Times media writer Edward Wyatt penned a soft, round filing that was about the word "douche." It appeared on today's front page.

This word is one with which this website (and media network) has a wide breadth of experience with. In November, 2006, former Gawker scribe Emily Gould wrote:

Don't get us wrong. It's not that (50%) of our delicate ladyish sensibilities are offended or anything; far from it. It's just that, as vagina-havers, we want to branch out a little bit in the realm of vagina-related insults. Also, we couldn't help but notice that the trope is now so bitten and tired, it pretty much begs to be called "Already Over" (if Already Over wasn't Already Over, obvs). Plus, Dolce has co-opted it for his own use. What a fucking asswizard!

Before we go any further, can we just say that "azzwizard" is kind of magical?

Anyway. People, as we are, can't be without first-stone casters. Observe:

I really, really hope there aren't actually 17,400 results for the word "douche" on Gawker websites that can't be cross-referenced with Joe Dolce.

But for a moment, back to Wyatt's piece. He didn't write about how the word evolved from a technical term of feminine hygiene to a schoolyard pejorative, to a favorite of bloggers and mediocre satire writers alike, to a Times media piece. No: that'd be too meta, and too interesting, and too far into the purview of their excellent After Deadline column.

In a newspaper where the word "fuck" is too vulgar as to only be printed once in its entire history—despite the word "fuck" and its entrenchment in our daily lives, in politics, popular culture, literature, and I'm sure its handy usage around Times' bullpens—they penned a piece based on the statistical usage and adoption into sitcom television, where every decent slang word goes to die.

It's filled with numbers about usage, and quotes from TV writers about how they employ it, like this one:

"As a writer, you're always reaching for a more potent way to call somebody a jerk," Dan Harmon, the creator of "Community," said about the word "douche." "This is a word that has evolved in the last couple of years - a thing that sounds like a thing you can't say."

It doesn't get much more interesting than that, except for a line about how the show that once presented the American Public with Dennis Franz's tuchus decided to give it an evolved go:

Users of the recently popular word "douche" defend its use, noting that it was invoked, usually with the suffix "bag," in the 1990s by the character Andy Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue," an ABC series that frequently pushed the boundaries of network acceptability.

Naturally, since this story dropped, the Gawker Weekend inbox has been brimming with glee and excitement.

There are a few angles to take on it. Mediaite's Joe Coscarelli reflects much of the sentiment I've already heard out there in his lede:

I bet you never thought you'd see the day when you could pick up a copy of the New York Times and see the word "douche" on page one. And we're not talking hygiene!

And NYTpicker, that anonymous scourge of the New York Times' newsroom, takes out his or her butcher knife and gets to work on how typically bullshit the numbers used to create this story are, making a special point to note that the Times calls the word "offensive to many people" but doesn't say who those people are:

But seeing TV reporter Edward Wyatt and the NYT base its front-page reporting on numbers the paper actually requested from the Parents Television Council — a notoriously conservative TV watchdog group that has brought 99 percent of all indecency complaints before the FCC (we learned that from an excellent 2004 NYT story) — makes us a little sick. The PTC has been around since 1995, founded by conservative commentator L. Brent Bozell, and is responsible for complaints to the FCC about the Janet Jackson nipple slip and cursing on "NYPD Blue."

NYTpicker's right, and Joe Coscarelli's right. It's patently ridiculous that the Times uses generalized opinions to substantiate their numbers, to help give their story a case. There's also something inevitably entertaining about watching a newspaper as prude as the Times give the word "douche" some kind of once-over, even if the story behind it is fairly flimsy.

But honestly, this all just kind of brings me down.

Believe me, the last thing I want to do is rain on the parade of fun that is the New York Times using the word "douche," as someone who can only die happy once Clark Hoyt calls one of the Styles writers a "fuckface" in his Public Editor column. But let's talk about this like adults, kind of, for a moment. As someone with a strange affection for vulgar language, I only see this as an intense letdown.

To do this story two years ago would've been one thing, as the numbers slowly rise into becoming a trend, before it hits fever pitch. But for this story to run now, without Styles writer Allen Salkin's byline—and Salkin would've done way better with this—is absurd. Besides the fact that it's boring and plucked from a bullshit ether, the potential they laid waste to with this one is absurd. Mainly: to address the issue of creating new terms that don't exhaust themselves more and more on each usage. For example:

Where did the word "douche" come from in it's literal, non-slang implication?
Who were the first people to make the word "douche" a pejorative?
Who appended the word "bag" to the word "douche"?
Who uses this word every day?
How long has it been around?
Who (besides Gould/Shafrir/Balk/Sicha-era Gawker) has called this word over?
And what media outlets use it on a regular basis? But mostly:
Who's offended by the word?

There's nothing interesting about the word "mediocre" unless it's placed in an interesting context. On the inverse, the word "fuck" is almost always interesting, if only because it begs the question of necessity. The idea behind using a word like "douche" or "fuck" is to emphasize or exclaim something, it's to aid a common goal of writing or speaking, the reason people like me love language: to communicate an idea to someone you otherwise couldn't.

But what does the word "douche" communicate, exactly, besides the kind of person who would use it?

Maybe someone who's just unsavory in some regard, or someone who's typically unaware of their uncouth behavior. Or someone who does something your way of going about things disagrees with. There're way too many words like it. Maybe people just enjoy the way it rolls off the tongue, or maybe people actually enjoy employing the connotation of a Feminine hygiene product (which is the point all you nu-Feminists should take to say the exact same thing Gould said three years ago).

But really, the word douche is just like the story the Times did on it, and the generalized sources—the "some people" who "may be offended" by it— they used. It's empty. It means nothing. It's a completely subjective assessment of somebody who does something you don't like. I know people who use the word "douchebag" when referring to other people; I'm willing to bet those same people use the word "douchebag" to refer to the people referring to them. And I'm most disappointed when people I know who use the word could find something more concise, or shocking, or linguistically artful to go with. It's sold at the Wal-Mart of pejoratives. It's cheap, it's made en masse, and there's nothing but bad preservatives in the ingredients. Let's all—The New York Times, Bloggers, TV Writers, Those Who Use The Word "Douchebag," Those Who You Would Call A "Douche," Bar Patrons, Sports Fans, English Professors, Joe Dolce—become better communicators, and find something better than the word "douche" and it's mediocre suffix "bag" to go with.

Or, you know, we could just judge each other a little less.

Since none of these things will probably happen in the foreseeable future, just go with "douchenozzle" until it does. At least it sounds funny.

[Related Reading - Commenter VioletViolet makes a salient point: "I still think the NY Times article on "vajajay" was worse, although at least it wasn't on the front page. When you're asking Gloria Steinem for her opinion on a term that's use was mostly limited to The Soup, you're in trouble."]

The lesson and the lede is that there's no quicker way to felch the sentiment and nostalgia out of something than to sit and watch six people at a table intellectualize the bone marrow out of it. The panel's lineup was kind of like The Real World as cast by a Kicking and Screaming-era Noah Baumbach: former Gawker blogger Emily Gould, Nirvana scholar and Come As You Are author Michael Azerrad, n+1 film critic A. S. Hamrah, Sassy magazine scholar and the table's riotgrrl expert, Marisa Meltzer, and moderator Mark Grief, an n+1 co-editor and literary shaman. Oh! I'm forgetting someone. From the press release: "Aaron Lake Smith makes a series of fanzines called Big Hands that have been described as "an ongoing treatise on disappointment."" Aaron, 25, was dressed in a red flannel shirt. He was not being ironic, and it actually appeared to be a nice shirt, though he probably hates it.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser. Aaron Lake Smith tried to remember his roots.

The room was fairly packed, and they got going at about 7:10 p.m. I'd brought a bottle of Diet Coke and Rum to mix in my seat, but this proved to be relatively difficult, as most of the people around us were actually listening pretty intently on what the panel had to say. I put down the sauce and picked up some old bills and started to write on them. I took the following notes: The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Azerrad's opening shot is something about Nirvana. Him and (Aaron Rose Smith) talked about 9/11 as the end of the 90s. The 90s ended a year after the 90s ended? Gould is quiet. Smith said parties were better in the 90s, but he was 15! Huffing glue is no longer socially acceptable, that's why. Term "cultural touchstones" has now been used seven times. Hamrah comes in with Anita Hill! Hamrah also noted that Winona Ryder shoplifting was the end of the 90s, nobody can tell if he's joking even after he says he's joking. 90s of light, 90s of darkness? Glee vs. Malaise? Heard these terms seven more times. Meltzer: Riot grrl, Riot grrl, Riot grrl, Riot grrl, something about Sassy. Makes a salient point that it was cooler to be a lesbian in the 90s. Emily looks bored. Azerrad is still talking about Nirvana. Sleepy. No phone service; intentional? Are they blocking me? This is My Dinner With Andre meets I Love The 90's. Except they're now talking about I Love The 90s, and the difference they fail to point out is that VH1 actually tries. Meta. Pop culture intellectualizing as sedative, falling asleep. Emily talking about Drudge breaking Lewinsky "stained dress" thing and I wake up. Hipster says 90s discussions were more interesting and I'm starting to believe him. Collectively, they're not so bad, taken apart, I feel like they're lobotomizing me. Mark Grief predictably tells everyone how wrong they are.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Michael Azerrad was the George Martin of Citizen Dick.

I stopped taking notes sometime around when they were discussing the "imminent failure of rap rock as evidenced by the Judgment Night soundtrack," because that about encapsulates the entire thing. But two more decent things happened.

1. Emily Gould was asked something by a girl in the second row what it's like to journal and chronicle one's life on the internet, and she somehow tied it back into the 90s. Not so interesting was the line of inquiry or the answer Gould gave so much as the confusing, ridiculous way she tried to make it relevant to the topic. Gould looked at her with a mixture of curiosity and sheer confusion, and I'm pretty sure Azerrad answered for her with something about Nirvana.

2. Marisa Meltzer and A.S. Hamrah, who was the panel's oldest and crankiest (thus: funniest) member got into it over Meltzer's reason for existence, Sassy magazine. I have no idea how they got there, but Hamrah basically called it a sham, noting that it was a magazine written by 24 year-olds, for 24 year-olds. Meltzer looked like she was about to punch Hamrah in the face, and noted that no, it was written for 16 year-olds. Like her. Hamrah then argued that, if that was the case, it was written by a bunch of 24 year-olds who thought they knew what 16 year-olds would be into, which was ostensibly the directive of all teen magazines, but really, just 24 year-olds impressing their own tastes, beliefs, and style onto impressionable 16 year-olds. Like Meltzer. He kept laying into her: "You want to know what 16 year-olds enjoy? Use a focus group." The kid in the flannel shirt then noted that he's lied several times during focus groups.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser. Marissa Meltzer used to be a rebel. Now she writes for the New York Times. And Slate.

Sure, there was other stuff - my highlight was Smith talking about how he's roamed from globalization protest to globalization protest, even though nobody else thought that was funny - but you get the idea: intelligent people asserting their intelligence in a dumb game of one-upsmanship is no smarter nor enlightening than an episode of Best Week Ever, and I'd take the Best Week Ever over this any day.

The person I brought with me - who, incidentally, wouldn't let me leave early - noted that they were too busy indulging in their own nonsense (the independent, the "cool," the "cultural touchstones" nobody actually gave a shit about) to not miss a bunch of things that would've helped make the night interesting. Among them: "Rollerblading, Dave Matthews Band, Beavis and Butthead, Carl Lewis, The Rachel hairstyle, The Hale-Bopp comet, HIV/AIDS." Might I add to that list: Counting Crows, the advent of TR:L, Gin Blossoms, Can't Hardly Wait (Aaron Smith, I'm looking at you), Michael Jordan, John Grisham. Another attendee thought Emily was pretty funny, and so did I. She looked relatively incredulous at even being there. Understandably.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Emily Gould wanted to say something about hooking up to "Say Goodbye" in college, but politely declined. Mark Grief would enjoy this song if he heard it several times.

We filed out, and I didn't have any higher a score at Flight Control than when we walked in, sadly. At a bar afterwards, someone noted that having a panel discussion was almost, in it of itself, a very 90s thing to do. And after I was politely asked to leave said bar for mixing my own drink (the aforementioned previous failure of a mixology experiment), the same person noted how 90s that was. He was right: the psudeo-coffee-shop intellectualizing of something that could probably make for an entertaining conversation is as outdated as it is disenchanting and utterly annoying. And I was so, so relieved that we live when we do.

"Speak no ill of a former Gawker writer," Denton once wrote, citing a longstanding, "unspoken rule" at his company, apparently intended to keep his loose confederation of caustic writers from turning on one another and collapsing his profit-making enterprise into an online black hole of self-reference and backbiting.

But some snark slaves couldn't help themselves — and Denton, it turns out, was foremost among them, especially after the CEO took direct control of his flagship website and started churning out blog posts. Breaking the directive in a lengthy item on his predecessor Gould's bed-hopping allowed the gossip merchant to surface some juicy (and worthwhile) dirt on wunderkind novelist Keith Gessen, even if it did betray a certain fascination with the Brooklyn literary set from whom the former business reporter believed himself to be reclaiming Gawker.

The goal posts had been moved: Speaking ill of a former Gawker writer was now allowed, it seemed, if confined to activities undertaken since leaving the company. This allowed any number of further items on Gould, who was turning into a bona fide fameball (and worthy subject of coverage).

But it turned out Denton had broken more sharply with the old Gawker norms than was readily apparent. Recapping Gould's story on Vanity Fair's website today, Jim Windolf reveals that the blog mogul last spring planted an embarrassing video of Gould that was shot at at Gawker Media event while she worked at the company, in which the blogger peformed "mock fellatio on a plastic tube:"

"When I finally met Emily," [onetime "Gawker Mascot" Andrew Krucoff] says, "I felt so bad about posting the blowjob video and I took it down. Yes, it came from within Gawker. Denton fed it to me and I was too eager to play his lapdog on that one."

Perhaps Denton's intent was more mischievous than vengeful; Gould herself once called him "a pranksterish rapscallion" of a boss. But in the same post, Gould also presaged the less charming, "much less okay" ways Denton might treat her, especially once she was out the door. (Denton had begged her to stay and offered an $80,000-$90,000 annual salary, former Gawker editor Choire Sicha told Windolf. Denton disputes that account.)

Gould left little question how the leak of the video felt from her side of things:

"That was the point where I was like, ‘Wow, I am actually kind of scared of this person,'" Gould says. "I had never during my time at Gawker witnessed Gawker being used as a tool to try to take someone down. It was more like, people take themselves down, and you watch, and you write about it. This was different. This was him having an agenda, and to watch people fall in line with it, it's very creepy."

We — oh fuck it, I — don't buy Gould's premise that Gawker coverage of her has been part of a filthy, inaccurate and somehow evil attack campaign. This is (and always has been) a gossip website, and Gould became a significant player in the world we write about long before she appeared on the cover of the Times magazine or signed a six-figure book deal.

That said: leaking an embarrassing in-house video — if that is what in fact actually happened — shot at a company event, to visit a sort of vengeance on an ex-employee is beyond the pale and beneath the man I ultimately work for.

(Especially because I got fairly plastered at the last company event. And acted really obnoxious with Ian Spiegelman. And may or may not have invited Richard Blakeley up to my place. To crash on the couch, I SWEAR.)

[Vanity Fair]

Right! There are other Gawker Media alum who have been blogging away in other places: The former Defamer crew have resuscitated Movieline and ex-Gawker writer Sheila McClear, is keeping ASSME.org well-stocked with contributors writing about living through this shitty media economy.

She calls Allison's two sidekicks Mary and Megan "equally terrifying alpha girlfriends." (Touché!) Also: "I meet Gould in the painfully sceney Balthazar cafe in New York’s Soho (her choice)." Dang.

However, we finally learn how Julia thinks her baffling Nonsociety startup will earn money!

"Her plan, however, is to earn a living from product endorsement on her nonsociety site. As she goes to great lengths to emphasise, this has never been done before, so its chance of success is uncertain (my conclusion, not hers)."

We knew it... although who knows if that will work. Blueprint Cleanse, anyone? Betsey Johnson? Cupcakes? May we interest you in a designer handbag?

Emily went to visit Keith in Russia. She stayed a month. Now she's back in New York. We suppose that sort of counts as "back together" except now, obviously, they are thousands of miles apart, again.

(The kitten we got Keith that he couldn't take because he was going to Russia did find a home.)

The End.

Gould, a former Gawker editor who institutionalized oversharing as an element of blog style, now plays the penitent. As a writer, she revealed details of her love life in the course of contributing to a gossip site, one that eventually used her exit as more gossip for the mill. Today, though, Gould can't resist the temptation to revisit her past:

Like an expatriate who reads every new novel that's set in her homeland, I read books about the Internet to remember the time I spent working and living there.

Gould argues that dependency on services like Twitter and Facebook to define ourselves gives us "inauthentic" relationships — representations of human connection, not the connection itself. But I stopped reading when she invoked theorist Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Benjamin's worries are still legitimate — his Teutonically hard-to-follow essay prophesized the TV-driven wars of the last two decades. But why is Emily Gould invoking Marxist theory to warn us of the dangers of Twitter and Tumblr? Because, like Shirky, she has a book she wants you to buy.

Gould concedes that such an experiment is unsustainable in the modern world. She'd just like to see more nuanced books about the internet, balancing positive effects with negative ones, like the way in which "social-media technologies are creating simulacra of social connection."

But even with this hedging Gould adds to an ongoing neoluddite meme that counts as contributors online sock puppeteer Lee Siegel (also considered a partial rather than full-blown internet hater) and a variety of others, many of them named at the top of Gould's essay. The meme surfaces more obliquely in the ongoing backlash against against online commenters and mean blogs and in the retreat from the internet by various high-profile bloggers.

The bloggers always come back. The comments sections continue to multiply. Lee Siegel still publishes online and must still contend with anonymous snipers. The best one can hope for, in walling away the modern world, are some new insights. Which you will then be DYING to blog.

[Technology Review]

The blogger's latest project—for Condé Nast's Men's Style website—is a directory mainly of women who've achieved some modicum of fame or notoriety on the web. The verdict on Gawker alumna Emily Gould—"That she actually isn't much of a writer has, so far, mostly escaped attention"—is rather bold for Sorgatz, himself such a recent arrival to the Manhattan media world.

But Sorgatz is far too modest in leaving himself out of the micro-celebrity rankings. Since arriving less than a year ago in New York, the dorky Fimoculous founder has cut an unlikely swathe through the geek-loving women of the city. (Yes, that's the Huffington Post's Rachel Sklar in the photograph above.)

In a feature for New York magazine on this "new class" of celebrity—only really new in the paucity of fans, if the truth were told—Sorgatz outlined eight steps to microfame. One key move is to associate with other bloggers. "From anonymous blog comments to frothy bar conversations, confidantes are needed to tout your reputation at every opportunity... The posse—or as media theoreticians call it, the network—creates influence that grows exponentially with its size."

That's advice that Sorgatz himself lives by. His latest romance—with the delightful Sklar—is on display on the media writer's Facebook page, where she's posted photographs of a recent weekend at Lockhart Steele's blogger-only shared house in the Hamptons. How did the geeky Sorgatz become such a seducer? "I wish I knew!" says a jealous rival. "I've seen him in action and it amazes me. Maybe they are wowed by his charm, media sound bites and shiny shoes? He's a good talker. I'm sure he plays up his dual outsider/insider angle too." Of course, there's a simpler explanation: he's micro-famous.

But such public exposure has its price as Sorgatz, an authority on internet culture, should know all too well. Leonora Epstein, one of Sklar's predecessors, has written up an account of her hook-ups with a man called Phil—whose fondness for shiny objects, spiky hairdos and the color red suggests she's referring instead to Sorgatz. The liaison ended when Phil, about to leave for a week in the Hamptons without Leonora, left his packing list on the desk. "Tent. Video camera. Condoms." That embarrassing list is now her screen saver.

"The lines between empowerment and self-promotion, between sharing and oversharing, between community and cliques, can be blurry," wrote Sorgatz for New York, presciently. "Nano-celebrity is there for the taking, if you really want it." Yes, but only if you really want it.

Rachel Sklar: Rex at the sea thinking "Oh my God how am I going to last an entire weekend with this girl?" Me thinking "When are we going to eat again?"

Our Suggestions For Jimmy:

Adam Carolla: We've never actually seen Kimmel look quite as happy on any TV appearance to date than during those beer-guzzling days of homo-erotic male bonding with Carolla, currently desperate for some much-needed post-Dancing With The Stars publicity.

Cameron Diaz: One of the co-stars of Kimmel's revenge video in which Ben Affleck managed to keep down a visible need to dry heave while millimeters away from Kimmel's mug, we've noted recently how eager the bed-hopping actress is for action. And so far, no amount of plumber butt crackage, receding hair lines, or drastic height differences have stopped her from jumping into the next bed!

Emily Gould: Any loyal reader of our siblings in snark over at Gawker are more than familiar with that epic battle between Kimmel and former Gawker blogger Emily Gould. Standing in for Larry King last year and feeling very important about it, Kimmel accosted Gould for daring to contribute to a site that caught him "drunk and talking loud" on the streets of Manhattan. But whenever we watch the clip, we can't help remembering why all those chubby little kindergarten boys would be mean to girls: they sooo wanted to take them behind the school bus and get them pregnant!

Our Suggestions For Sarah:

Seth Rogen: We don't know about Sarah, but we would have been more than a little miffed after seeing less-funny quasi-Jew Elizabeth Banks stealing her thunder by filming the (again) less-funny version of Silverman's original "I'm Fucking" video alongside the goofy and kinda Kimmel-esque Seth Rogen. What better way to kill two birds with one fuck stone than to team up with Seth and form the new and improved comedic union of uncomfortable love?

Britney Spears: Remember what we said about those mean boys on the playground? We've long suspected Silverman's borderline-cruel rant against Spears after her tragic VMA performance may have been a guise for an intense girl crush. And Britney, lest you forget, dabbled in the very chic girl-on-girl movement long before Lindsay and Sam made it "cool."

Doug The Dog: Because who wouldn't risk jail time to pucker up to this little twitchy bundle of chihuahua ass?

• IT'S OFFICIAL: KIMMEL AND SILVERMAN NO LONGER F*CKING [Vanity Fair]

From Emily Magazine, excerpted here and there for length:

"Before I get into this, I’ll save you the trouble of pointing out that I used to work at Gawker. I quit that job, and one of the reasons I quit was that I wasn’t comfortable with being shady, insulting, and two-faced. It’s not that I’m saying I’m some kind of moral beacon, I just am terrible at dissembling, acting one way to someone’s face and another way behind their back. And I’m not a hardnosed investigative journalist who will do anything for the story, no matter who gets hurts. I don’t like the idea of hurting people. It took me quite a while to realize this, and if you want to criticize me for having taken quite a while to realize this, go ahead. That’s valid. But just because I used to hurt people doesn’t mean I now have to approve of it when other people do.

"A woman named Susannah Breslin called me around the time that my Times magazine story came out, saying that she wanted to interview me for a piece she was writing about the Sex and the City movie... None of my quotes ended up in her article, which I was grateful for. However, I wasn’t particularly grateful when she wrote a post on her personal blog about how snotty I’d seemed on the phone. More recently, about the paragraph-long excerpt from an essay included in my book proposal that was posted on New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer blog, Breslin wrote a post on her blog entitled “Vomit,” which reads in part:

“This writing is so god awful I thought it was worth pointing out. I love the blogosphere, and the blogs, and the blogginess of the world, but one thing blogs have done is given people who write the perception they are writers.”

We'll break in here to judge—not professional, Suze. But, Em! We wouldn't have even known about this had you not called it to our attention. Anyway:

Yesterday afternoon I was waiting around for various deliveries and installations of things and I wasn’t screening my calls. So I picked up the phone. It was Jessica Coen, who used to work at Gawker and who now works at New York magazine’s Daily Intelligencer blog, I guess overseeing it somehow, though during our conversation she was quick to point out that it’s not like at Gawker — “I’m not in in there in Moveable Type or anything” — so I guess this means she doesn’t have direct control over anything anyone writes there.

Daily Intelligencer posts don’t have bylines, but because one of their editors has always been friendly to me in person and wrote me a supportive, fuck-the-haters type email when that Times piece came out, I’ve been assuming that the really ad hominem posts about me on there — which are the fourth and fifth Google results for my name, respectively — have been written by the other editor, Chris Rovzar, who I don’t remember ever having met. Rovzar is one of the best Gossip Girl recappers of our time, and that’s saying something. But his posts about me are not only gross, they’re full of basic factual errors. He accuses me of documenting my “burps and blow jobs” and says, innacurately, that I “while at Gawker [I] made the site all self-referential, to the detriment of pageviews.” Well, okay, except that my Gawker posts still get more pageviews than the posts of some writers who actually currently work there. He has also taken me to task for misrepresenting bloggers to America, and for using the personal pronoun too many times in a personal essay.

Anyway, back to my conversation with Jessica Coen. “We have a very good source who says that you got a million dollars from Regan Arthur at Little, Brown,” she told me. I told her that rumor was wrong in all its particulars. I didn’t know then that Publisher’s Weekly and Publisher’s Marketplace had already run items about the book’s sale, which were correct in all their particulars (except that PW daily called it a “memoir,” a word that makes my skin crawl and which apparently makes everyone else’s skin crawl, too. What is a 26 year old who hasn’t overcome an addiction or been a child soldier doing writing a MEMOIR? But it’s hard to figure out what else to call a book of autobiographical stories, I guess. That is a few too many words to fit onto a computer screen, apparently.)

Anyway, I told Jessica, off the record, to look for a press release, and then — stupidly! — I took the opportunity of having her on the phone to ask her why her site’s coverage of me was so personal and so negative. I don’t know what I wanted her to say, really. “I don’t like you and I never did”? That would have been kind of gratifying, I guess. Instead, though, she talked about how she was sure, having been there, I understood what it was like. And she “apologized.” She said,

“I’m sorry you’ve found it hurtful.”

Look, it’s not like Jessica Coen and I were ever friends, but there was a time — I guess when I worked at Gawker — that we were friendly.

Oh, and then there’s Rachel Sklar, who was so nice to me when I worked at Gawker, always sending me such long, chatty emails, especially when she wanted something she’d written to be linked to. Sometimes I’d write something about Julia Allison that would make her angry and she’d send me long, crackpotty, strange emails. She’s also a friend of a friend. She has never been anything but incredibly nice to me in person. And lately she has been one of my harshest critics, writing cattily and condescendingly about me on the Huffington Post’s Eat the Press blog.

“For anyone who has followed the saga of Emily Gould, this week’s New York Times magazine cover story comes as a shock only to the extent that they would publish it,” one of her posts began. Of course Rachel Sklar thinks my “saga” is old news. She used to live in Josh Stein’s apartment building. This is a person who has been inside this machine so long she no longer realizes that a world exists outside of it.

Yesterday, her post about my book deal included four references to my appearance and the speculation that I might be tempted to pose for Playboy...

It’s true, the kind of coverage my book deal has gotten has been a far cry from the kind of support that Sklar’s friend Skurnick got when her deal for a collection of nostalgic pieces about classic young adult novels was announced. I guess there probably aren’t a lot of bloggers, blog-editors and freelance writers sitting around thinking “I am the perfect person to write a collection of nostalgic pieces about classic young adult novels, but she gets to do it and I don’t! Bitch!”

Nothing personal, just business as usual! Um, enjoy the Fourth of July weekend, eating non-gossip sausages, everyone!

From How your Emily Gould gossip sausage gets made [Emily Magazine]

Rex says:

If that fucking Tumblr is oversharing, then so is writing a goddamn novel. It's just some random fucking quotes that I sorta thought summarized a certain kind of feeling, aesthetic, angst at this particular historical moment.

And:

I don't like this reactionary voice on the internet that wishes to turn everything into bland, impersonal, "boredwithit" blog junk. The internet was once a big experiment of people trying out new personal forms, but we've reached this new place in which the only allowed first person accounts are those that involve peoples' motherfucking babies, trips to cupcake shops, and OMG I HATE MY BOSS LET ME TELL YOU WHY.

Furthermore:

Seriously, why the fuck does David Sedaris, or Augusten Burroughs, or Klosterman, or any number of lesser memoirists who make less hyperbolic examples of confession culture — why exactly do they get to "overshare"? Where did they get their license?

But:

There really is a line that people have crossed that IS over-sharing, in the bad sense.

Where that line is drawn is left as an exercise to the reader.

"Overshare" is one of Gawker's favorite insults, applied to Emily Gould's NYT Mag piece, a memoir about J. D. Salinger, a photo of a cumshot on a sex blog, and a pickup line from Michael Musto.

Do all these stories deserve the same label? Are none of them merited? Are we just using "overshare" as a coy little criticism instead of thinking out a proper response? I posit no, some, and yes respectively!

Photo by Scott Beale

No disclaimer about the author-subject relationship, whatever it was at the time of writing, is mentioned. We reported on this earlier via a tipster who said the magazine was "furiously scrubbing the story of all mentions of Keith Gessen. Which were, of course, numerous, laudatory and unencumbered with disclaimers."

Gessen is still included in the profile, and as for the lack of disclaimer, "the material didn't warrant any, did it? We're just happy to watch authors get hotter than their subjects," said EIC Michael Idov. Don't push it, mate. "The joys of a quarterly production cycle," he added.

[Russia!]