What I'll miss about Gawker

A tribute to the website everyone read and loved to hate

Gawk, no more.
(Image credit: Illustration by Lauren Hansen)

After it ceases publication next week, Gawker.com will be remembered as the maturing internet's greatest interpreter.

Vicious and nosy, dismissive and brash, Gawker defined mean. It defined cool. It scorned your Facebook friends long before you really "got" Facebook — it was good at scorn — and whenever it articulated something about the present (with all its embarrassing platforms), it offered cultural acumen in writerly bedhead.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.