Change is always scary but that never keeps it from happening anyway. Take a deep breath, and enjoy.

Good afternoon, or good evening, whatever it is! Today is The Awl’s first day on Medium, a cool platform for publishers. This will look familiar to readers of The Billfold, which moved over to Medium late last year. Porting all eight thousand posts about bears took a bit of time and lots of coding. Objects in the archive may have shifted during our flight, so please use caution when opening links — there are bound to be some posts, both old and new, with slightly mangled formatting. If you see anything of the sort, feel free to let us know at notes@theawl.com. The forecast on the ground is sunny with a chance of bears; see you in the content streams.

The Awl newsletter changes in theme, format, and frequency every week — that’s why it’s called Everything Changes — so we can’t give you a good sense of what it’s like or how often you’ll get it. You are signing up to be surprised. That’s the deal. Hopefully you’ll like it.

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Welcome to The Awl, the last weblog.

The Awl was started in 2009, at least four Internets ago. It was edited by Alex Balk and Choire Sicha. It was subsequently edited by Matt Buchanan and John Herrman. It is now edited by Silvia Killingsworth. Its prior mission statement read as follows:

We believe that there is a great big Internet out there on which we all live, and that too often the curios and oddities of that Internet are ignored in favor of the most obvious and easy stories. We believe that there is an audience of intelligent readers who are poorly served by being delivered those same stories in numbing repetition to the detriment of their reading diet. We believe that there is no topic unworthy of scrutiny, so long that it is approached from an intelligent angle, but that there are many topics worthy of scrutiny that lack coverage because of commercial factors. We believe that the longform essay has a home on the Internet, and that the idea of “too long; didn’t read” is exactly as shortsighted as its TL;DR acronym.

This does not mean that we eschew frivolity; far from it. Who doesn’t enjoy a funny video, a current meme, or anything about bears? We love bears. And Science!

In the end, however, we return most frequently to New York City and its self-centered, all-consuming industries: media and publishing, finance and real estate, politics and capitalism and gamesmanship.

These sentences still apply, mostly, except the whole #longform thing — now all the bad things are twice as long. (Also hahaha, “current meme.” Good Lord, were we ever that young?) The Awl was and is a site that publishes things only because we think that they are good or smart or funny or weird or interesting or surprising (and sometimes all of those things), and that other reasonable people might enjoy them too.

The Awl Network’s publisher is Michael Macher. Please contact him regarding any sort of business activity, including advertising and other opportunities for your brand. You may reach him at advertise@theawl.com.

The Awl Network is independently owned and operated. It has no venture capital backing nor any outside investment whatsoever.

(An “awl,” by the way, is a “pointed tool used for punching small holes,” often utilized in wood and leather craft. Here is how you pronounce the word “awl,” both with UK and US accents. Finally, our motto, “Be Less Stupid,” is a goal we try to live up to every day. Most days we fail, but the point is in the trying.)

Thanks again for dropping by. We appreciate it.

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Do you know who I am? I’m a ‘whale’ on that famous television show Whale Pool, and it’s going to be a really big problem if you don’t let me in to see Dead Presidents. Can you please just try scanning my paper QR code one more time, because I think your machine is broken. It couldn’t possibly be my piece of paper, printed out by my assistant. Actually maybe it is her fault. I bet there’s something wrong with the printer or maybe the ink is really low. But it can’t possibly be wrong. There’s got to be some explanation for this that has nothing to do with me. I want to speak to your manager, this is ridiculous. Do you know how much I paid for these tickets? Do you know that I just coyly tweeted at Len-Mario Ortega before arriving here tonight? He’s probably expecting me, you know. It’s going to be a really big problem if I don’t get to tweet about this show afterwards, and I have a lot of important Twitter followers. You think this is a scam? Do you really think I would have paid all that money for a scam? This is unacceptable. I’m going to tell every board member I know not to use this service. It’s all your fault. You ruined my night. More than that, you ruined my experience. There isn’t any way to make it up. I’ll never come back here again, unless I’m not paying, because that’s what rich people do: they give each other expensive things for free. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to Caroline’s to break my funny bone.

The grapefruit-flavored dessert contains 0.7 percent oriental raisin tree fruit juice, a traditional hangover remedy cited in a Korean medicine book from the 17th century that is included in popular hangover potions.

You can now buy hangover ice cream bars in South Korea. One question: do they work topically too? Like can I just put it on my forehead? What’s new about this? I mean, we have Pedialyte pops, not that I’ve ever personally tried them but they seem pretty ingenious. I just love that the cure for consuming too much is consuming even more! The most confusing part of this article is that nowhere does it tell us why this is called an ice cream instead of a sorbet or a popsicle, because it’s apparently grapefruit flavored? And I don’t think grapefruit and dairy go together. Also there’s a pretty high incidence of lactose intolerance in East Asia, but more importantly WHAT IS AN ORIENTAL RAISIN TREE FRUIT?

Happy Monday! Let’s just get this out of the way: there’s nothing magical about breakfast, claims the New York Times this morning. (It should be noted that the article-writer is a known breakfast-skipper; but not to worry, this article will shoot to the #1 most emailed in no time.) According to studies that were not funded by breakfast-food companies, the whole thing is a shame scam for those of us who can’t resist actuallying each other with counterintuitive facts about metabolic rates. But what about hungry children who get school breakfasts? That’s not magic, that’s just common sense, right? On the whole, I get this guy’s point, but I still think the it bears pointing out that being a free citizen, able to choose whether to eat a bacon egg and cheese or a mason jar of overnight oats or nothing at all is pretty spectacular. Those of us who will ogle the sloppy fried eggs in the photo at the top of the post need not be shamed for thinking them magical, for that is precisely what they are — evidence of human ingeniousness and modern advancements so convenient they might actually harm us by allowing ourselves to gorge on previously scarce nutritional commodities. Also when it comes to health policy and message distribution, it’s probably safer to err on the side of encouraging people to get in the habit of eating at regular, moderated intervals rather than not. Just a guess.

★★★★ The early light in the city was the color of the sidewalk. It was too humid to be cool and too sunless to be warm. Haze lightly coated the landscape all around the highway. In the clearing at the trailhead, the sun was beginning to come through. Mugwort was flourishing where the trail began, and poison ivy was flourishing after. Chipmunks and maybe other small things made sharp movements in the leaves, darting away. Something else rustled without ever leaping, a snakelike sound. Joggers passed on the paved road separately and individually, each wearing the same shade of pink. On the way back out of the park, a robin fledgling lay headless in the dry gravel. The sun grew full and bright, interrupted by passing clouds thick enough to be gray in their middles. Under the clouds, it was too cool to keep the light jacket off, and under the sun it was too hot to keep it on. But once the afternoon had subsided behind the trees did perfect comfortableness settle in. It was ease itself to stroll from the suburban houses to the suburban downtown, past the deep and thick grass. Two deer, pale tan near color of old bone, grazed in a front lawn no distance at all from the sidewalk. It took some searching, back in the city, to find a star in the sky.

If you are in New York right now and you are not having a hard time seeing any of this text because the sun’s glare is making it difficult to read, I have to assume that you are still indoors and the only reason is you have some sort of job where a human life depends on your continued presence and attention. I hereby give you permission to tell the person in your care that he has had a good run but that all things come to an end and unfortunately you will not be able to complete the surgery because it is so fucking nice outside that you cannot spend another minute out of the sun. Given the way the year has gone thus far who knows if you’ll ever see it again? GO.