The Official Pitchfork Obituary

I met the man I am dating now 12 years ago, at our college newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, where we sometimes found ourselves at adjacent desktops, editing the next day’s copy. “Fun and games,” we called ourselves self-deprecatingly, because we oversaw music and sports, respectively. Because in the hierarchy of newsworthiness, we ranked below the more serious work coming out of features and the city desk. He was at baseball games, recording batting averages and surprise home runs. I was drinking PBRs with members of local bands. Our colleagues were covering council meetings and murders, drug scandals and Greek life. We were not the same.

I wrote my first Pitchfork review in 2019, seven years after college graduation, three and half years before this week’s announcement that the site would be folded into GQ and half the staff were laid off. Long before, I’d been disabused of the notion of “making it,” because media jobs never paid enough to afford my insulin, much less my thrifting habit, but I knew writing for the site was as close as I would get. In a notebook, right around the time I met Aaron, I’d written a list of life goals — ”short story in the New Yorker,” one read. “Review for Pitchfork,” read another.