Mind the Gap
The Taylor Lorenz discourse continues until the sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood.
Did you think the Taylor Lorenz discourse was over yesterday? Oh you sweet fool, no, it won’t be over until “the sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood” as the prophet Joel wrote. In today’s installment we have Maureen Dowd’s former assistant, a man, sneering about all the “actually consequential world news” and then writing 1,100 words about a “food fight” in “the media-Twitter lunchroom” anyway. Good luck with your Playbook application, Shawn! Maybe they’ll let you be Rachel Bade’s assistant next.
Speaking of new jobs, Taylor spent her first day at the Post reporting that Michael Sayman has been hired to lure the teens to Twitter. Sayman previously tried to lure the teens to Facebook (as a teen himself, with evidently limited success), then to Google (ditto), then to Roblox (where the teens conveniently already were). Lorenz writes:
At Facebook, he helped the platform build out and launch products like Instagram Stories and Facebook Groups, features primarily directed at college students. In 2017, Sayman left Facebook for Google, where he once again was tapped with helping a tech giant grow and retain young users. He worked on YouTube Shorts, a TikTok-like format within YouTube, and other projects before joining Roblox in 2020 to help the gaming platform incorporate more social functionality.
If you’ve ever written a tech industry resumé, you might recognize this particular use of “helped build” to encompass anything that happened at a company while you worked there. Check back eighteen months from now, when Sayman will be excited to start his new job luring the teens to LinkedIn.
It’s International Women’s Day and that means we’re still talking about the pay gap, assisted this year by the Gender Pay Gap Bot on Twitter, which posts the exact pay discrepancy between women and men at British companies who tweet about International Women’s Day. Vice’s Zing Tsjeng talked to Francesca Lawson and Ali Fensome who built the bot using data from the UK’s gender gap pay database, a real thing any minimally functioning government could create. New Yorker archive editor Erin Overbey posted her seven year quest to earn only 20% less than her much less senior male predecessor made, and TV writer Amanda Deibert told the story of the time she “asked for equal pay and my boss offered me his SPERM.” This is not some kind of euphemism.
Bari Weiss’s Hard-R University announced its first “Forbidden Courses,” which is less a college education and more a five day seminar at a Dallas office park. Alvin & The Chipmunks 1980 album “Chipmunk Punk” played at 16 RPM is “secretly the most important postpunk/goth album ever recorded.” For an even more deep fried experience, play the YouTube at 1.5x (or 0.5x if you’re on ketamine). There’s also a second one, with “Chariots of Fire,” “Fame,” and “Eye of the Tiger.” 😘🤌 In Dirt Eliza Levinson tried to figure out if Russia could evade sanctions using cryptocurrency, and I think the answer is that if you use Bitcoin you’re already donating to Iran and Russia? Sam Sanders joined the NPR to Vox talent pipeline. Daniel Kaluuya is reportedly being managed by the “‘Head Mistress’ for ‘The International Alma Mater, Blessed University’,” Heir Holiness.
The Post can reveal that her real name is Vanylla Salimah Mahmoud. The 50-year-old hails from California and has at least three Twitter accounts, one of which is private. There is also an Instagram account with messages like “I’m just a spiritual gangster serving a life sentence in a human body.”
Same.
“A year ago, the USPS announced it was buying between 50,000 and 165,000 new delivery trucks over the next decade from Oshkosh Defense,” wrote Aaron Gordon in Vice. The trucks were cute, until we found out 90% of them would be gas powered and they only get eight miles per gallon. How did this happen? It’s not the reason you think, unless you think it’s because:
After a 2006 law saddled the USPS with made-up debt to help balance the federal budget, the USPS acts as if it lacks the financial flexibility to make any mistakes, a fear that results in an organization so tepid and conservative it ends up making many of them.
If you did, then it’s exactly the reason you think.
Today’s Song: The Breeders, “No Aloha”
~ O the tabs, saw it on the wall ~
The header image today is of the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (W.I.T.C.H.) via Moira Donegan. When Discord isn’t down I hang out at the Tabs subscriber discord, and when Twitter isn’t down I tweet @fka_tabs and @TodayinTabs with the rest of my fellow teens.