If you pull your mouse over a name, you can often click to get background stories on that individual.

You can view today's most popular stories, at gawker.com/popular. They include items from earlier in the week which are getting belated recognition, such as Alex Pareene's history of terrible CNN headlines.

If you're overwhelmed by the number of items on Gawker, you can view just the day's most popular stories.

You can follow your favorite commenters, and see which stories they're talking about, by clicking the + button next to a comment. (You have to be signed in for that to work, though.) Once you have a few friends, you'll see updates like this between the first and second posts.