Those tastes-for safe sex, bareback, rimming, kissing, S&M, nipples, PNP!, no PNP!, and oh so much more!-are enumerated in your profile. There are photos of you which anyone can see, and also photos you can selectively lock or unlock. You can email, you can chat, you can (oh, can you ever) block. You can say if you're looking for "Right Now." You can see the particular people who have looked at your profile, and therefore the people who have looked at it, thought about it, and made the choice not to contact you, which can lead to agonizing minutes of self-doubt. Agonizing minutes turn into dull hours, and there goes your evening.

Part of the, how shall we say, charm of Manhunt for many of its users has been its resistance, since its early days in 2002, to any kind of substantive redesign. Yes, there have been a few tweaks here and there (ha!), but as other cruising sites like Gay.com and Adam4Adam.com regularly updated their look, adding more features and more flash, Manhunt has remained stubbornly the same: familiar, modest, even cozy. And staying the same in this case meant surging ahead: by December 2006, Manhunt said it surpassed Gay.com as the Web's largest
LGBT-targeted site.

Well, yesterday that charmed time came to an end, and all of us lost a little bit more of our innocence than we had previously lost. Manhunt.net has been redesigned.

It has been given, says the site, "a slicker look and feel." Did they really have to bring lubriciousness into it? For shame. Because the old design was, for us gays (who may like change even less than other people), kind of treasurable. The old design was goofy and even a little comedic, a little ironic. You got so used to it! There were
stubby little words in white and orange, and sometimes they flashed. The edges were rounded. There was so much blue! The backgrounds were so blue!

Now the backgrounds are a scary gun-metal grey, like the space ship in Alien. Little bits of blue poke out here and there, but a darker blue than before, a shamed blue. It is all very dark, dark and impersonal. The blown-up logo looks like an Aztec rune gone wrong (Arrows! A question mark! What does it mean?!). And the page is divided into many small boxes with very pointy edges, for things like Links, New Mail, Online Buddies, Blogs, Shopping, and Party Pics. It is hard to imagine that there can be this many small boxes on a single web page.

There is no goofiness, no irony. This is Sex, the new site says, and you are Going To Have It. Or, not: the palpable chill of the new design is something of a buzz kill. Just as the Internet got people off the streets and into each others' apartments in the first place, so the new Manhunt design discourages even going to each others' apartments. With the introduction of their video chat, and their spin-off OnTheHunt.com, launched in 2008, they have directly and indirectly been encouraging users to create porn when they could be searching for partners. There's not even a need for in-person interaction at all. You're tired! It's raining! Why take that train up
to Hell's Kitchen when, instead of being on the hunt, you can be OnTheHunt? Virtual performance in lieu of performance anxiety! Ah, Manhunt! Ah, humanity!

Well, though it upset me, and may momentarily confuse some guys looking for after-work action tonight, chances are the redesign won't be as effective as precious, precious marriage in outraging the gay community. Emailed for comment, one user gave a typical answer: "eh its ok, liked it a bit better before, but just getting used to it. whatre u up to? wanna fuck?"

Mike Bloomberg: The Ideal New Yorker, But Not The Ideal Mayor

Zachary Woolfe writes about opera for the New York Observer.

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In a city where 63 percent of respondents think the economy is "bad," and only 12 percent see it getting "better"; in a city where 59 percent are making "just enough to pay bills" and 38 percent are "very" concerned about being out of a job in the next twelve months; in a city where 80 percent are "concerned" about not having enough money for retirement, is it any surprise that 55 percent think it's "time for a new person" as mayor?

And this in the same poll that finds Bloomberg with an approval rating of 60 percent! I don't think that the wish-fulfillment aspect of his success can be overstated. Here is the ideal New Yorker, the richest man in town, the self-made tycoon, the dry Jewish wit, with the ability to insulate himself from what anyone thinks, an ability that can come across as, simply, assholeish, but that reads to many people as, simply, the dream: as freedom.

But people seem to hope, to assume, that that freedom is the freedom to do things, to make things happen; 59 percent in this poll think that the city's economy is something a mayor "can" do a lot about, which makes it more than a tad disappointing when they perceive that not "a lot" is happening.

And the three things that the respondents identify most closely with the mayor-education, taxes, and the term limits change-happen to be the three things they're most upset about. 54 percent are not satisfied by the quality of the city's public schools, a number that climbs to 61 percent among Black respondents. 58 percent have seen their city taxes rise since the mayor took office. 58 percent disapprove of the term limits extension.

The poll also revealed something shocking: 1% of New Yorkers think that Bloomberg is "Nice guy/pleasant to people." Either New York Observer reporter Azi Paybarah is answering this poll and has Stockholm Syndrome or I do not know who the fuck those 6.83 people are or what they're smoking. For all of Bloomberg's strengths, "nice" and "pleasant" are not the words to describe his attractions.

Forty years ago this summer, Jimmy Breslin wrote a cover article for New York magazine. "Is Lindsay Too Tall to be Mayor?" it was called, when "too tall" means "too Manhattanish, too removed from the problems of the street corners":

John Lindsay was a striking, handsome, cool, towering figure as he walked the streets of Harlem and was acclaimed across the country as future Presidential material. But now, take Lindsay off the front pages of the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times or Chicago Sun-Times and put him on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Put him there with the schools closed and the garbage not picked up and the robberies and assaults way up. Put him there in a crowd of stumpy, bulging, balding Bronxites. Do this, and you do not have a towering figure anymore. You have a bony Protestant from Yale and Wall Street whose height makes him a conspicuous target for the stumpy little people who yell up at him, "Lindsay, make the robbers go away or you go away!"

"Suddenly," Breslin wrote, "it is not good to be so tall and handsome." Now Bloomberg, I assure you, is not a tall fellow, nor is he handsome in the way John Lindsay was handsome. But he is tall and handsome in Breslin's sense, in the sense that 57 percent of the Times poll's respondents say that he "pays too much attention to Manhattan and not enough to the other boroughs."

In fact, height has been an issue for Bloomberg before, an issue of memory, or what many of us would call truth-telling. A month after he was elected in November 2001, Newsday reported that Bloomberg's driver's license gave his height as 5-foot-10, a figure easily 3 or 4 inches too high. Then, on December 31 of that year, with Bloomberg about to be sworn in as mayor, the same paper joined him for an inspection of the stage. "When you're 5-10 like me, you want to make sure the podium isn't too low," he said, not joking. The article continues, "The new mayor has refused to give his actual height." As of December 2006, he hadn't changed his license information.

This combination of inaccuracy and stonewalling, the tendency to fudge facts and then stymie those who try to clarify them, is a defining characteristic of Bloomberg, who is always trying to have it both ways. He's a self-proclaimed gay rights advocate who nevertheless appealed, over the objections of gay advocates and elected officials, a 2005 lower-court decision allowing same-sex marriage. He's an active courter of Democrats, women, and minorities even as he assiduously raises funds for Republican state senate candidates pushing an anti-choice, anti-schools agenda.

It's entirely possible that the Times poll will turn out to have been a false start, that Thompson will remain a nonentity, unknown by three-quarters of voters. But it's established one thing beyond a doubt: Bloomberg, at 5-foot-7, is too tall to be mayor.

Previously: Tina Brown and CEOs Deep in Denial About the Death of Publishing

Zachary Woolfe grew up on the South Shore of Long Island, tutors Upper East Side high-schoolers by afternoon/early evening, and enjoys opera and himself. He also writes about the U.S. Open for The New York Observer.

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In the book, released in English in 2006 as The Mystery Guest, Boullier recounts his invitation-by an ex-girlfriend to whom he hadn't spoken in years-to be the eponymous "mystery guest" at Calle's thirty-seventh birthday party in 1990. Every year in the '80s and early '90s, she hosted a birthday party to which she'd invite the number of guests corresponding to the age she was turning, and to which one guest would bring someone Calle didn't know and who would symbolize The Future, in all its unpredictability.

Sometime between then and now, there was love and there was loss.

Boullier's appointment as mystery guest was productive for both him and Calle: they commenced a long-term relationship. Then, suddenly, he broke it off, in an e-mail ending "Prenez soin de vous," which translates to "Take care of yourself," also the title of Calle's show, first presented as the French submission to the 2007 Venice Biennale and now at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea until June 6.

Calle's work from the 1970s and '80s are voyeuristic, stunts like calling the people in an address book she had found in the street to ask them about the owner. Her recent work is more consistently focused on herself-but is always funny, always playful, without ever being self-deprecating in the standard sense and without losing its edge of menace and paranoia. For "Take Care of Yourself," she has enlisted over a hundred women of various backgrounds and professions to read Boullier's break-up email and respond to it. Singers sing it, criminologists analyze the author's psyche, proofreaders dissect its grammar. Some of the names are familiar-Jeanne Moreau, Laurie Anderson, Feist-but most are unknown members of the haute bourgeoisie, lawyers, doctors, and scholars.

Calle herself is almost absent from the work, appearing only in a video in which she talks to a family counselor about the relationship and its aftermath, while sitting next to a chair containing a printout of the email. It's her intention that the two protagonists in this drama remain invisible (it would be an even stronger show if she'd left herself out entirely). Yet of course they dominate the proceedings, particularly Boullier, whose name doesn't appear once; the email ends with an "X," but it's unclear whether this was Boullier's own gesture or Calle's redaction.

Calle's point is about the force people exert in absence, and the spectacle of these successful women forced to chase a man's shadow is intensely melancholy.

Also melancholy is that, even with hugely blown-up photos of most of the women reading the email alongside the displays of the responses they produced, they remain ciphers. The artist of whom the exercise is most reminiscent is Vanessa Beecroft, who employs armies of models-always female, almost always scantily clad-in the performance of silent, affectless, nearly motionless rituals. Calle's women are accomplished and prosperous, but they're as inaccessible as Beecroft's. They do their work diligently and go home; they are unaware of one another and there's no sense of feminist celebration or mutual regard. (This may be being a woman today.) It's eerie that a show so obsessed with emotion is so devoid of personalities, but Calle identifies that as the way we live now.

Yet there is something affecting about everyone's diligent, guild-like professionalism-and perhaps the most extraordinary thing about the show at this particular moment is seeing so many people so happily employed, particularly women.

And women do seem to have the last laugh: the literary scholar who reads the email for textual antecedents identifies "Prenez soin de vous," Boullier's send-off, from the work of Madame de Sévigné, the great 17th-century French letter writer. But Calle is too smart to think that professional success has meant that women have "won" anything. She's got her name in big letters outside of the Paula Cooper Gallery, of course. But the size of both the name and the crowds enticed by it are dwarfed by those of Picasso at the Gagosian next door.

Previously: On Daphne Merkin

Zachary Woolfe grew up on the South Shore of Long Island, tutors Upper East Side high-schoolers by afternoon/early evening, and enjoys opera and himself. He also writes about the U.S. Open for The New York Observer.

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In memoirs, as with so much else, it comes down to: celebrities and the rest of us. There will be incredible nuggets in, say, Rue McClanahan's autobiography-it's just a fact. But the rest of us need to try a lot harder and write a lot better if we're going to make people care about those years we spent high or the time Dad raped us. The best non-McClanahan personal histories telescope outward, starting with the writer's experience, but somehow along the way picking up implications, consequences, interest!

Daphne Merkin's pieces, on the other hand, always start with an intriguing subject-family, or class, or sexuality, or motherhood-and inexorably wind up being All About Her.

This narcissism fails even her own criteria for self-revelation, defined in 2006, when she told an interviewer: "I have very strong feelings about self-revelation. It is an art. Tina Brown once said to me, 'The art of self-exposure is not simply catharsis.' When I write personally, I truly try and think: 'If I were reading about me, would I want to know this much? Have I gone on too much here?'"

So this piece about Merkin's depression, as it goes on too much, fails even to harrow-the very least any good illness memoir can do. And it's because not much happens. The piece refers to the writer's lifelong ("I do know that by the age of 5 or 6...I had begun to be apprehensive about what lay in wait for me") battle with the disease, and comes into focus around her 2008 hospitalization. The main drama, picked up for a paragraph or two, is whether or not she will opt for the scary but newly fashionable electro-convulsive therapy that may give her relief. Will she?! Won't she?! (She doesn't.)

In fact, she thinks (or projects) that her Freudian analyst is perhaps pushing ECT because of Merkin's fame:

Perhaps I had frightened him with my insistent talk of wanting to cut out for good; perhaps he didn't want to be held responsible for the death of a patient who compulsively wrote about herself and would undoubtedly leave evidence that would tie him to her.

Among other ways that this does not make sense, it might have occurred to her that suicides are incapable of writing confessional essays from beyond the grave.

It's been fully eight years since Salon declared "Depression mania!" and asked, "Why has a cultural cottage industry sprung up around the most isolating of illnesses?" William Styron's Darkness Visible, the touchstone of literary writing about depression, came out in 1990. Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon, the pharmaceutical heir's account of both our cultural and his own depression, won the 2001 National Book Award.

Pretending, as Merkin does, that depression remains a little-known, broadly ignored condition is disingenuous. (Though not nearly as disingenuous as her dubious "disclaimer," in a March 21 blame-the-victims Times op-ed piece about Bernie Madoff, that she had "a sibling who did business with him," by which she meant her brother Ezra–who is being sued by, among others, Mort Zuckerman, the New York Law School, and New York University for, in some cases, running a negligent "feeder fund" for Madoff's Ponzi schemes.

So, if there's no real story here with Merkin, we can at least expect a good story. Or, not. Merkin's prose is flat and unevocative; the best she can muster to describe herself is as "lost in the Gothic kingdom of depression." (This writing style may itself be a sign of depression.)

She remains as self-congratulatory as she was in 1989, when she declared herself "daringly open to the untried and untrodden on an intellectual level." As usual, while discussing processes much larger than any individual, she claims center stage: "You could say that the history of depression medication and my personal history came of age together, with me in the starring role of a lab rat." After the Madoff disclaimer became a debacle, Merkin defended her piece by saying that she "had something of sufficient interest to say that had not been previously aired." Similarly, her reason for pulling through her latest bout with depression is focused on her indispensable voice: "I had things I wanted to say."

Zachary Woolfe grew up on the South Shore of Long Island, tutors Upper East Side high-schoolers by afternoon/early evening, and enjoys opera and himself. He also writes about the U.S. Open for The New York Observer.

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