All the Narcissism That's Fit to Print

Oh, my.

Oh.

My.

The cover article of the next issue of the New York Times Magazine is by Emily Gould, and it's now online. At first, I wasn't going to post about this, because that seems like aiding and abetting. But I had to at least point it out, in the way that I might alert you to a tornado forming behind your back.

Gould formerly wrote for Gawker, the site that thrillingly proves how ineffectively certain New Yorkers can cloak insecurity and a bottomless need for attention with bad jokes and disaffection. I skimmed through all of the nearly 8,000 words of the magazine piece, just to make sure it was as uneventful as it promised to be.

This early paragraph gives a pretty good idea of the whole thing:

Henry, seemingly alone among our generation, went out of his way to keep his online presence minimal. Now that we’ve broken up, I appreciate this about him — it’s pretty much impossible to torture myself by Google-stalking him. But back then, what this meant was that he was never particularly thrilled to be written about. Sometimes he was enraged.

As one of hundreds of commenters has already responded:

At first, I thought I was reading the sophomore page of the student newspaper at Harding High in Yokelville, Ohio. Then I realized that it was the New York Times.

Or, as another, more precise reader put it:

ZZZZZZZ