- “Nobody Cares About Rolling Stone”: The Weeknd’s “Idol” Character Responded To The Magazine’s Exposé On The HBO Series BuzzFeed News
- The Weeknd Fires Back at Rolling Stone Report Claiming ‘The Idol’ Is in Turmoil: ‘Did We Upset You?’ Yahoo Entertainment
- The Weeknd slams article about alleged toxicity on his upcoming show ‘The Idol Geo News
- The Weeknd, Already on the Outs with the Grammys, Goes After Rolling Stone So They Rip Apart His New Show (Got That?) Showbiz411
- HBO, Lily-Rose Depp Deny On-Set Turmoil on ‘The Idol’ Hollywood Reporter
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Magazines
Wizards of the Coast Breaks Their Silence on the Dungeons & Dragons Open Game License
Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that publishes Dungeons & Dragons, revealed details of its new Open Game License on Friday and attempted to answer questions about the future of the D&D community that were raised after io9 broke the news about the contents of a draft of the document last week.
A leaked copy of an updated “OGL 1.1,” received and reported on by io9 last week, outlined restrictions on third-party publishers including a 25 percent royalty payout for revenues over $750,000, and a copyright clause that appeared to cede ownership of content over to Wizards of the Coast (WotC). All of these concerns were taken up online, as D&D fans, content creators, and third-party publishers responded to the report with concern. Several prominent game publishers announced plans to stop creating new licensed content to focus on their own systems.
The update from Wizards of the Coast says; “the next OGL will contain the provisions… [so that it] covers only content for TTRPGs. That means that other expressions, such as educational and charitable campaigns, livestreams, cosplay, VTT-uses, etc., will remain unaffected by any OGL update. Content already released under 1.0a will also remain unaffected.”
This seems to imply that the Fan Content License, which was previously mentioned in the OGL 1.1 draft as continuing under the new licensing agreement, will be used to protect Wizards from fan content like Actual Play podcasts and videos. The fact that they are also saying that VTTs will be unaffected is a significant change, as earlier editions stated that “non-static” media would be disallowed under the new OGL 1.1. This is likely a massive relief to numerous companies that are working on creating and innovating in the VTT space, but without the fully updated OGL, there are no rock-solid assurances yet.
Another announcement is the fact that any updated OGL “will not contain is any royalty structure.” This is a huge change from the previous iterations, which had a tiered royalty structure that required all commercial projects to report to Wizards of the Coast. One of the reasons for this change seems to be the response that people had to the language about copyright and ownership in the OGL 1.1. The update says, “any language we put down will be crystal clear and unequivocal on that point. The license back language was intended to protect us and our partners from creators who incorrectly allege that we steal their work simply because of coincidental similarities.”
G/O Media may get a commission
Up to $100 credit
Samsung Reserve
Reserve the next gen Samsung device
All you need to do is sign up with your email and boom: credit for your preorder on a new Samsung device.
The announcement goes on to include the expansive IP projects that Wizards is taking on—a movie, a television series, and digital games. It’s clear that Wizards of the Coast cares much more about protecting the cultural currency of Dungeons & Dragons before they think about anything else—including fans, content creators, and third-party publishers.
While the updated OGL 2.0 isn’t going to be released today, it will be coming. There will be no backing down entirely for Wizards of the Coast. They’ve committed too much time, money, and effort into their IP to allow it to be written off totally under the OGL 1.0(a) and the suits in Hasbro will not allow everyone to make off with their name and numbers.
Additionally, the final thing to note about this update is that Wizards of the Coast is doing some incredible spin doctoring in order to lay the groundwork to try to salvage the situation that they find themselves in. The company would love for you to think that this is all part of the plan, but none of this was part of any plan.
The drafts that io9 received were not a thought experiment. They were intended to gauge a reaction, but from individual publishers that Wizards could silence with an NDA, not from the public at large. For all intents and purposes, the OGL 1.1 that was leaked to the press was supposed to go forward. Wizards has realized that they made a mistake and they are walking back numerous parts of the leaked OGL 1.1, saying that, “any change this major could only have been done well if we were willing to take that feedback, no matter how it was provided–so we are.”
However Wizards wants to spin it, the fact is that if hundreds of thousands of fans hadn’t said something on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit, the current capitulation would have most likely happened after the OGL 1.1 was released. “Finally,” Wizards of the Coast ends their statement, “we’d appreciate the chance to make this right… We won’t let you down.” It may be too late for that.
[Editor’s Note: This article is a breaking news story, and the information cited on this page will change as the story unfolds. Our writers are updating this article as new information is released.]
Want more io9 news? Sign up for our newsletter to get the most up-to-date reporting on D&D and the OGL. Or check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
George Lois Changed Magazines—And Pop Culture—Forever
As an art director for Esquire in the 1960s, George Lois assailed Muhammad Ali with arrows, drowned Andy Warhol in a can of soup, and prepped Richard Nixon’s profile for a close-up. He stunned minds to attention, making magazine covers that spoke so urgently, they muted an entire newsstand’s worth of bold headlines. Through Lois’s work, history was reified.
I wasn’t alive in the ’60s, but I can tell you that many of the era’s visual markers that arise in my mind were made by Lois. (And I’m surely not alone in this—the Museum of Modern Art secured several of his works for its permanent collection.) He was a fierce and uncompromising visual visionary, a provocateur whose wordless commentary refracted America through dozens of roughly 8-by-10-inch canvases. He possessed an uncanny ability to channel collective sentiment in a time of deep political divide, but more than that, he transmitted messages that America didn’t realize it was ready to embrace. Until he died this past weekend at age 91, George Lois was the greatest living magazine art director. He will be remembered as a pioneering graphic artist of the 20th century.
Before Esquire, Lois made his bones as an ad man developing campaigns for Xerox and John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. He was Bronx-born—brash, passionate, and willing to throw down the gauntlet to defend his ideas. Rumored to be the inspiration for Mad Men’s Don Draper, Lois rejected the comparison altogether (which is fair, because Draper didn’t have nearly as tight a grip on the counterculture as Lois did). Through advertising, Lois honed his stylish and daring sensibilities, which would carry him through a decade in magazines and then on to MTV, where he rescued a flailing brand and turned it into a zeitgeist-defining entity.
In 2019, when Peter Mendelsund and I began redesigning The Atlantic, no designer had more influence on us. Lois’s work left us no choice but to contend with it, occupying, as it does, a dominant space in the cultural imagination. We studied his covers, seeking to bring a similar sensibility to The Atlantic, which is to say we tried to copy him often. A common thread in Lois’s most searing designs is the relationship of typography to image. He frequently relied on a striking central visual component to anchor the cover while the rest of the elements remained deferential. This required bravery—as well as immense trust in the public—and removed the onus from the language. He reduced the cover’s typography to Lilliputian scale in order to harness the image’s massive power.
In 1968, Lois subjected Ali to the fate of Saint Sebastian, using arrows to martyr the iconoclastic athlete. In the cover’s bottom right-hand corner sits a small headline of five words. This magazine cover, among the most famous in American history, manages to confront race, religion, and the Vietnam War in a single conceptual image that is as brutal as it is brilliant.
Over dozens of Esquire issues, he didn’t just create iconic images; he deployed existing icons in order to subvert, reframe, and recontextualize them. Take his 1964 cover of Kennedy, with a hand photographed in the foreground of the frame, wiping away an imagined tear. This meta visual move adds friction to a static image; it forces us to confront and process tragedy in a new way. It turns the magazine, newsstand price 60 cents, into something that transcends its form—into something more like art.
From Jiffy Lube ads to the campaign for “I Want My MTV” to the boxer Sonny Liston donning a Santa hat on the cover of Esquire, contemporary American culture looks and feels the way it does in part because of Lois’s genius. If you’ve ever been struck by a piece of design in our pages, you might now recognize the traces of his influence. Even if you don’t, I can tell you that it’s there (our December 2019 and November 2021 covers are both valiant attempts at homage). History has no choice but to remember George Lois; he was an integral part of the machine of remembering.
Drake, 21 Savage Ordered to Stop the ‘Counterfeit’ ‘Vogue’ Magazines for ‘Her Loss’ Promotion
A judge has ordered Drake and 21 Savage to stop using a fake Vogue cover story to promote their new collaborative album, Her Loss.
In a ruling Wednesday, Nov. 10 (obtained by Billboard), the judge ruled in favor of Vogue publisher Condé Nast, issuing a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction against the two rappers. The judge found that Condé Nast owned “valid and incontestable” trademarks for Vogue and its logo and that Drake, 21 Savage, and the communications firm Hiltzik Strategies “created and disseminated” counterfeit images of a Vogue cover, as well as a reproduction of full issue, without the magazine’s authorization.
More from Rolling Stone
“Condé Nast has a likelihood of success on its claims for federal and common law trademark infringement, false designation of origin and unfair competition, false endorsement, dilution, [and] false advertising,” the ruling states. The judge also said Drake and 21’s faux Vogue was “confusing consumers about the origin, sponsorship, or approval” of the magazine, “misleading consumers to believe that these are genuine and authentic materials associated Condé Nast and Vogue.”
A lawyer for Drake and 21 Savage did not immediately return Rolling Stone‘s request for comment, nor did Hiltzik Strategies. A lawyer for Condé Nast also did not immediately return a request for comment.
Drake and 21 Savage have been on a tear promoting their collaborative album Her Loss with a series of stunts. The duo faked a Saturday Night Live performance and performed in what appeared to be a gold bar for a faux Colors x Studios promotion. Their initial promotion, though — a doctored Vogue cover — led to a trademark infringement lawsuit filed by the magazine’s owner Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., also known as Condé Nast.
In the lawsuit, obtained by Rolling Stone, Condé Nast called the duo’s promotional stunt a “deceptive campaign” that was not authorized by the company. The fake Vogue association included posters and distribution of “a counterfeit issue of Vogue” in large cities across North America.
The suit accuses the rappers of deliberately mimicking rollouts the magazine uses in its own promotional campaigns to appear authentic and added that the rappers’ social media accounts contained “explicitly false statements: ‘Me and my brother on newsstands tomorrow!! Thanks @voguemagazine and Anna Wintour for the love and support on this historic moment. Her Loss Nov 4th.’”
However, per the complaint, Vogue and its editor-in-chief Wintour “have had no involvement in Her Loss or its promotion, and have not endorsed it in any way. Nor did Condé Nast authorize, much less support, the creation and widespread dissemination of a counterfeit issue of Vogue, or a counterfeit version of perhaps one of the most carefully curated covers in all of the publication business in service of promoting Defendants’ new album.“
“The confusion among the public is unmistakable,” the complaint further states, citing a number of media outlets who picked up the story as real and subsequent user comments believing it to be a real cover.
At the time of the lawsuit was filed, Larry Stein, a lawyer for the defendants, declined Rolling Stone’s request for comment on Tuesday having not yet reviewed the complaint. Hiltzik Strategies LLC, also named as a defendant in the suit alongside Drake and 21 Savage, declined Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
Condé Nast is seeking a minimum of $4 million in damages. It further seeks punitive damages alongside ending any trademark infringement.
This story was updated 11/10/22 at 12:58 p.m. ET with the judge’s ruling.
Best of Rolling Stone
Click here to read the full article.
Chris Evans has been named People magazine’s ‘Sexiest Man Alive’
CNN
—
People magazine has crowned actor Chris Evans this year’s Sexiest Man Alive.
The unveiling was made on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” with help from John Oliver and Dwayne Johnson.
In a bit that aired on the show, Oliver sat in the show’s audience as Colbert announced the winner from two finalists – Oliver and Evans, who Colbert called an “incandescent supernova of hotness.”
When Evans’ name was announced, a miffed Oliver prompted the audience to boo and stormed out angrily, demanding a “recount” as he exited.
The former “Captain America” star, who couldn’t appear on the show, was instead congratulated by Johnson on the set of their movie, “Red One.”
“It means a lot coming from a former Sexiest Man Alive,” Evans tells Johnson in the video.
Johnson, a 2016 Sexiest Man cover star, however, goes on to correct him: “I never give the title up….I’m Sexiest Man Alive in perpetuity, which means for life.”
Evans, confused, tries to get clarification, but Johnson stops him.
“Let me ask you a question, brother. Am I alive?… Am I still sexy? You bet your sexy mouth I am. We’re sharing it!”
Evans agrees and the two sexiest men alive live, apparently, happily ever after. But not before Johnson prompts his co-star to say something “sexy” into the camera and Evans obliges.
“Go vote tomorrow.”
Evans succeeds fellow Marvel alum Paul Rudd on the Sexiest mantel.
St. Louis school shooting: Police made entry about 4 minutes after a gunman with high-capacity magazines opened fire
CNN
—
When a 19-year-old gunman opened fire at a St. Louis school Monday, killing two and injuring several others, he was armed with a long gun and nearly a dozen high-capacity magazines – enough ammunition for a “much worse” situation, police said.
Authorities credited locked doors and a quick police response – including by off-duty officers – for preventing more killings at Central Visual and Performing Arts High School.
“This could have been much worse,” police Commissioner Michael Sack said. “The individual had almost a dozen 30-round … high-capacity magazines on him. That’s a whole lot of victims there.”
But the tragedy is still devastating for the victims’ families and the entire community, he said.
Student Alexandria Bell, 15, and teacher Jean Kuczka, 61, were killed in the shooting.
Alexandria was looking forward to her Sweet 16, her father told CNN affiliate KSDK. Kuczka was looking forward to retiring in a few years, her daughter told CNN.
The gunman died at a hospital after a gun battle with officers, Sack said. He was identified as Orlando Harris, who graduated from the school last year.
Across the country, at least 67 shootings have taken place on school grounds so far this year.
As the shooting unfolded in St. Louis, a Michigan prosecutor who just heard the guilty plea of a teen who killed four students last fall said she was no longer shocked to hear of another school shooting. “The fact that there is another school shooting does not surprise me – which is horrific,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said.
“We need to keep the public and inform the public … on how we can prevent gun violence. It is preventable, and we should never ever allow that to be something we just should have to live with.”
Alexandria had an outgoing personality, loved to dance and was a member of her high school’s junior varsity dance team, her father Andre Bell told KSDK.
Her friend Dejah Robinson said the two were planning to celebrate Halloween together this weekend. “She was always funny and always kept the smile on her face and kept everybody laughing,” Robinson said, fighting back tears.
Kuczka, a health and physical education teacher, was looking forward to retiring in the next few years, her daughter Abigail Kuczka told CNN.
“Jean was passionate for making a difference and enjoyed spending time with her family,” Abigail Kuczka said in a statement.
Alexis Allen-Brown was among the alumni who fondly remembered Jean Kuczka’s impact on her students. “She was kindhearted. She was sweet. She always made you laugh even when you wasn’t trying to laugh,” Allen-Brown said.
“She made you feel real, inside the class and out. She made you feel human. And she was just so sweet.”
In her biography on the school’s website, Kuczka said she had been at Central VPA High School since 2008. “I believe that every child is a unique human being and deserves a chance to learn,” she wrote.
Seven other teens were injured, some with gunshot or graze wounds. One had a fractured ankle. They were all in stable conditions, the police commissioner said.
It’s unclear how the gunman gained access to the school. Authorities have said the doors were locked.
The police commissioner declined to detail how the shooter got in. “I don’t want to make this easy for anybody else,” Sack said.
The gunman didn’t conceal his weapon when entering the school, Sack said.
“When he entered, it was out … there was no mystery about what was going to happen,” the commissioner said. “He had it out and entered in an aggressive, violent manner.”
Adrianne Bolden, a freshman at the school, told KSDK that students thought it was a drill until they heard the sirens and saw their teachers were scared.
“The teacher, she crawled over and she was asking for help to move the lockers to the door so they can’t get in,” Bolden said. “And we started hearing glass breaking from the outside and gunshots outside the door.”
Adrianne told KSDK that the class stayed put until students saw their assistant principal come up to one of the classroom’s locked windows. “We opened it, the teacher said to come on, and we all had to jump out the window,” Bolden recalled.
Math teacher David Williams told CNN everyone went into “drill mode,” turning off lights, locking doors and huddling in corners so they couldn’t be seen.
He said he heard someone trying to open the door and a man yell, “You are all going to f**king die.”
A short time later, a bullet came through one of the windows in his classroom, Williams said.
Williams’ classroom is on the third floor, where Sack said police engaged the shooter.
Eventually, an officer said she was outside, and the class ran out through nearby emergency doors.
Security personnel were at the school when the gunman arrived, St. Louis Public Schools Communications Director George Sells said.
“We had the seven personnel working in the building who did a wonderful job getting the alarm sounded quickly,” Sells said.
Sack said he did not know if the security guards at the school had guns.
“Not all of the public safety security officers are armed,” the police commissioner said.
He did say the school doors being locked likely delayed the gunman.
“The school was closed and the doors were locked,” Sack told CNN affiliate KMOV. “The security staff did an outstanding job identifying the suspect’s efforts to enter, and immediately notified other staff and ensured that we were contacted.”
After widespread controversy over the delayed response in confronting school shooters in Uvalde, Texas, and Parkland, Florida, Sack said responding officers in St. Louis wasted no time rushing into the school and stopping the gunman.
“There was no sidewalk conference. There was no discussion,” Sack said. “There was no, ‘Hey, where are you going to?’ They just went right in.”
A call about an active shooter at the high school came in around 9:11 a.m., according to a timeline provided by the commissioner.
Police arrived on scene and made entry four minutes later, at 9:15 a.m.
Officers found the gunman and began “engaging him in a gunfight” at 9:23 a.m. Two minutes later, officers reported the suspect was down.
Asked about the eight minutes between officers’ arrival and making contact with the gunman, Sack said “eight minutes isn’t very long,” and that officers had to maneuver through a big school with few entrances and crowds of students and staff who were evacuating.
Police found the suspect “not just by hearing the gunfire, but by talking to kids and teachers as they’re leaving,” Sack said.
As phone calls came in from people hiding in different locations, officers fanned out and searched for students and staff to escort them out of the building.
Officers who were at a church down the street for a fellow officer’s funeral also responded to the shooting, the commissioner said.
A SWAT team that was together for a training exercise was also able to quickly load up and get to the school to perform a secondary sweep of the building, Sack said.
Some officers were “off duty; some were in T-shirts, but they had their (ballistic) vests on,” the commissioner said. “They did an outstanding job.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story gave the wrong age for 15-year-old Alexandria Bell, who was killed in the shooting.
Drake Gifted $8000 Gaming PC From Twitch Streamer Xposed
While you’d all be aware that celebrities, despite their wealth, are given expensive shit for free all the time, today we’re going to take a look at one gift in particular. Partly because it’s a gaming PC, but also because we kinda have the receipt for it as well.
Esports guy Jake Lucky tweeted this out earlier today, and it certainly provoked a reaction:
Responses in the replies generally ranged from “it looks like shit” to “that’s massively overpriced” to “lmao all that just to gamble” (more on that soon). That first sentiment might be a bit much. I think this looks great! It’s a gaming PC, what do you expect, and the white lighting in these photos is an infinitely classier look than the electronic clown car aesthetic you often see on these kind of systems. I’m particularly fond of the lighting around the fans, it’s a very “starship corridor” look.
G/O Media may get a commission
Save 32% during prime day
Apple AirPods Pro
Transparently awesome
These earbuds have active noise cancellation, transparency mode to let in outside sound as needed, and active EQ to ensure you get the best out of your audio.
As for the price, well, there are some caveats here. The PC—which was put together by Paradox Customs—was actually bought for Drake as a gift by streamer Xposed (Paradox tells Kotaku they “hashed out” the component selection together), and in the time between the order first being placed and the PC actually arriving the market for a lot of expensive PC parts crashed for some reason. Throw in some Canadian taxes Xposed had to pay and Paradox say the actual cost in July 2022 is somewhere closer to $6500. Which, you know, is still ridiculously expensive for a PC, but it’s also not $8000.
How do we know that? Paradox tweeted this earlier today, which handily also gives us a chance to take a look at the kind of specs you can expect to see in a PC that cost more than my last three desktops combined.
As for who paid for the system and why, Xposed actually picked out this exact system for himself, then says he ordered a second for Drake because he had helped the rapper out with an earlier PC, but at the time had to skimp and get him a “prebuilt from Best Buy because it was short notice”:
In December 2021, Xposed signed a partnership deal with Stake, a shady and controversial online gambling site which Drake just happens to be continually streaming and promoting at the same time, and who shared this new PCs arrival on their socials.
Nintendo First-Party Titles Miss Out On EDGE Magazine’s GOTY 2021 List
Revered gaming mag EDGE has revealed its top 10 games of 2021 in the latest issue, and while Sony and Microsoft fans will be delighted to see platform exclusives from both PS5 and Xbox consoles put in an appearance, no Nintendo-developed or published games managed to make the list this year.
That’s not to say Switch doesn’t feature, of course. Six of the games in the top 10 are available on Nintendo’s console in some form, with Capcom’s excellent Monster Hunter Rise being a platform exclusive, no less (well, until 12th January when it’s scheduled for launch on PC) — but first-party Nintendo titles are absent from the publication’s GOTY selection this year.
That may be a little surprising to Nintendo fans, but it has to be said that it’s been a great year for games across the board, so the competition was fierce. Arkane Studios’ PS5 exclusive Deathloop came in first place, followed by indie darling Chicory: A Colorful Tale (recently launched on Switch) and PC tactical RPG Wildermyth in third place.
Other games playable on Switch that made the grade include Dungeon Encounters (fourth), the previously mentioned Monster Hunter Rise (sixth), Hitman 3 (seventh — Switch got the Cloud Version treatment), and Bonfire Peaks (eighth).
According to EDGE, the top 10 games of 2021 are as follows:
1. Deathloop
2. Chicory: A Colorful Tale
3. Wildermyth
4. Dungeon Encounters
5. Forza Horizon 5
6. Monster Hunter Rise
7. Hitman 3
8. Bonfire Peaks
9. Returnal
10. Psychonauts 2
Elsewhere, Metroid Dread and New Pokémon Snap were named as runners-up in the Nintendo-specific awards category (which Monster Hunter Rise won, of course).
As we noted above, the field is extremely strong this year, and while personally we would have worked Metroid Dread in there, it’s fantastic to see that every single one of the non-exclusive games listed is playable on Nintendo Switch, even if it’s a cloud version version in the case of Hitman 3. For Switch owners, that alone is worth celebrating after so many years (since the Wii era, really) of multiplatform games skipping Nintendo consoles entirely.
So, Nintendo the company may have missed out on an EDGE Award, but Switch gamers are able to sample a big chunk of that fine list. It’s definitely a great time to be playing video games.
Bask in the natural glory of a deer running into a garage door
With the arrival of spring, the world is beginning to wake up once again. Flowers are blooming, birds are chirping, and deer are tearing ass into driveways in order to slam headfirst into garage doors.
This last, wondrous demonstration of the season’s general feeling of optimism and joy was captured on video by YouTube channel ssnapier through footage so breathtaking we can almost hear David Attenborough’s narration as it plays. For a few seconds we just see a driveway and some motion in the sun-bleached stretch of road at the edge of the camera’s frame. Then a deer comes barreling into view on an apparent mission to throw itself into the garage door as hard as possible. The natural majesty of the herd animal is in full effect as it whacks against the door with a distorted crash just before a few more deer follow, skidding on the pavement, flopping all over each other, then taking back off to who-knows-where, their objective complete.
There’s silence for a moment before a man’s voice is heard from inside the house shouting at a dog to calm down then exclaiming, with perfect comedic timing: “What the fuck?”
Clearly, he’s overcome with the beauty of what he’s just been lucky enough to witness: A ballet choreographed by nature and performed with mysterious grace by planet Earth’s beautiful children.
Some people in the video’s comments suggest that the deer couldn’t see where they were going because the sun was too bright and the garage door was painted a light color. This seems very possible, but we also know that it’s just as important to take the natural world’s unpredictable artistry on its own terms as it is to try to explain it with scientific rationale. What weight does a description of a rainbow hold next to seeing one with your own eyes? Does knowing the evolutionary reasons for a cardinal’s bright red feathers help the bird appear any more stunning? No. And the same applies to this other remarkable display of an animal’s spectacular, soul-stirring drive to crash against a stationary object at full speed.
[via Boing Boing]
Send Great Job, Internet tips to gji@theonion.com
G/O Media may get a commission
Reply All’s P.J. Vogt departs amid The Test Kitchen controversy
Last year, the Condé Nast-owned Bon Appétit found itself hit with a reckoning of sorts, after numerous staffers of color—including Priya Krishna, Sohla El-Waylly, Rick Martinez, Gaby Melian, Molly Baz, and Carla Lalli Music—departed its popular Test Kitchen series of videos over accusations of lower pay compared to white colleagues, tokenization, stolen credit, and more. The scandal revealed a great deal about the inner workings and power differentials in a site that often strove to portray its staffers as a group of mutually respectful colleagues all just hanging out in the kitchen together, and highlighted disparities in power and pay throughout the site’s organization.
Now a different, but related, Test Kitchen is finding itself undergoing similar scrutiny, as Vulture reports that Sruthi Pinnamaneni and P.J. Vogt, a senior reporter and host, respectively, for the Reply All podcast, are stepping away from the series after their reporting on Bon Appétit brought to light similar issues at their own Spotify-owned Gimlet Media. Specifically, Eric Eddings, a former Gimlet staffer and co-host of The Nod podcast, outlined in a Twitter thread earlier this week a number of ways Vogt and Pinnamaneni, who covered Bon Appétit through their The Test Kitchen Spotify miniseries, were allegedly obstructive to efforts to diversify Gimlet’s staff, specifically during the period in which the company’s employees were pushing to unionize. Among other things, Eddings wrote that, “The BA staffers’ stories deserve to be told, but to me it’s damaging to have that reporting and storytelling come from two people who have actively and AGGRESSIVELY worked against multiple efforts to diversify Gimlet’s staff & content.” He went on to detail a number of instances in which Vogt and Pinnamaneni pushed back against organizing and diversification efforts.
Both Vogt and Pinnamaneni have issued apologies in light of Eddings’ statements; while Pinnamaneni was already planning to depart Reply All after The Test Kitchen miniseries, she has now left the show mid-production. Meanwhile, Vogt, who co-hosts Reply All with Alex Goldman and Emmanuel Dzotsi, has stated that he is going to “step away” from the podcast, with Vulture reporting that his departure from the series will be “permanent.” Gimlet Media has yet to issue a statement on the departures.