Thanksgiving, America's national pre-Black Friday ritual, has its origins as a celebration of harvest bounty and an opportunity to reflect on the things and people for which we're thankful. This is what the staff of Gawker is thankful for. What about you?

Got a news tip? Get in touch at tips@gawker.com, call us at 646.470.4295, or leave a comment below.

Got a news tip? Get in touch at tips@gawker.com, call us at 646.470.4295, or leave a comment below.

Gawker relies on tips, leaked documents, and eyewitness accounts for many of its stories. Here’s how to get in touch.

The late investigative reporter Michael Hastings’ much-buzzed-about posthumous novel, The Last Magazine, a thinly veiled account of his time at Newsweek (and Gawker!) in the mid-2000s, finally landed in bookstores and Amazon warehouses earlier this week. But where’s the fun in thin veils?

Last week, Gawker reported that, in the summer of 2013, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the events, Fox News executives had retaliated against star anchor Shepard Smith because he had voiced his desire to come out as gay. Fox News called the report “100% false and a complete fabrication,” and pointed out—directly and through cooperative reporters—what it thought were discrepancies in our account.

Astra Taylor began her career making documentaries about thinkers (Zizek! and Examined Life). Now she's doing the thinking herself. In her new book, The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, Taylor argues the Internet isn't as liberating a force as its initial boosters promised. She's joining us at 2 p.m. ET here in Kinja to take questions and talk about her book.

See that generic stock photo at the top of this post? We like to avoid this. So we're looking to fill a position for a staff illustrator/designer.

Today is John Cook's last day as the editor-in-chief of Gawker.com.

"Group chats," the newest design iteration of Gawker Media LLC's proprietary Kinja® blog-platform technology, are now live on Gawker, and will be rolled out across the Gawker Media network by the end of the day. Read on for more.

Oh internet! Oh glorious fountain of lies and truth, oh tangled network of trolls and heroes, oh noxious abyss of Photoshopped Harry Styles photos. You are so wonderful yet so full of shit.

We've already assembled what we think are the best Gawker posts of 2013. Here is what the faceless, indifferent gods of internet traffic thought were the best.

Wow, you guys missed some... OK stuff. These are the 10 least-read Gawker posts of the year, ranked by pageviews. Give them another chance! And what do you have against Nelson Mandela, international news, terrible music, and former Gawker editorial fellow Maggie Lange? (The Lanny Davis thing, we get.)

Our best work here at Gawker is not always our most popular. Sometimes those two indicia—popularity and quality—are negatively correlated, and sometimes they're aligned. It's a crapshoot. Below, you will find the a list of the best stuff we came up with over the past 12 months. It's a grab-bag of searing criticism, straight dirt, personal assaults, intense narrative journalism, dark essays, a dead dog, jokes we couldn't get out of our heads until we put them on the site, gag headlines, and screaming goats. We hate to disappoint the loyal readers who expect, as one wag recently put it, "the short newsy posts typical of Gawker." But this is the stuff the staff was really into.

Bears! Sure, 2013 is technically the Year of the Deer, but what would the past 12 months have been without Gawker.com's groundbreaking bear coverage? Answer: Not much. So as Gawker Media's premier source for all news bear-related, we're proud to present: The Year in Bears, 2013 Edition.

The literary summer of Gawker contributing editor Kiese Laymon continues with the publication of How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays, released yesterday. Buy it with his debut novel, Long Division, which came out in June. And read the original essay here.

A debate is raging here at Gawker Media: Should we, as a suite of web sites, maintain (with one exception) our current adherence to the grand American newspapering tradition of Headlines that Capitalize the First Letter of Each Significant Word? Or should we crumble before the creeping Europeanization of our culture and adopt the global norm of headlines that, casually, Capitalize only the first letter? What say you?

Where's Edward Snowden? As I write this, only a handful of people know exactly the location of the world famous NSA whistleblower, after he apparently ditched his flight from Moscow to Cuba last night. One of those people is Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Snowden is "safe and healthy" and his "spirits are high," Assange told reporters begging for any scrap of information on a conference call this morning. It is this secret knowledge that has paradoxically thrust Assange's anti-secrecy outlet back into the media spotlight after a long period of decline. Now there's hints of another massive leak. Wikileaks is back, God help us all.

Cybermillionaire Nick Denton, the former owner of First Tuesday and Oddjack and current principal of Blogwire Hungary Szellemi Alkotast Hasznosito KFT, plans to marry his boyfriend next year, according to an exclusive report in the New York Daily News.