Molly Mirhashem's promotion to editorial director of Outside explains how an already worthless set of e-publications managed to sink even lower
Another victim of "impostor syndrome"—i.e., an incompetent editor who never should have been given a media job—discovers that no one is interested in her girlish attempts at writing
Molly Mirhashem is a mid-pack jogger, shitty writer, and standard “progressive” Millennial hypocrite-of-privilege who attended a liberal arts college in New England and has been participating in Outside’s anti-white, anti-male, and anti-quality standards for around five years.
I learned yesterday that Mirhashem—who like every promoter of damaging Wokish falsehoods has been serially professionally rewarded rather than punished for her lying—became the editorial director of all of Outside in November. This presumably means that she guides, or at least notices, the content across the company’s three running-first brands—Trail Runner, Women’s Running, and RUN (the latter formerly a section within Outside Online and, before that, a separate Outside offering titled Podium Runner).
It is therefore no wonder that, late last fall, these already disreputable and disposable e-pubs managed to suddenly become even worse across its already laughingstock running-related brands.\
My unpleasant history with Mirhashem dates back to June 2018, when she, then a lower-level editor with Outside, accepted an article pitch I sent her about the folks behind New Hampshire Cross-Country and New Hampshire Track and Field. After I quickly supplied the piece, Mirhashem sat on it for nine months, offering increasingly tenuous explanations for my piece being editorial jailed without a trial or even any charges. I eventually pulled the plug on the article, published the piece myself, and published the long e-mail exchange between me and Mirhashem pertaining to this ignominious behavior, eventually receiving a “kill fee” of $400 from Outside.
Five years ago, I had no idea that Mirhashem just one of hundreds of uncreative motormouth-slacktivists who was doing her job—derogating white male writers and article subjects so that such people could be replaced by illiterate and insincere dingbats of color, most of them female or “female.” Outside’s executive editor at the time, Alexandra Navas, had openly admitted in January 2018 that she was aiming to prevent an excess of whiteness. I’m surprised Mirhashem even accepted my pitch five months later, even if she admitted tha being from New Hampshire herself made her more interested in the story.
Thankfully, “Axie,” who looks a lot like Mirhashem like every other standard neurotic, tight-lipped, alabaster-skinned harridan who has taken opportunistic and unapologetic aim at white men over the past five years, left the publishing industry in August 2019. But fuck her for being another dumb-cunt cog in a bigoted machine, as she never deserved to spend a single day in even a low-level editorial role.
I omitted Mirhashem’s name from my 2019 series of griping-posts, which appeared on a Google-based version of Beck of the Pack as Substack did not yet exist. Believe it or not, I remained discreet for a while when bitching about the antics of the dispersed tribe of humorless, brain-dead clowns I would later know as the Wokish before catching wise: the Wokish are not imperfect humans striving to get better, they’re preening, unethical morons continually striving to reach new lows in both the provision of information and their own chuckle-headed cowardice.
The whole episode represented my first official instance of running afoul of anti-white-male Wokish lunacies. But it wasn’t anything close to the worst thing Mirhashem has done as a representative of the corporate media.
In December 2015, Mirhashem, then a freelancer, wrote a story centering on two filmmakers’ work on the Barkley Marathons and described their creator, Gary Cantrell, in glowing terms:
Mirhashem supplied this tribute to “Laz” a little less than five years before commissioning Martin Fritz Huber to write a hit piece on him based on sham accusations of racism from Ben Chan, a mentally unbalanced muckraking fat guy in a leopard-skin brief pretending to be a long-distance runner. To the extent the term “running community” retains any meaning, that community in the end rejected the media’s unvarnished smear campaign.
Mirhashem’s failed Substack newsletter, The Kick!, says everything anyone needs to know about both her degree of intellectual sophistication and the actual level of interest in ersatz social-justice issues when they're not being pumped through the Outside rags by the sheer force of money and ESG/DEI requirements. She may be getting to steer a large, proudly drunken publishing enterprise, but no one cares what she or anyone besides Alex Hutchinson has to say away from the deck of that hopefully doomed trash-barge.
The Kick! has had no new posts in over two years, and the companion Twitter/X account with 613 followers has had one retweet (on January 22) since Mirhashem apparently realized last May that no one with taste cares either about Wokish bigotries and stupidities or her bespoke-yet-boilerplate girlish tripe concerning same and abruptly gave up on that account, too.
Mirhashem, like everyone who understands deep down that she’s a scurrilous ass who doesn’t deserve a job that requires any kind of objective cogitation, has declared herself a victim of “impostor syndrome.” Interestingly, the only people who seem worried that they might be suffering from this affliction are women who are hold positions they aren’t qualified to hold and are abysmal and superfluous “workers.”
Jen Ator, who was the editor-in-chief of Women’s Running for two years before being invited to depart in December 2021, is another victim of this oddly targeted “syndrome.”
Ator and fellow impostor Erin Strout are now both getting assignments in RUN. This is a little over two years after Outside canned them both from Women's Running, and not long after Women's Running published a disjointed conversation between the two of them framed as an interview, a chat that amusingly included no mention of this dual December 2021 sacking.
We* already knew that Strout was a dolt as well as an asshole long, long ago, But Ator, while clearly indolent and replaceable in her two years on the job, is a more reticent figure and probably doesn't need to work anyway (she now lists herself on LinkedIn as a consultant).
On January 24, Run published a piece by Ator titled “10 Marathon Training Must-Haves.” While any article with a title implying that any ten items are "must-haves" for marathon training is patently insincere, this one is unusually bad for the genre. Ator not only recommends a slate of non-essential items, but in the process gives free advertising for nine specific products sold by nine distinct brands (the only generic suggestion is "graham crackers," although the brand pictured is Kellogg).
Seemingly all of RUN’s articles about training for marathons now include the author's stated goal of completing all six Abbott World Marathon Majors races. And many of these authors harbor this goal despite not being very interested in marathons--for example, Ator, no youngster, has run a total of three and none in three years. And none of them seem to be keeping an eye on the number of passenger airplanes that are falling apart on the go. I guess most of these people have access to private jets anyway.
Notes:
Why is the Berlin Marathon "infamous"? That means well-known for something negative. Nazis?
The clause "legends like marathon world record holder Eluid Kipchoge, American marathon record holder Keira D’Amato" seems to have eluded RUN's copy-editors.
"Abbott Major Marathons" is incorrect. So, see above note.
"Even if you’ve run a marathon before, you inevitably learn a lot of lessons over the course of a 16-week training program. Like, what socks not to wear when running in crazy-high humidity (hello, blisters!). Or what happens when you absentmindedly don’t eat and drink enough before running (hello, bonk!)." I learned these things shortly after I started running as a teenager. And you have to be more than "absentminded" to ignore the need to take in fluids and glucose during a hot-weather long run.
"While I still feel like a relative newbie to the marathon distance..." I wonder why.
"Here are the products I could not get through marathon training without this summer." How many of the ten items she goes on to list do you think she has ever used or will use even once?
“To be honest, I’m not really a shorts person. I’ve always preferred running in capris or leggings, but even thinking about capris in these summer temps makes me feel flustered and a little grossed out." Yeah. I think I'll take advice about shorts from someone who regularly wears them, thanks. And the link to the $75 "must-have" pair doesn't work.
Ator, Strout, and others get paid for generating this crap. But not much, so I guess her post-WR consulting gig must not be going any better than her career at WR did.
No stars at all, as this is total suck in a 360-degree kaleidoscopic shit-splotch if misguided and superfluous verbiage. This article needs to be unpublished and its author should return any payment she received for supplying it. But until Molly Mirhashem decides to leave or is shitcanned, Outside’s electronic trash-heap is likely to become among the tallest and most unstable “edifice’ of its type anywhere on the Internet.