Hey Rookie, Welcome to the Big League

Don’t get me wrong, we’re totally excited about Tablet Magazine’s makeover. We just can’t help feeling a little ticked off, honestly, since the water fountain talk this morning was all “Tavi this” and “Rookie that.” Sure, Tavi (Gevinson, duh) is everywhere, having shed her precocious teen fashion blogging image and taken on the role of precocious teen online magazine editor. And, yes, The Scroll has followed the Tavi chronicles with more than casual interest (she is, after all, Of The Tribe). And fine, maybe we are kind of jealous of her youthful spirit and online popularity, and wish we were invited to her bat mitzvah or at least got one of the giveaways. But launching Rookie, her brand-new Website for teenage girls, the DAY before Tablet’s re-launch? That was just mean. We may as well have worn the same thing to school today. Even though you’d probably look cooler and quirkier and say funny things that everyone would laugh at in the hallways, and we’d trip because it’s the first day of school and we just had to wear those new chunky wedges, or something.

Naturally, we had to get to the bottom of it. Luckily, our old pal MTV asked Gevinson the very question we wanted to know: why Labor Day? “We wanted to start in September but a lot of our schedule is based around the start of the week and it was awkward to start on a Thursday or Friday,” she explained, I imagine coolly. But then we read her editor’s note, where she writes, “Rookie is a place to make the best of the beautiful pain and cringe-worthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl,” and we realize that we sort of wish Rookie could have been around back when we were in high school. And that maybe we’ve been saying “we” all this time but I really mean me, and then she says, “When you’re sick of having to be happy all the time, we have lots of eye-rolling rants, too.” And it’s like, you GET me. I’m sorry I said all that stuff before. Let’s be friends?

Rookie
Related: How Sassy Is Tavi Gevinson? [NYT Magazine]
Earlier The New Teenage Jewish Fashionista