Since Jezebel shut down, I cannot tell you how many people have joked, semi-seriously, that I should buy it for a dollar.

I will admit the temptation. As the media obits say, Jezebel was “an antidote to the superficiality and irrelevance of women's media properties that dominated the late 90s and early aughts” (that one was actually written by the lead executive and friend of the Horse Anna Holmes on the site in 2010).

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Bandcamp isn’t dead. But maybe it’s time for a eulogy. After last year’s surprise acquisition by Epic Games, the profitable online record store and community was sold last week to Songtradr, whose core business is licensing music to brands who want that magic track to make their latest content pop. Half of the staff was laid off. The Bandcamp union was gutted. The editorial team at Bandcamp Daily, which had music recommendations from real dedicated listeners rather than algorithms, was hit hard. What’s next is unclear, but for Songtradr the wealth of influential, genre-rich music on the platform is a drool-worthy mood music content library, not art.

Phew, did Clare Malone skewer Hasan Minhaj in The New Yorker last week. She didn’t intend to — she only wanted to profile him around his new standup special. But in the course of The New Yorker’s notoriously rigorous fact-checking, the team found that he had fabricated a number of the personal stories he tells onstage.

Last week at the Online News Association conference I caught up with many peers and colleagues about the state of news (not good). Most of the people I talked to are extremely talented and deeply experienced. Many of them are locked into long-term roles at organizations where their careers are unlikely to grow further. Virtually all of them will retire from the industry in the next 15 years.

I grew up a summer kid in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin — which basically meant I appeared spontaneously in some other kid’s ecosystem arbitrarily on most weekends between Memorial Day and Labor Day. We waterskied and nearly drowned several times a summer, and I caught the same, sad bluegill under the pier over and over and over again while reflecting on whether or not Wisconsin ever got hot.

When I was 16, my parents moved up there permanently and my brother became a kid who actually lived there. I came along less willingly and got a horse, Copenhagen, as a bribe. He was cheap and is legendarily indestructible at the ripe old age of 32.

Jose Mejia is a writer and editor who used to run a design studio, sometimes codes, and obsesses over how things are built. He's currently leading Product at Friends With Benefits, a decentralized autonomous organization that brings together artists, technologists, designers, musicians and other curious creative people to imagine and build a better internet.

We spoke with Jose about what a better internet would look like, and how his team helped envision it by producing the second annual FWBFest.

Megha Desai is the President of the Desai Foundation, an organization that empowers women and children through community programming to elevate health, livelihood, and menstrual equity in rural India. Recognized by the Clinton Global Initiative in 2022, the organization has directly impacted over five million lives, across eight states in India. Previously, Megha worked in advertising, branded entertainment and marketing. She currently sits on the board of directors for TIE – Boston and the Take Two Media Initiative. She also advises many companies, including SpiceWell, an ayurvedic spice company.

She is a contributor to publications like The Boston Globe, Entrepreneur Magazine, Fast Company and THRIVE. She is also a singer and performs with the Resistance Revival Chorus (signed to Righteous Babe Records) at venues like Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Summer Stage and more. She splits her time between NYC, Boston, and Bombay.

Katie Longmyer is an executive and former nightlife producer who works as a connector between artistic and commercial worlds. She has served as managing director at America’s leading creative agency, Mother; transitioned Google’s annual development platform I/O from a conference to a festival; built the 10-year-running Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival; led the cultural team that created the Made In America Music Festival; and stewarded the Gucci x Dapper Dan partnership.

On top of ongoing consulting, Katie has become the go-to cultural strategist for global executive leaders, including tech and creative CEOs. A couple of choice titles: Head of Special Projects at The Translation and Chief of Staff to the co-founder of WeWork.

This month we’re here with Siri Dahl, a multi-award-winning adult film performer and content creator with a background in writing and podcasting. As one of adult's most recognizable independent models, Siri collaborates with dozens of content platforms and film studios in the industry, and has been an ambassador for the Adult Time studio brand since 2021. She's an outspoken advocate for the rights of sex workers, as seen most recently in Netflix's "Money Shot: The Pornhub Story."

This month, we’re here with our client and hero Plan C, a ground-breaking digital campaign that provides up-to-date information on how people in the U.S. are accessing at-home abortion pill options online.

Since its founding in 2015, the organization has become a leader in the movement for reproductive rights and abortion access, putting forth a vision for a new reality: A world with democratized access to these safe, effective pills as a self-managed care option.

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