Ben Smith

But everything always goes badly there.

And I think people underestimate the extent to which, yeah, she is being given the job, maybe not as captain of the Titanic, but as first mate post-iceberg.

And that's a very, very challenging situation.

And I don't know, we should all be rooting for them to succeed.

Because I think the most natural thing here is that they cease to exist.

That's the course that they've been on for a long time.

So, A, look, there was no lunchroom.

It was all Slack, which did make it certainly totally insane.

And, you know, I guess I knew Barry there at the time.

And I think maybe I didn't take these things as personally.

Like, I think, you know, people react to things differently.

But I do think, you know, the Slack became some rough equivalent of Twitter, right?

And I do think the culture was more dominated by younger people who were more comfortable in social media and sometimes really did take on some of the crazier features of social media.

Like there was a 2000 person.

I wasn't allowed in most of the Slack because I wrote about the New York Times.

And so like I got tossed out of Slacks and Taylor Lorenz created a Slack called Ben Chat where people could come talk to me.

But there was one giant Slack with everybody in it.

And that was the one where when James Bennett – there was a controversy that I feel like we don't need to revisit involving the opinion editor.

But people were reacting – you can react with emojis and people were reacting with guillotines.

Oh, boy.