My favorite thing about Beethoven is his beats

There’s an article in Styles this weekend about Gawker and how it’s not good anymore. To show that media insiders haven’t read the site since Choire left, they quote Rachel Sklar Elizabeth Spiers, who complains that “‘current Gawker’ is committing the Journalism 101 sin of doing too much telling and not enough showing.” Saying something is awful, she says, “is a poor substitute for an actual argument.”

This is the equivalent of saying you like Lolita because it has such an important message. Like, honestly? The thing Choire did, the thing he could do that no one else can, was precisely the opposite of “actual argument.” Spiers is right, he showed things, but the fact that he always stopped short of making an argument was what gave his posts such weight and such grace.