From the NYT Archive, circa 1887. Thanks to the tipster who brought it to our attention!

Traffic Spike #1:
Gawker Pinup Gallery: Julia Allison and Brooke Parkhurst.
Feb. 14, 2007
37,480 views

Traffic Spike #2:
Can You Tell That A Woman Is Single And Unlaid Just From Her Apartment?
Jul. 25, 2007
74,716 views

Traffic Spike #3:
Julia Allison To Answer Readers' Questions Right Here
Jan. 2, 2008
78,451 views

This is the first time I've blogged a public apology for a breakup, but I feel right doing it. And here it is: Julia, you deserve better than I treated you. I'm sorry I broke up with you for standing up for yourself; I'm sorry I fixated on and attacked your flaws; I'm sorry I blew you off because I was tired from shrooms; and I'm sorry I selflessly agreed to hang out with you when I didn't actually want to (which was the root of this dilemma).

If there were no evolutionary benefit to fame, no one would chase it—or certainly not as doggedly as they do now. To be well-known gives many people (perhaps most people?) pleasure, and generally things that give us pleasure have their roots in something that at one point helped us. There could be no other reason for the proliferation and (exponentially accelerating) mass obsession with fame.

Professor Allison explains that people crave fame for its benefits ("the adulation, the sense of false familiarity, the reassurance that people you don't know personally will treat you well and help you out when you need something"), but sounds a note of caution on the new, low barrier to entry web-aided variety ("the anarchy which, at its most delusional, believes itself to be a meritocracy").

Prior to the internet, your options for achieving fame were as follows: acting, athletics, politics, royalty or sure, you could get a little attention by killing a few people in a dramatic way. Other than that, you were probably doomed to the dim twilight that knows neither MySpace nor YouTube.

Now, on the other hand, you need merely a T-1 line and a digital camera and three days from now, you could sit opposite Matt Lauer on the Today Show as 10 million people watch you give the director's commentary on your poorly lit, badly edited 3 minute viral video.

"Dynamic Fame" [Julia Allison]

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

We'll pass the winning entry along to Jules. You're free to offer your write-in suggestions in the comments, but let's not be predictable and go with some permutation of "a vulva." You people are better than that. Think out of the box.

Before blogs, if some dude you were dating didn't have the balls to break up with you in person, you might show his Dear Jane letter to a few of your closest girlfriends. Dating advice columnist and Star talking head Julia Allison, being Julia Allison, sent her friends the email in which CollegeHumor and Vimeo cofounder Jakob Lodwick dropped her like a hot potato minutes after he sent it to her.

Later, of course, she posted it on her blog.

She had sort of broken up with him first, though, or tried to—she was upset because he'd blown her off, but somehow found time to update his blog, Obeastiality. "I'm upset with you because I feel like you're putting me in a position where I have to—for my own self-respect—stop seeing you," she wrote to him.

FYI, ladies? Never do this! When you send the "I'm sort of dumping you but leaving the door open for you to say you still care" email, you are basically sending a letterpress-printed hand-calligraphied invitation that says, "Dump me please."

And that's what Jakob did.

You deserve more respect than I've been treating you with. I think you pretty much nail it in this email. I tend to walk all over girls I date, in the sense that they aren't as high a priority as they ought to be. You are not an exception, and I will only grow more selfish (inconsiderate) in the future. For example, this week will be worse than last week.
I am not capable of giving you what you deserve in a relationship, even an "alternative" relationship, so, we should stop seeing each other. I think you are awesome, but I think it's impossible to be together.

Now, the high road to take in an instance like this is: Get angry, sure! Bitch about the jerk you wasted a few months with to your close friends. Take a lot of hard yoga or kickboxing classes or whatnot and buy yourself some new shoes and have sex with a 23-year-old! But bloggers don't think like that—at least, not right off the bat. Their first impulse is, of course, to blog it out.

"And so there it is, the demise of a budding relationship. All over... what, exactly?" Julia wrote. Well, if we had to wildly guess? We'd say that writing about a relationship while you're in it, especially in a public forum, always kills it, unless you're Calvin Fucking Trillin. And if we wanted to delve a little deeper, we'd say that the funny thing about the critiques of each other that Julia and Jakob have posted on their respective blogs could just as easily be about themselves.

Here's Julia on Jakob: "He's an intriguing, colorful, free-spirited, deeply creative soul. He is also aloof and self-centered and unapologetically narcissistic, which in moderation would be fine, but he pushes the boundaries towards 'asshole.' He's incredibly erratic—immature with bursts of maturity. Myopia with bursts of self-awareness. Selfishness with bursts of... well... there were a few moments—tiny glimpses—of who he could be if he took into account the feelings of others. It was something very special. I really liked that person—there I saw joy and an energy, an active curiosity, an exploratory mind with a lot of passion."

And here's Jakob on Julia: "You cannot build a media shrine to yourself when your self is shaped primarily by someone else."

So here's a super-weird sighting - I saw David Blaine, Leven Rambin and Julia Allison eating dinner together at Koi in the Bryant Park Hotel tonight (Thurs) around 6:30. He seriously had cards out on the table doing a trick and Julia was laughing really loudly. She was wearing a black Chanel dress - it was pretty conservative. Leven was wearing some tan sweatshirt thing. Blaine was wearing sunglasses. When they left Blaine and Leven got on a motorcycle together and Julia took a photo of them.

Julia continues:

Although the rhetorical question "how is that my problem?" is a fairly egocentric thing to say, actually. It presupposes that I really don't care what anyone else thinks, which, I'm sorry to say, isn't the case. (Inconveniently.) I don't care what all people think, and I certainly have different standards than ... ugh, you know what? I'm totally bored by this line of thinking right now. So I'm just ending the paragraph.

You're sort of like a high proof shot. There is a lot of energy, it's confrontational, it's in your face, and people make that shot face. But in the end the fact is that you are a big dork. Your farts smell and you think they are funny. You pick up dirt and make people look at it. You produce and stick by some of the most retarded stories ever created to explain how that stupid thing everyone just saw you do was totally not your fault. And that's endearing to your friends and family because they are all dorks under the façade of success too.

One afternoon at 2:00, which was exactly one hour after she'd said she'd arrive, a busty brunette in a skimpy red sundress burst through the doors of Gawker headquarters and sprinted towards me. It was Julia Allison, of course, coming to take me to a psychic in Staten Island. The kicky rhythm of her four-inch rope espadrilles on the hardwood floor was the loudest thing that had happened in the office all day, but it was quickly one-upped by her voice. "Aren't you SO EXCITED!" she asked-told me as she enfolded me in a candy-smelling embrace. And then she grabbed my hand and the next thing I knew I was beside her in that vaunted convertible Mercedes, speeding as quickly as it's possible to speed down a traffic-clogged street in Soho, accompanied by Whitney Houston ("I Wanna Dance With Somebody"). That's when reality began to blur, so I've had to reconstruct the next part of the afternoon by looking at my sent and received text messages.

To: Josh, 2:20 pm
Now she is getting gas and everyone is staring. It's like an Aerosmith video.

To: Doree, 2:49 pm
"I think this song would be better with the top down"

To: Josh, 3:03 pm
This is the fourth construction worker we've asked for directions

From: Josh, 3:04 pm
Are you even off Crosby street?

We really may as well not have been. For an hour, we had been driving around lower Manhattan, looking for the entrance to the Battery Park tunnel, or sort of half-looking while we talked about jobs, love, family, body image, eating disorders, workouts, boys, feminism and shopping. Basically it was a slumber party crossed with a Cosmo ed meeting on wheels that occasionally pulled over to ask the nearest cop or friendly-seeming fellow motorist whether we were headed in the right direction (we weren't). Also for a time we were very involved in singing along to "Pussy Control" by Prince. We missed the turnoff into the tunnel four separate times. The whole time, Julia treated traffic laws like traffic suggestions or traffic hints. One of the times we missed the turnoff, we made an illegal u-turn, cut across two lanes of traffic, and ended up behind a cop car. "I wonder if the cop saw that?" Julia mused, and then confessed that she'd never gotten a ticket.

At 3:49, we pulled up outside a smallish detached vinyl-sided colonial and got out of the car. Alexandra, the psychic, came to her front door to chide us for being late. I couldn't see her that well through the storm door, but I could tell that she was 40ish and blonde and wearing black leather and clutching a small white dog. The dog was wering a blue bandanna. In a slightly put-out tone, she instructed us to go out back and wait by the pool. "We should have called to say we'd be late, but shouldn't she have forseen it?" Julia said, winking like Jessica Rabbit.

The pool was about the size of a lawn chair but very refreshing to stick your feet in, which we did as we waited for Alexandra and Mr. Fluffy to prepare to receive us. Soon we were ushered into the basement, which was decorated in 80s lady (white leather sectional, recumbent bike, treadmill, pink dried flower wreath, tv set with videos including 'The Hand That Rocks The Cradle' resting on top). I peed in the pink, raspberry-and-lit-matches scented bathroom (ornamental soap shaped like butterflies, no t.p.) while Julia got comfortable in the white leather easy chair where you sit while Alexandra, who has a public access show called "Alexandra's Psychic Eye," tells your fortune.

First Alexandra put her hand over Julia's hands and then she asked Julia some very specific questions. At first, I thought the asking questions part was a copout that meant Alexandra was basically just an ad hoc therapist who talked about energy and past lives. But as the session progressed, I became more and more impressed with her psychic abilities. Julia, it turns out, was a man in many of her past lives. "So men are attracted to your feminine looks, but then they're confused by your masculine energy. You're like General Patton: in every situation you need to be in control." Julia then demonstrated this tendency by badgering Alexandra with a ton of rapid-fire questions about specific career stuff. Alexandra told her straight up that she wasn't going to get anywhere like that. "You need to be more gentle, more nurturing. Women are natural nurturers. Women have inner space," she explained. "You need to stop being General Patton and start being Mother Earth." Then she started talking about how Julia was going to have a cooking show, maybe after moving back to the Midwest where her roots lie, even though Julia hates cooking and doesn't want to go back to Chicago ever. She also advised Julia to change her name to Julie.

I was trying hard to pay attention, but Mr. Fluffy had taken an incredibly strong amorous interest in all of my limbs. I didn't want to interrupt the reading, but eventually I had to draw the line at being extremity-raped by a bichon frise. "You have a lot of dog energy!" Alexandra observed as she took Mr. Fluffy into her arms. "We talked about this, Mr. Fluffy!" she admonished him.

When it came to disciplining Julia, though, Alexandra was a bit sterner. "You need to be real. You're just not real," she told her at one point. She also didn't bullshit Julia about the long-term potential of her latest suitor, a young guy who got too rich too quickly off a website he started in college. "This guy's a player, a joke. I see it lasting another six weeks, max."

Then it was time for my reading. Alexandra won me over immediately when the first thing she said to me was "I'm getting a [first initial of the boy I have a crush on]. Who is [initial]?" but I recognize that she had a one in twenty-six chance of nailing that one. Well, whatever, she said that he really likes me and that I shouldn't be so afraid of him. Just for that I pretty much consider my $100 well-spent, even though, during my energy healing, Mr. Fluffy renewed his relationship with my left calf just as I was really successfully imagining pink light escaping through the crown of my head and reaching out and enfolding the people I love.

Later, in the car going home, Julia and I talked about the highlights of our readings. We were both pretty happy with Alexandra's prognostications, but Julia was disappointed that things weren't going to work out between her and the website dude. "I'm in the mood to fall in love, Emily! I want him to fall madly in love with me." "Well, maybe he will," I said. "She's not psychic." God, long day.

How in the hell are we supposed to care about this bitch Julia Allison? Who is this woman and how did she rise to such notoriety with such little education and or common knowledge of the world around her? The question remains, who among us can't do what she does? This is not simply a latter day Carrie Bradshaw. This is a painted whore who drives a Mercedes off her ill gotten gains. Perhaps because we don't have a 34D chest and a vacant personality we shall never attain such lofty goals. This girl is a menace, a boil on society and I, for one, refuse to accept that she gets a pass just because she has big tits. If people like me are heard then this girl w ill be out of the papers, if not now, eventually. I am sick of this type of New York bullshit. Woody Allen I can take, he is at least funny 10% of the time. This bitch is just annoying 100% percent all the time, every time. Please kill me before you place another post about her.

Today's installment:

Julia Allison: Hey Balk's Cock! Did you know Pete Wentz used to BABYSIT me!?!?
BALK BTW: That explains so much.
Julia Allison: HA!
Julia Allison: Also, I've discovered that the stereotype is true: hipsters smell.
Julia Allison: and that's my wisdom for the day.
Julia Allison: xo!
Julia Allison signed off at 1:13:54 PM.
Julia Allison is offline and will receive your IMs when signing back in.

XO, Jules!

RELATED: Julia Allison finds her tech boy closer to home [Valleywag]

Julia Attempts to Lip Dub Fergie's Glamorous While Driving [Julia Allison and Vimeo]