KAHN HEIR

F in the chat for Dean.

April 19th, 2022

White smoke issued from the chimney of the New York Times this morning, signaling that publisher Attorney General Sulzberger has chosen a new editor-in-chief to succeed Los Angeles resident Dean Baquet, who was present, at least in a virtual sense, for enormous digital subscriber growth over the eight years he led New York City’s most popular daily newspaper, Scooby-Doo-like, through a series of hilarious scrapes and wacky misadventures. Replacing him will be bloodless patrician managing editor Joseph Kahn, a chilly but lifelike New England butter sculpture who was born at Harvard University and attended Harvard University before taking a master’s degree at Harvard University. “People say Kahn is funny,” reports The Fine Print’s Andrew Fedorov, “though nobody who spoke with The Fine Print could exactly recall anything he’d said that was funny.” By “funny” they mean witty and by “witty” they mean rich. Kahn, whose middle name is “F,” has reportedly already brought in a crew to patch the holes in the walls of Baquet’s office, and the Times’s 1,700 person staff are all keenly looking forward to potentially having their first conversation with him.

Times PR prepped for today’s announcement by arranging for a long profile of Kahn in New York Magazine by Maureen Dowd’s assistant, the thirsty and reliably deferential Shawn McCreesh. Here’s a taste of what that’s like:

So what sort of crazy is Kahn? He’s a mandarin who actually speaks Mandarin; he spent years reporting from China. He’s been kicking around the Times since 1998 — winning a Pulitzer, overseeing various institutional transformations — but in an organization built on nosiness, he remains something of an enigma. He’s a man without obvious eccentricity or need to be liked and isn’t known for much beyond his reputation for adroitness and overachieving.

Just imagine many thousand more words of that. More like Yawn McYeesh. The most interesting part is the Ann Getty’s Rug portrait of Kahn getting ready to have sex with the newspaper.

Disgraced Wing founder Audrey Gelman has opened a New England colonial country store in the form of a deranged cottagecore D&D campaign. Frosted Lucky Charms, the vomiting is vicious. 🌈 David Mack investigates: “Exactly How Many Easter Bunny Costumes Does The White House Own?!” This is the hard-hitting journalism that Jonah Peretti gutted BuzzFeed News for. “CNN+ looks doomed” reports Sara Fischer in a 20-bullet-point Axios longread. “Last year, venture capitalists invested $11.9 billion in renewable energy globally, compared with $30.1 billion in cryptocurrency and blockchain,” write Eshe Nelson and Adam Satariano explaining why we are doomed, as a species. “Masks Are Off,” and touring musicians are getting decimated by Covid, according to Dada Drummer’s Damon Krukowski. And in the Decoder podcast, Nilay Patel and Josh Dzieza finally talk to Foxconn’s Wisconsin fiasco lead Alan Yeung, who just wrote a book about the failed factory project. You’ll be shocked to hear that all the answers we want about why no factory was built and what the AI 8K+5G ecosystem is are… in his next book. You don’t get to hear many interviews like this, I tell you what.

Today in Weird Sex: Snopes reports that no, they have not removed the dick vein from Snickers to appease the woke mob. And the Québec Health Ministry posted feet on main, which is illegal because it wasn’t in French.

Today in Crabs:

Taylor Lorenz reported on the Brooklyn realtor behind the enormously influential @LibsofTikTok twitter account which, amplified by Spotify’s Joe Rogan and Substack’s Glenn Greenwald among other far right media figures, is fueling a moral panic against queer and transgender people in America’s ascendent fascist movement. The story’s publication was preceded by a predictable meltdown from “the online influencer Glenn Greenwald” who inadvertently confirmed the identity of the account’s owner, Chaya Raichik:

When a reporter called the phone number registered to Raichik’s real estate profile and LibofTikTok.us, the woman who answered hung up after the reporter identified herself as calling from The Washington Post. A woman at the address listed to Raichik’s name in Los Angeles declined to identify herself. On Monday night, a tweet from Glenn Greenwald confirmed the house that was visited belonged to Raichik’s family.

The goal of the account, and movement, is to exterminate transgender people.

Today’s Song: My Chemical Romance, “Welcome To The Black Parade”

~ and though you're dead and gone, believe me, your tabs will carry on ~

Thank you Jevin for the subject line. If you’d like to help me catch up to the Times’s ten million digital subscribers, please sign up here. I’ve got a ways to go. Don’t worry, Today in Tabs has also adopted a poison pill to prevent Elon Musk from buying more than a 15% stake (it’s me eating a poison pill if that happens). I persistently tell you that I tweet @fka_tabs but I don’t know why. You can follow me there, but it doesn’t help me at all, so please only do that if it’s what you truly want.

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