It’s been almost eight months since entertainment writer and TV recapper extraordinaire Richard Lawson jumped into The Atlantic Wire. After racking up 2.4 million monthly views as Gawker’s most popular writer, you’d think Lawson would want to stay put.

But in Mediabistro’s latest So What Do You Do? interview, the scribe said he left Nick Denton‘s empire simply because it was time to “grow up.”

“After a while, the Gawker snark — for lack of a less heavy word — can get a bit tiring. I think it’s great and I think it has its place, but I felt like I wanted to be a little more mature, I guess,” he said. ”I love all of the writing at Gawker still, but just for myself, I’m getting a chance to do more serious movie reviews and stuff I think wouldn’t have necessarily played out well on Gawker.”