Gawker: microcelebrities

Meet The New N+1 T-Shirt Models!

Moe — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:10:43 EDT

The highbrow low-pay publishing community has long suffered from a startling male-female attractiveness imbalance exemplified by the case of that American Apparel modeling Paris Review intern. I mean, if Jessica Roy was ever right about anything, it is that.* But for its work righting the prettiness gap perhaps we owe a debt of "gratitude" to the most important literary journal of our time, N+1, whose founding editors Keith Gessen and Benjamin Kunkel are not only decidedly conventionally attractive but extra reviled on the basis of that fact. And as the Observer noticed today, N+1 is now employing male contributor Wesley Yang (and his wavy hair I will refrain from calling a "mane") in the new capacity of T-shirt pitchman. Yang, you might recall if you are one of N+1's numerous readers, originally ascended to literary microfame in a piece in the last issue about how he related to Virginia Tech school shooter Seung Hui-Cho for feeling fundamentally "unlovable."

Look, at some point I actually scanned in the good parts.

Anyway, I think we can all agree that Yang is no "Morlock." Here is his blog, it needs more comments. Oh, and the girl is managing editor Kate Perkins. One day maybe she will write something about her comically bad self-esteem and I'll post about that.

*Seriously, you are a girl and you go to their parties and think, "Whoa, I am never going to get laid, I give up," but you quickly learn this is wrong, you will totally get laid, and you'll make some of the most pretty friends you ever had bonding with the literary scene girls over what a unique experience it was!

Rex Sorgatz Grows His Microcelebrity One B-Roll at a Time

Sheila — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 13:53:25 EDT

Rexie! The nerdy Midwestern micro-celebrity "expert" and blogger who allegedly makes Tumblr girls (and the HuffPo's Rachel Sklar) weak in the knees has inexplicably grabbed yet another bit of micro-fame—he's in some b-roll for the local news in St. Paul, outside the Daily Show. What does the voice-over say about him? Just wait. (Bonus footage: the redhead is former Wonkette editor Anna Marie Cox.)

Most Despised Internet Microcelebrities

Sheila — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 17:17:34 EDT

Recently, there was a roundup of microcelebrities on men.style.com. (Out of 13 people, only 5 were dudes.) Readers voted either pro or con for each micropersonality. We mashed up the resulting data into something much easier to understand—by taking each person's "negative" votes and ranking them, we've created a spreadsheet of some of the most roundly disliked microcelebs around. Sorry! (Click to expand)

In the future, maybe each and every one of us will be a disliked microcelebrity for fifteen minutes. We can only hope!

(Radar made a list of the The Web's Most Hated People, but clearly they did not use scientific data/crowdsourcing like we did.)