Member-only story
Stockholm, August 1, 2023
When my favorite publication, The Awl, was alive, they did a column called “Weather Reviews” in which they rated New York City’s weather. Tom Scocca wrote on a 4-star day that was January 18, 2018:
The brightness was expansive, unfaltering. It was cold enough to numb the face — correctly, appropriately, perfectly cold. A whole solid winter might be built of days like this, if only there were enough of them to find and stack together.
I hereby want to pay a small tribute to The Awl, especially the writings of Alex Balk. They were one of the reasons I came back to blogging. I was too involved with the HTML-CSS design of my Tumblr template when publications like The Awl made me understand that it’s the content, no matter how SEO-unfriendly it is, that matters the most. The Awl was the opposite of clickbait. The staff wrote posts because they loved writing. I’m quite sure it did not give them any big bucks either.
Alex Balk’s writings in specific were sad but hilarious. My nihilistic dose of culture for the day. The sadness accumulated in him throughout the years, and he, I assume, reached a difficult state of emptiness. He announced The Awl dead, and cleaned his Twitter (X now??) account of all his tweets (he actually did this before closing The Awl and wrote about it…
