded by the tragic yearnings and broken dreams of everyone who wrote in was too much to bear for one of my delicate sensibilities, so I wisely let it go. But let me just tell you now, whatever you are wondering about, it doesn’t matter. We’re all going to die anyway. I hope you find that a little freeing.

Media Masthead Olympics

This one was mostly a data-gathering exercise. We would scan the mastheads of 50 or so top publications and see who had the most appearances in “contributing editor” and other name-only positions so that we could crown the top competitors in the games of brand-building and title-getting. This was another one that would only wind up hurting feelings so we never got it together, and now there are neither 50 top publications or mastheads to find in them. Oh well.

Thanks For Shutting Up

There is some irony in this one being on this list, but here was how I pitched it: “Everybody jokes about the ‘where are they now’ files but what about the people who did what they did and then decided that while they COULD put out another album/write another book/do another movie or series or etc. they didn’t really NEED to or they didn’t have enough to say to make it interesting to them so they just weren’t going to do it. Let’s celebrate THEM for once. I am thinking, weirdly, of Billy Joel here, who just stopped writing songs even though he probably could have kept doing an album a year (and almost certainly should have stopped long before he did, but that’s another story). But there are people who were like ‘I am successful enough and I have nothing more to say so I won’t,’ and that is a decision that should be encouraged.” Of everything here I still think this one has the most promise.

The Sadiad

This was a terrible idea that I knew wouldn’t work the second I thought of it. It was just an epic poem about how depressing it is to be human. Yes, I will see your eye roll and raise you a [jerking off motion]. Mark Bibbins, the Awl’s secret weapon, would have quit as soon as he saw it, and he would have been right to. I’m sorry I even included it here.

The Doody Car

My white whale. The story I wanted more than any other. The dream I never had fulfilled. The one that Awl editor Carrie Frye, whose genius for making things happen was only matched by her genius for coming up with things that should happen, was always wise enough to never assign out. The idea is incredibly simple: We all know the doody car. It’s the car on the subway that seems to be the perfect one to take because there are only two or three people in it, and it is not until you step inside that you remember if you see an empty car it’s because there is no air conditioning or it reeks of doody. But no matter how bad the smell there are always two or three people sitting in there as if it is perfectly fine. The Doody Car story, then, involves finding out who those people are. Do they have olfactory damage? Are they so highly evolved in their mental state that they are above conventional odor? Who are they? Where are they from? Where are they going? Etc. The problems that I think kept this story from ever happening were that a) it would be cruel to send anyone onto these cars for the purpose of investigation and b) even though this would clearly be a parody of classic “New Yorkers are tough and put up with more than anyone else” stories, if someone were determined to construe it as an item making light of the homeless they certainly could and now the entire Internet is people determined to deliberately read things the wrong way and make a big deal about it on the poison dispensary we call social media, so it doesn’t seem worth it. Sorry, Doody Car story. You were too beautiful for this world. I will think of you every time I see an empty car roll by.

Photo: Ann Wuyts

Last Friday, just after 2pm, the financial journalist Felix Salmon posted a blog titled “Why I’m Leaving Fusion.” It was a very short post indeed:

So, that is a provocative shruggie, is it not? At the very least it implies a cheeky “I don’t know (I know)” along with a dash of womp-womp (“not of my own volition!”). Salmon was most recently “working to develop and launch a new project that will explore the world of philanthropy, activism, social entrepreneurship, and spotlighting those working to try and make the world a better place,” on Fusion’s Rise Up “social impact” team, and before that, he had been a Senior Editor since the time he joined Fusion in 2014. For years, there has been rampant speculation among media types (loser dorks) about how much money the “hybrid television and digital media outlet” was paying to poach high-profile digital editors. But two weeks ago, the growing resentment within the Gizmodo Media Group newsroom toward Salmon and his significant salary—which because of a clerical error in 2016 had become an open secret in the newsroom—boiled over.

On January 17, in GMG’s media chat slack channel, Salmon revealed his money privilege in a way that didn’t sit well with some. “As someone who just installed a new kitchen in a rental at my own expense, I can say that decorating rentals is a good and sensible thing to do,” Salmon wrote. It seemed no one else in the room could relate—some took issue with the distinction between “decorating” and “renovating,” while others could not fathom having the money to do either. Salmon explained the sense in spending “3 months’ rent on making your permanent rental a much nicer place to live” thusly: “if you amortize 3 months’ rent over another 6 years, it works out at a pretty small monthly increase for a much nicer place.” Technically he is correct! Practically speaking, this is not the best thing to discuss in a room full of smart alecks who know they’re making a fraction of what you do:

Salmon dug into his economically sound but nonetheless tone-deaf point: “It’s cheaper than paying more rent to rent a nicer place. It’s much, much cheaper than buying. It’s still not cheap. But it does make financial sense, if what you want is, say, a dishwasher.” Tipped off to the exciting chat going on, several staffers joined in to make winking reference to their own financial status as self-pitying millennials who will never be able to afford houses because of avocados and baby boomers:

(n.b. Salmon LOVES talking about the the rent-vs.-buy calculation and rightly insisted buying is “vastly more expensive.”)

“I had a termite swarm this year, so termites caked my floor,” chimed in one person. Another uploaded a photo of a hole in their apartment ceiling. “Which is worse, a hole in the ceiling or a hole in the floor?” asked another. “My old place had a corner with rotting boards where anything smaller than a ping-pong ball would fall through.”

(At some point, Salmon left the chat, but the wonderment continued.)

The next day on Twitter, Salmon posted a tweet reassuring his followers he DOES NOT have enough money to buy a $10 million villa. Presumably he was implying he doesn’t have the twenty percent down payment (about $1.96 million), and any rumors of his wealth have been greatly exaggerated.

I just checked my bank account, and this tweet is FALSE https://t.co/OXaL87lYtz

— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) January 18, 2018

It is worth remembering that Salmon was not alone in the Fu$ion hiring $pree of 2014-15. Alexis Madrigal, Kevin Roose, Anna Holmes, Dodai Stewart, and Hillary Frey are a few of the big-name hires Fusion “[showered] with TV money, doling out salaries around the $300,000 and $500,000 range for marquee hires,” reported Kara Bloomgarden-Smoke in WWD. But Salmon was the last vestige of the high rollers once Fusion and Gizmodo Media Group were consolidated in 2016, triggering Fusion layoffs—the newer media brand ceding redundancies to the established and more widely read ex-Gawker brands.

Would there have been similar resentment toward any of the others had they remained and their salaries accidentally revealed, or was there something particular to Salmon that made him an obvious bugbear? It’s only half a moot point, since most of them had already departed for other ventures, either having not had their contracts renewed or perhaps having seen the post-text writing on the wall—that Fusion hadn’t quite found its footing. What became of a “genuine attempt to reach a new demographic by a new kind of media company”? What was Fusion in the end? And why, especially if no one could really answer without brand-mediated digital mediasphere jargonspeak, did Felix Salmon stay on?

Way back in 2015, when everyone was still trying to wrap their heads around what Fusion even was, Salmon wrote a post that he could then conveniently send out to anyone who ever asked him to “pick his brain” over coffee about their budding nosedive into a career in journalism. Titled, “To all the young journalists asking for advice,” it made the point that journalism was no longer a place to make good money:

If all you care about is the great journalism, then, well, go out and find great stories to tell, and tell those stories in a compelling manner. You’ll always be able to find somewhere willing to publish them, even if they pay little or nothing for the privilege of doing so.

On the other hand, if you’re more career-oriented, and want a good chance at a well-paid middle-class lifestyle down the road, I don’t really know what to tell you. Except that the chances of getting there, if you enter the journalism profession today, have probably never been lower.

First of all, no one ever went into journalism because it was going to be a lucrative vocation. With the exception of perhaps the eighties/nineties heyday of magazines (and of what I affectionately call Tina Brown Money™, which GOD BLESS), one must always question the motives of anyone who goes into the business of truth-telling for serious cash. (Then along came Isaac Lee in 2015 with his endearing pot of gold, which he defended to the New York Times—in 2018 it doesn’t seem all so defensible.) But as usual, Felix Salmon has a point—albeit an obvious one, which is that journalists used to be able to make a decent living and now they mostly can’t (which is precisely why the recent push for unionizing across various media companies is unquestionably a good thing). But it’s rich, isn’t it, coming from someone who has been very lucky to make an uncommonly good living at it—quite a slam of the door from a blogger making think-tank (or really, television) money.

So yes, bloggers typically don’t make a lot of money, but Salmon is not your average guy banging shit out on the Internet; he had very good timing and a good deal of boldness. After years of web 1.0 blogging on his own WordPress site, plus stints at NewsBridge (don’t ask) and Euromoney (ditto) as a specialist in Latin American markets, Salmon caught the attention of the flashy economist and housing-crisis Cassandra Nouriel Roubini in 2007 by asking him to lunch to discuss the flaws in Roubini’s book about financial crises. Roubini ended up hiring him as a blogger at a rate of $10,000 a month; the gig was short-lived, but it raised his profile. Salmon then jumped to Condé Nast Portfolio to blog for the magazine’s website, largely due to the notice of Wall Street editor Jesse Eisinger.

I first encountered Salmon in the Portfolio offices, on the few occasions he came in to meet with my boss, the editor-in-chief, Joanne Lipman. He was one of many big-deal hires that year in the media world, where Portfolio was one of the closest-watched magazine launches in modern memory. Gawker (and Nick Denton and Hamilton Nolan in particular) was obsessed with cataloging its failures and missteps. But by Denton and Nolan’s accounts, Salmon and media columnist Jeff Bercovici’s contributions to Portfolio were some of the best parts about it. (Indeed, one of the more fun-in-retrospect blogs was Salmon’s post on the ins and outs of Gawker’s payroll in the old pay-per-pageview days, in which he calculated Gawker staffers’ earnings using publicly available traffic data and Nick Denton’s transparent pay rates). But it was “not until the economy crashed in 2008,” wrote Noreen Malone wrote in a glowing 2012 profile of Salmon for The New Republic,

did Salmon’s vigorous, discursive, finger-pointing blog become a must-read. What set him apart from every other journalist eager to take on Wall Street was that, with his high-end taste and appreciation for the finer things, he easily could have been one of the finance guys he was ripping. In post-crash New York, Salmon managed the magic trick of damning the excesses of a bygone era while simultaneously provoking nostalgia for them.

Portfolio had its moments, and I guess I would link to them here if I could remember them, and if the archives were better preserved, but Salmon was very much in the right place at the right time covering the right financial disaster with the right attitude. Besides which, the main thing “Fort Polio” was best known for in the world of magazines was its huge bankroll—$100 million. As Hamilton Nolan wrote in his obit for the mag:

It’s highly likely we’ll never see another glossy magazine launch of its size again. It was the last gasp of the “Spare No Expense” model. The magazine hired the best business writers in the country, and paid them huge salaries (for relatively little output). It aimed to be the New Yorker of business, and the plan—as far as you could tell—was to bust its way into the territory of Fortune, Forbes, and Businessweek through sheer glossiness.

Salmon confirmed over the phone last Friday that he signed a contract with Portfolio for $100,000, a number that would later metastasize once Reuters showed interest in hiring him. After a bit back and forth, Salmon managed to get competing raises and offers from both parties, ultimately choosing to leave Portfolio a month before it folded rather spectacularly in April of 2009. He continued to blog at Reuters, where he eventually became part of a team dedicated (along with millions of dollars and presumably several salary bumps) to developing a digital news product in the form of a “consumer-facing website” called Reuters Next. (The details of the venture had always been extremely murky.) During the end-of-blogging news crisis of web 2.0, someone with Salmon’s pedigree and enthusiasm for wild west of digital media was just the right fit for that sort of blurry project. Plus, one imagines after ten plus years of daily finance blogging, you get tired of it—time for broader horizons.

Fast forward to April of 2014, half a year after Reuters Next was shuttered, when Salmon announced that he was hired away from Reuters by Fusion—another blurry digital media product. (Salmon claims, and I believe, not to remember exactly what he was making over various years at the former.) He did this via Medium post, titled, “Why I’m Joining Fusion,” wherein he famously claimed, “the core of what I do at Fusion will be post-text.” A few weeks later, Salmon wrote a very smart and very much textual post for Vox (why not Fusion dot TV??) arguing for greater transparency around salaries. “Very few people like to talk about how much money they make,” he writes, “especially not people who earn a lot of money.” Tell me about it! My man only wears custom-made shirts! No, literally, please tell me.

This is a screenshot from that Vox piece!

Hamilton Nolan lightly taunted Salmon in response:

Felix Salmon makes the eminently reasonable case that salaries should not be kept secret, but he fails to disclose his own salary. A mere oversight, no doubt. Felix Salmon, please leave your salary in the comment section below.

How unintentionally, karmically prescient of Nolan, who would two years hence be working in a newsroom with Salmon, and made aware of the number. After Gawker was laid to rest in August of 2016 by Peter Thiel and his buffoonish front man, Terry Bollea-as-Hulk Hogan, Univision, the parent company of Fusion, bought Gawker in a fire sale for $135 million. The acquisition was completed in September, and the new company was renamed Gizmodo Media Group. By November, as Univision got down to brass tacks on how to merge and reorganize the two editorial entities, Fusion’s editorial staff voted to unionize (Gawker had voted to unionize in June of 2015). Days later, in a slashing of Univision’s workforce, Fusion bore the brunt of the layoffs, largely on the marketing and branded content units, while 15 editors were offered buyouts. As a part of the merger, Fusion and The Root were slated to join GMG effective January 1, 2017, joining their union contract.

Shortly after this period, according to several staffers, everyone in the newly conceived GMG received an individualized email from human resources, with their 3% cost-of-living-wage increase in the form of a letter attachment. One staffer was accidentally sent the entire spreadsheet from which the letters were presumably auto-populated. The individual reported the incident to HR, but the damage had been done. Rumors swirled about the outsized paycheck Salmon was pulling in while the rest of the staffers, many of whom outproduce him in both number of posts and traffic for their sites, grew to resent him.

This is another screenshot from that Vox piece!

According to people who saw the document in 2016, Felix Salmon was making $400,000, which with his 3% raise would put him at $412,000 as of March 2017. It’s highly unlikely that any other union employee was getting even close to half of that—aside from GMG site leads, almost no one in editorial is cracking six figures. Even the higher paid of (what remained of) the Fusion editorial staffers likely peaked in the “mid-1oos” according to another person familiar with the numbers. It’s more than most senior-level editors at the glossiest of legacy publications are making. But is it wrong per se? In a vacuum, no.

On some trivial level, it does feel unfair, but life is unfair and salaries are the result of complex, punctuated, and often gendered tauto-historological arithmetic. (Ideally the more we drain the mystery out of Where Salaries Come From And Why, both acceptance as well as true fairness increase.) But there are no pay caps in GMG’s union, only minimums, and by Salmon’s own (sound!) logic, it should be common and acceptable to have managers who regularly earn less than their reports.

There is no theoretical reason to begrudge Salmon a number so large, but it is fair to question as a practical matter whether the value he added to the company was worth the high wages he offset. (Not for nothing, it’s also fair to question whether people making above a certain pay grade should be subject to 3% cost-of-living wage increases—could that money be distributed better? Should annual raises be scaled by pay bracket? One of my very first exposures to this concept was when I learned that a senior-level Condé Nast staffer would be bumped from $650,000 to $675,000—the difference being my exact salary. Ah, the cost of living!) Not long after the salary brouhaha, Salmon was shifted over to the social impact team, called Rise Up, where he was slated to work on some kind of project that would “leverage content.” As a result of the title change, he was moved out of the newsroom, and conveniently no longer in the union. But the damage had been done—everyone knew what he earned and begged why.

I’m not an economist, but I think Salmon’s own words are a pretty good explanation of why he was ultimately let go from Fusion Media Group:

Labor has almost no leverage over capital any more, which helps explain the rash of “Uber for X” startups: they’re nearly all based on the idea that there is a bottomless pool out there of people with smartphones willing to do just about anything (drive a car, go shopping, do laundry, clean an apartment) for $15 an hour. If a company loses one of those workers, it’s no big deal, it just replaces that person with someone else who’s just as good and just as cheap. Now just apply that model to journalists.

That, and Univision is out fundraising for some cash to play media takeover with by selling a stake in FMG. Gizmodo Media Group budgets were flat this year, while everyone else was subject to cuts—and if consultants are coming in, Salmon’s stability and defendability within the company becomes a little more top of mind.

Two months after his advice for young idiots post, Salmon wrote another Betteridge’s Law of a post: “Is there any such thing as a career in digital journalism?”—once again with the mild tone deafness, since the answer for him was, well, yes, and the answer for you was, sorry, no. Jacob Silverman sears in The Baffler:

His answer was the same as Choire Sicha’s: no, not really. And he very well may be right. But Salmon left out an important detail: his salary is rumored to be $250,000. So my answer to his question is this: not as long as digital journalism employs people like Felix Salmon.

For that amount of money, you could hire five smart thirty-year-old writers, especially if you’re not drafting through the traditional Ivy League patronage system. You could pay a bunch of writers to actually write.

Indeed, one of the many openly aired complaints about Salmon was that he wasn’t producing a whole heck of a lot, editorially speaking. (It should be noted that Salmon is one of the hosts of Slate’s Money podcast where he once played himself into donating $20,000 of his own well-afforded money to Doctors Without Borders.) And it’s a goddamn shame, because he usually is quite right and good on many topics (well, ALMOST)! So was Felix Salmon really worth twice as much as anyone else in the company? (I realize that’s not exactly how salaries work, but it eventually effectively sort of is, where bottom lines are concerned.)

At certain levels, salaries stop being about output (hours, page views, widgets) and they become about some kind of ineffable value. And in the case of Salmon, it’s been hard to pin down what he’s been doing for years because rather than producing content blog widgets, he found a way to make himself relevant with management. He basically stopped blogging in 2012, and has been a media content strategist since then. So what was he doing in a newsroom in the first place? And what was his impact on the rest of the staff and their morale, especially after the dishwasher media chat?

Felix Salmon shouldn’t be shamed for making the salary that he did, but if he is to pull down the big bucks, everyone from the lowliest intern to the highest-level executive should be able to make a reasonable defense for why that is. It would appear that last Friday, Fusion Media Group could not longer do so. I had a long, lively conversation with Salmon about all the ins and outs of his career and how much money he’s made, and I think he understands that he was let go in part due to some of the very same logic he espouses in much of his writing on salary transparency and “digital journalism,” whatever the fuck that is. Salmon is bold, contrarian, smart, and a true thorn in the side of modern media—a true writer, ever in want of a good editor. It does not escape my notice that he would be the perfect person to write a piece about the thornier aspects of pay disparity, perhaps in the form of a first-person essay. This is your chance, Felix: let’s talk about money!

While it has been nice to see the kind words said about this site since we announced its shuttering a couple of weeks ago I feel as though we have not gotten enough credit for some of the things we pioneered in this corner of the Internet over the years. I am specifically talking about our affection for bears and wanting to die. But while many of our other content-area obsessions have gone unnoticed or fallen by the wayside, I am happy to note that the people of Britain remain a foul and pestilent congregation of stab-crazy louts, the moon is still our greatest enemy and Silvio Berlusconi is back, baby. There is sometimes comfort in permanence.

Is it obnoxious to choose, as The Awl’s final morning selection, a song from a band for whom almost everyone under 40 has a depressing and inexplicable distaste? A song that is not even from that band’s widely acknowledged golden era? A song that begins with a minute-long saxophone solo? Is that obnoxious? Good morning. Here’s music. Enjoy.

★★ A wide band of pale blue separated the sharp purple hills at the horizon from the frayed purple edge of the cloud sheet above. The hills stayed purple while the clouds became wrinkled and dimpled gray. Perfect clarity took over for a spell, but then the lid came down again, with murky tints of brown and orange on it. A wind blew insistently, then forcefully, from uptown. Only the gaudiest athletic-green accents stood out on the clothes and gear of the children on the dim playground.

Image: Martin Thomas via Flickr

Towards the end of last year, I asked people what they wanted me to cover in this column in 2018, a bold and ultimately fruitless thing to do, given I would only have about five or six more editions of this column to write. Nevertheless, friend of the column Casey Morell said: “I have always wondered why there isn’t a good piece that’s basically, ‘so you’re interested in listening to classical music? Here’s how you start.’” While I am not sure I am the person to write a good piece on that very topic, I do know I am a person who can write a piece on that topic, which is what I will do now.

So you’re interested in listening to classical music? you might be asking. Then start listening to classical music. That’s a smug, easy way of putting it, but I’m not entirely without justification. We have created a barrier to entry when it comes to classical music. In part because it’s old? I guess? And representative of a time in history that feels more and more alien to us by the day. And sometimes the pieces are, like, over an hour along. And also probably because it—like so much culture for so long—was dominated by stodgy white men who were always inexplicably feuding with one another. (Which, okay, on second thought, that’s basically the same as now.) But what I always feel is the most important thing to remind people is that classical music is music, and what’s more, it was popular music, honestly, truly, for a very long stretch of time. In turn, it was written to be listened to. It doesn’t want to alienate you. Challenge you, sure, but mostly welcome you into a theme, a melody, a variation, a mood.

Though I have only ever briefly written about them for this column, I really think the easiest entry into classical music is by listening to film scores. I write to you as if you are me—that is, to say, in your mid-to-late 20s or 30s—and I have no doubt in my mind that there are already at least half a dozen film scores that flood your brain at the mere mention of the genre. The works of John Williams and Hans Zimmer and Rachel Portman and Dario Marianelli are evocative and profound, and they summon images along with their melodies. Film scores are a gateway drug; the mocha of the classical music world. Next time you see a movie with a memorable score, stay through the credits (or google it afterwards, I don’t care) to find out the composer and dig into their work. Familiarize yourself with their music as you clean or work or commute or walk, allow yourself to understand the rise and fall of dramatic tension without lyrics.

Once you feel safe and comforted, it’s time to throw all of that out the window and dive right into symphonies. Symphonies: you know them already. I have spent the better part of my time on this column writing about them. You can’t hide from symphonies. You can dip around them for a time, bask in overtures and dances and polkas, but eventually you will get there. If you’ll indulge me (and again, you have to, it’s my column), I’d like to return to the first entry in this column which focused on Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony From The New World. I argued in late October 2016—haha, remembering arguing something in late October 2016?—that this was the best symphony of all time. I stand by this, by the way. And if you haven’t listened to it before or you’ve forgotten what it sounds like (fuck you??), I highly encourage you to revisit this Berliner Philharmoniker recording of it.

It’s possible the uproar and passion of its opening movement, “Adagio – allegro molto,” will motivate you, kickstart your mood, in which case I’m sending you to Wagner, to Shostakovich, to Hindemith. Or maybe you’ll need the full, wistful longing of its world-famous “Largo,” in which case I’m sending you to Bruckner, to Mendelssohn, to Holst (the expanding brain meme of Holst’s Planets ends in Venus, by the way, I’m as surprised as you are). And if you’re a “Scherzo” person—no shame, some of my closest friends are Leos—I’m sending you to Janáček, to Khachaturian, to Bernstein. And if you, like me, stand in awe of the finale, the “Allegro con fuoco,” I’m sending you to Beethoven, to Mahler, to Tchaikovsky.

None of this is academic or theoretical, and no doubt I’ve left some crucial people out. I’m really just doing my best to make recommendations. You will have to do the legwork, but this is fun legwork, I promise. When you finish listening to one piece, start another immediately. Absorb it the way skincare fanatics drink water. When in doubt, when lost for ideas, find your local classical station. As a kid, on nights I couldn’t fall asleep, I would sometimes turn on WFMT, the classical music station here in Chicago and just listen to whatever was on. No preference. I rarely knew what I was listening to. But I knew I liked it because I let myself listen in the silence of my bedroom. (This was, of course, after the phase of my childhood where, if I couldn’t fall asleep, I would throw myself out of bed to pretend like I had fallen out of bed in order to get my parents to come to my room and pay attention to me.)

All of this is to say that I know you can do the work here because I did the work here on the column. I pitched this column on a true whim, on a “I know there is, like, nothing less clickable than writing about classical music,” and when Silvia accepted it, I immediately panicked. For so long, this had been a subject I knew about that I kept to myself, and now I had to broadcast this knowledge in a way that sometimes led to people emailing me to call me a dumbass (it’s fine, the secret of the column is that I am a dumbass). To write what I wrote involved research and effort and long nights just listening to pieces—ones I knew, ones I didn’t—in the silence of my bedroom, on long walks, on noisy trains. And what I will say about working on a column that ultimately could not have had less relevance from fall of 2016 until now is that I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to dive headfirst into something so esoteric and abstract and strange and funny and difficult and beautiful. That, to me, is the legacy of The Awl in a nutshell, and to have played even the smallest part in its history is a great joy (especially when I also used said privilege to publish my terrible but correct opinions). Anchoring myself to classical music was a gift, and all I can do is give it back to you. Every piece of music I’ve written about for the column is here, and I’m wherever you need me to be. See ya soon.