emails

Exclusive: My Occidental College Love Letters

Max Read · 05/02/12 02:30PM

Today, Vanity Fair published several excerpts from the romantic correspondence of a young Barack Obama, displaying a penetrating mind and an impressive command of language on the part of the future president, who had just transferred from Occidental College to Columbia. His letters, as biographer David Maraniss writes, "wove [their] way though literature, politics, and personal philosophy"; our own Maureen O'Connor notes that they "reference T.S. Eliot, 'bourgeois liberalism,' and Jacques Derrida."

'I Shall Crush You Like the South' and Other Nostalgic Promises You Made to Us This Week

Leah Beckmann · 04/27/12 06:00PM

It's the dawning of a new commenting era here at Gawker, but sometimes commenting jut isn't enough. This week we came together to reflect upon racism, hipsters, hipster racism, Girls, racist hipster girls, and paragliding. Please enjoy this week's smorgasbord of rantings, then get out there and kick it up like the summer you spent on the cape when the beers were cold and the tunes were loud and the girls were young.

The Mayor of Harrison Reaches Out and Other Surprising Invitations We Received This Week

Leah Beckmann · 04/06/12 05:45PM

This week's hate mail was brimming with racism, lunch invitations, incensed Chevy Chase support, and the occasional grammatical error or two. A few were like little time capsules from the past, reminders that our ability to inspire ravenous anger in you has—and will always— remain the same. So enjoy this roundup and shine on, you crazy diamonds!