Swans legend Michael Rolfe Gira is 60 today. Don’t tell me you’re too tired to do something.

Now social media-focused HLN announces working titles for 2014 shows: “I Can Haz NewsToon,” “Keywords,” “One.Click.Away” and “Videocracy.”

— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) February 19, 2014

You ever see something and think, “No way that’s real,” with an immediate follow-up thought of, “But it totally could be real” and a simultaneous realization that it probably is real, and the weary acknowledgment that even if it’s not it doesn’t matter anyway because the essential truth of the thing is undeniable? Or does that just happen to me?

“Look at this place; it’s got everything: a DJ playing Ray Charles, fancy cocktails. It’s like hipster catnip.”

I have a theory about money in this age of financial services and valueless commodities which is essentially that there is one big pile of money on the table and the people who are in charge of things let you move the pile around. Sometimes it stops in front of you for a bit before you pass the pile on to someone else. If you’re lucky a couple of coins fall into your lap for you to keep, but mostly you push the pile to the next person. For a while the memory of the money in front of you keeps you warm and happy, and when that finally burns off you look at whoever the money is in front of right then and wonder why they have it and when it is coming back to you. Your desire to get the money back or your envy of whoever has the money at that moment keeps you from realizing that you are actually seated below a much bigger table, where a much larger pile of money is being passed around, and the money you’re playing with is the coins that have fallen down from there. The people who are in charge of your table couldn’t even get a seat at the table up top. Up at the larger table they understand that, for the most part, the money is fake and they’ve only got the use of it for so long, but even they are so captivated by the warm feeling they get from it that the will do anything to stay at that table and keep the people down below from moving up. They know that it is ethereal, that it is based on fakery and willful self-delusion, but they also understand that so long as everyone believes in it they can keep the warmth wrapped around them all the time and even pass it along to their children. Like so many of my theories this idea is simplistic and flawed, but, on the other hand, it is hard to read something like this and convince yourself that we live in a world where things actually make sense.

“Philadelphia Eagles football player Brent Celek has 2 Chainz on his music playlist. A What’s Your Workout? column in Tuesday’s Personal Journal incorrectly said Two Chairs is on the list.”

In case you needed yet one more reminder, and you do, as any lawyer can tell you, just don’t ever put things in email. Yes, we all hate the phone. Yes, it’s truly horrible. But do yourself a favor. Save the juicy business for IRL. And also then when you do have a dishy phone conversation — in this case, with Tony Blair — don’t then summarize it in… an email. This PSA comes to you from the unlikely source of one James Murdoch. If you’re still somehow following the News of the World hacking trials and tribulations, which have been going on for what seems like several lifetimes, you can stop now: that is the only useful message we will learn.

by Matthew J.X. Malady

People drop things on the Internet and run all the time. So we have to ask. In this edition, writer Cord Jefferson tells us more about his new job.

Here is some info: I’m leaving Gawker to work on a television show. Gawker is great and full of geniuses and I’m going to miss it a lot.

— Cord Jefferson (@cordjefferson) February 4, 2014

Cord! So what happened here?

In mid-January I got a call saying that a guy had reached out to my literary agent to ask if I’d be interested in writing for television. That person turned out to be Mike O’Malley, the showrunner for a project being tentatively called “Survivor’s Remorse.” Mike and I met for coffee on a Friday and the official, final offer for the job came through the next day, at 10 p.m. If I wanted the job I had to start on the upcoming Monday. It made me feel shitty to have to leave Gawker on such short notice, but I counseled with a dude I trust and pay, and he told me that the opportunity I was being given was too rare to pass up. Thankfully my boss at Gawker, John Cook, was super-supportive. During that first week he let me finish out my time at Gawker in the mornings before heading to the TV writers’ room in the afternoons.

And, yes, I’m absolutely planning on continuing to write for Gawker, and any other place that will have me, when I’ve got the time. I enjoyed the work I was doing before all this, and I don’t want to let the skills I’d built up doing that kind of writing completely atrophy. Also, while I’m excited about the show I’m working on and hopeful that it will do very well, I’m aware of the fact that the world of TV is unstable in that shows can come and go in an instant. Even if they’re a big hit you aren’t guaranteed a consistent paycheck every two weeks of the year, which is why I have no intention of devoting my entire career to TV. Maybe I’ll hate this job, or be really terrible at it. I’m really loving it at the moment, but if that joy dries up I’ll have to find something else to do, and what I was doing before was more than fine by me.

That all sounds fantastic and exciting! What will you miss most about Gawker, and what are you most looking forward to about this new project?

I’m not exaggerating when I say that Gawker Media is the best place I’ve ever worked. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, of course — and there are enough opinions about Gawker to choke a dinosaur — but the freedom that company gives people to think differently, to write differently, and to try shit out is, I think, truly important, and it’s what I’ll miss the most. There aren’t a lot of publications in which you’re going to find a letter from a death-row inmate published next to a ranking of sauces published next to a funeral dirge for a dead dolphin published next to an essay I wrote about America and racism, and that’s due in large part to the freedom of thought that’s allowed to flourish at Gawker. I’ll also miss the people. I love every damn person I worked with at that place, from Nick Denton on down. My colleagues made coming to work every day hilarious, edifying, and intimidating. I’ll probably miss them the most, come to think of it.

The thing I’m most looking forward to is trying something new. When I started my career I never set out to be a journalist or an essayist or a blogger; I just wanted to be a writer, with no kind of qualifier preceding that title. Now that I’m in the thick of this new venture I’m scared as hell of failing and going broke, but most of that fear is tempered with the excitement of trying to get good at something unlike anything I’ve worked on before. Maybe I’ll ruin my life, but maybe I won’t, so that’s fun.

I’m also pretty eager to not feel an internal pull to write about all the racist shit that happens in America constantly. Thinking and writing about a new black person being murdered by a racist or arrested by a bad cop every other week can start to wear on your psyche. I wrote a thing about Richard Sherman right before I left Gawker, and I was proud of that piece, but the day it was published I ended up texting with a black writer friend about how exhausting it can be to always be considering the fresh and inventive ways black people get beaten down in this country. I think about race a lot, and I probably always will, but writing about it day in and day out can also erode something in you and make you angry. On the day I was texting with my friend I quoted to him the Dave Chappelle line “This racism is killin’ me inside!” and I was only half joking. (Speaking of racism on the internet, another thing I like about this job is that it’s forced me to stop looking at people scream at each other on Twitter and Tumblr and the rest of the internet all day. At my new office they make us close our computers and turn off our phones during work, which has been strange but soothing.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFuF8Y1H06Q

Lesson learned (if any)?

Here is one interesting thing I’ve learned so far: Film and TV writing doesn’t require that the stuff you write be produced in order for you to get paid. There are writers who make great livings — like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — working in Hollywood without ever seeing anything they write actually get made into a TV show or a movie. Isn’t that wild?

Just one more thing.

Work really hard on things that make you feel happy and proud, do work that makes you feel like you’re improving, feel free to screw up from time to time, take calculated risks, and be as kind as you can stomach to everyone you meet. Is that smarm? Just kidding.

Matthew J.X. Malady is a writer and editor in New York.

★★★★ Through the western trees, the descending moon was fat and yellow-white. It was still dark, but the dog was whining and the birds were chirping. After an interlude of not very long, the toddler started chirping too, from the other side of the house. He wanted to see the moon out of the windows there, where it had been at bedtime, but had to settle for the sun. Back to the west, pink and tangerine light was in the tops of the drab trees, quickly descending the limbs and trunks. The colorless sky turned a saturated blue. Outside on the feeders and branches and the fence, over the yard full of dense and undulating snow, were three-four-five bluejays, three-four male cardinals and as many females, innumerable little juncos and white-throated sparrows. One mourning dove was in among them, placid amid the little squabbles. Titmice made forays from the dormant trumpet vines. A goldfinch clung to the dangling sack of finch-food, a patch of bright spring yellow blooming at the throat of its dull winter plumage. The first-grader could walk on top of the snow. Fallen oak leaves, heated by the sun, had sunk an inch deep into the crust, their lobes and stems traced perfectly in negative space. The deer had sunk footprints into the snow when it was soft, then left later prints on the surface and piles of droppings within 10 feet of the house. A few chickadees had finally showed up, and would fly right up to the feeders if humans stood still enough nearby. Everything indoors was a wash of green after the snow-brightness. The bigger birds arrived in their mixed flock — blackbirds, starlings, the grackles with their oily sheen and staring ivory eyes — alternately bullying the earlier birds and flinching away en masse at sudden sounds. The Cooper’s hawk was nowhere to be seen. There were potholes in the highway back to the interstate. A shelf of snow hung ominously off the top of a tractor trailer crossing the Susquehanna. Traffic was light and free-flowing, with the sun at its back. A stainless-steel refrigerator and stove flashed in the bed of a pickup truck. The daylight lasted all the way up to the Lincoln Tunnel and through it. A band of purple-red lay just above New Jersey like a second horizon. In the deepening dusk, a pale horse trotted down Ninth Avenue, the hubs of carriage wheels glinting behind it. The potholes were the worst yet. One last surprising glimpse of bright blue appeared in the sky, in the space opening up behind the rack of cars, stacked four high, at the end of the parking lot.

“Arguments at weddings can be caused by a variety of reasons: From drunken uncles making a scene and distant cousins unhappy at being on a table by the door, to best man speeches that reveal a little bit too much about the stag do and almost anything to do with the bride’s sister. But now a new source of conflict can be added to the list — a pork pie. Police tweeted that they were on their way to a couple’s wedding celebrations to break up a brawl thought to have been started after an argument about the humble meat pie. Officers from the dog section at West Yorkshire Police said they had been called to a ‘large fight’ in Bradford on Saturday night, which led to three arrests.”

Most of this video will delight you and even the small part that does not (and if you watch it all the way through you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about) is so short that it isn’t even worth getting upset about. Ya got 8 minutes? Ya got time to watch this.