Free Tionna

Yesterday I promised to start ganking all my post ideas from io9, the newest outpost of the Gawker webpire. Today, in the interest of equal time, I'm going to shake my fist at Gawker.com's dark lord, Nick Denton, for dropping one of his flagship site's most beloved features: Ask Tionna, the weekly advice column from the outrageous and brilliantly funny Tionna Tee Smalls, author of Girl, Get Your Mind Right and blogster of Talk Dat Ish.

I won't guess at Denton's motives for dropping Tionna—okay, I will. Did he worry there was too much "laughing at," as opposed to "laughing with"? Or did he think she just gave lousy advice?

Both understandable concerns, but both wrong. Tionna is a star not because she fits the "sassy Black lady" stereotype, or because her writing is super-loopy—but because her writing is humane, because it shines with wit and charm, and because, dang it, she represents everything that's best about the New York that Gawker is supposed to speak up for. She's proof that you can be a bold, shameless self-promoter without being a self-absorbed media leech.

I say, Manhattan's navel-gazing billionaires can keep their puff pieces in the Times: just let the rest of us have Ms. Smalls.