Annals of Narcissism: Manhunt, Redesigned, Is Now The Gay Skynet–And It Wants You To Stay Home @10:31 PM
The headquarters of Manhunt.net, a website that, as Wikipedia puts it, "facilitates same-sex introductions," are located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a worldwide center of learning and racial profiling. And other types of
profiling as well! Coursing through the Manhunt servers are the profiles of the service's 1.5 million users, which rush towards each other at about twenty-three miles per hour, the speed at which fluid may be propelled through the male human urethra into whoever or whatever one desires, in whatever manner one desires it. READ MORE 6
Annals of Narcissism: Mayor Mike Bloomberg, The Ideal New Yorker, But Not The Ideal Mayor @3:10 PM
It would be a shame if the mumbo-jumbo up in Albany entirely distracted us from the really remarkable new Times/Cornell/NY1 poll. Though I wouldn't blame someone for thinking that Times reporter David Chen and his top boss Bill Keller made up the results at lunch on Monday, and though I doubt that Bill Thompson's mayoral campaign will do much to take advantage of what a less dully genial candidate might think of as an unmatched opportunity, it is nonetheless the first tangible victory for democracy in the city this year—the first time it seems even possible that Michael Bloomberg's millions might be spent in vain. READ MORE 10
Annals Of Narcissism: Sophie Calle @2:58 PM
Sophie <3 Grégoire scrawled on a notebook: that is the way it would have gone down in an ordinary relationship. But because we are talking about high rollers in the French arts scene, Grégoire Boullier dedicated a genre-bending book to the conceptual artist Sophie Calle in 2004. In return, she dedicated, after a fashion, a major traveling art show to him. Or, rather, to telling him to fuck off. READ MORE 1
Annals of Narcissism: On Daphne Merkin @11:20 AM
"Recently I arrived at what I consider to be a dramatic new understanding of the concept of change." The quote-unironic!-is the first sentence of a 1989 Times article by Daphne Merkin, the writer whose chosen form is the personal history (her one novel, Enchantment, is about as fictional as Primary Colors, and she is the author of a memoir already). But little has changed, in tone or content, in the twenty years that have intervened between that "dramatic new understanding" and "A Journey Through Darkness," the 8000-word account of her depression that was the cover article of yesterday's New York Times magazine. READ MORE 15
