Mormando's lawyer Nancy Ennis told the judge that her client "has been openly gay since he left the mob." The ex-gangster became a government informant shortly after the shooting and was released based on time served. Mormando says he lives "a peaceful working life" with his partner who doesn't want to join the witness protection program.

Mob hit man out of the closet: Robert Mormando is gay and regrets life of crime, his lawyer says [NY Daily News]

Protocols, the group in question, was put together by Michael Malice, the Overheard In New York guy, whose "life story" was also chronicled by Harvey Pekar in a comic book. Some of the writers: noted Fingerbanging Expert Justin Rocket Silverman of the New York Post; Gawker Media 's Fleshbot Editor Lux Alptraum; Heeb's Jeff Newelt, a publicist/comic book artist; and illustrator/artist Molly Crabapple. No question, as far as media gatherings go, it's an impressively diverse group. Most of the time, when media people get together in New York, it's the same fifty people, at the same bar, and they're all talking shit on each other, or the shit they talked earlier in the week. Pathetically guilty as charged.

Salkin, as he's wont to do, trots off a bunch of numbers about The Way We Live Now with Facebook, Twitter, texting, cell phones, clubs that won't allow you to take pictures of other parties, bars that don't allow you to document their goings-on, and various ways in which people in New York put themselves out there. He ends on a salient note: the documentarian behind We Live In Public - about this very trend, which features an appearance by none other than Julia Allison - at one point mugs to a camera in the doc: "I'm just a product ready to be harvested." His eventual fate?

He moved to an upstate apple farm in 2001. According to his biography on the film's Web site, he is now running an entertainment network in Sidamo, Ethiopia.

Impressive that Salkin - normally a slave to his stories - got this one right, even if he still has a lot to learn about Twitter (as evidenced by the screengrab above, ha). But it feels like he might've missed the larger picture:

1. The idea that a group of people getting together who aren't allowed to broadcast their whereabouts or ideas even makes the news.

2. The fact that Protocols - a conversation whose foundation is wrapped around the idea of not being broadcast - wasn't able to resist being profiled by the Sunday Styles.

3. That the urge to express ones-self in some way is - yeah, besides self-evident - possibly just the American Condition.

Writers have been talking into the abyss for ages. Now, every away message, Tweet, and Facebook status puts people who wouldn't have ordinarily found themselves sharing inane sentiments on the same road as, say, Julia Allison, or any chronic over-sharer ever chronicled (or bylined) on this site. They might not be so far down said road as her, but anytime anybody talks into the vast expanse of the internet, they've expressed the desire to be heard by someone, anyone, anywhere. For better or worse, the repression (or restraint) that caused people to once stay silent in any number of ways is now a rarity.

That same desire isn't so far, ironically, from what Protocols nobly sets out to do. The difference is that they know who they're talking to. And quite frankly - again, for better or worse, wonderfully or creepily - I have no idea who any of you are.

See, there was a passionate outcry against Waldman's 2005 NYT essay on how "when I catch a glimpse of my husband from the corner of my eye - his smooth, round shoulders, his bright-blue eyes through the magnification of his reading glasses - I fold over the page of my novel" and fuck him, while not thinking about her four kids. So she had to write a book, called "Bad Mother," which is provocative! Let's hear what she has to say, shall we?

[...]

Okay, we read this whole profile of her and there's really nothing that obnoxious about her save for the fact that she wrote a fucking "Mommy" book in the first place, and her previous infractions like sending one of America's smuggest post-inauguration emails, and of course oversharing about her sex life which set her on this path to begin with, but look, she likes to fuck her husband, Michael Chabon, a lot, and playing with her kids she thinks is okay and everything, but not really in the same league as fucking her husband, Michael Chabon, and if she feels that way, that's her right. She likes to fuck Michael Chabon, period, deal with it.
[WP. Pic via]

Not that we blame Berners-Lee for these things ... okay, okay, we do. The 20 worst things about the World Wide Web:

• 1. Julia Allison
• 2. Twitter
• 3. Jason Calacanis
• 4. Wikipedia
• 5. Henry Blodget
• 6. Dave Winer
• 7. Blogs
• 8. Dead newspapers everywhere
• 9. Congressman Jared Polis
• 10. Robert Scoble
• 11. The Pets.com sock puppet, and Michael Ian Black's subsequent career
• 12. Digg
• 13. Perez Hilton
• 14. /b/
• 15. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales's love life
• 16. Oversharing
• 17. Mark Zuckerberg
• 18. Chris Crocker
• 19. Internet commenters
• 20. Kevin Rose

We realize they weren't in your original spec, Timbo, but you should have anticipated them. Really.

Lodwick in January:

From his Tumblr, yesterday:

Is that him? Is this yet another example of a lack of identity causing someone to obsessively overshare on the Internet in a desperate search for validation from the faceless public? We will be trying not to think about those questions, or anything else that might cause us to recall this post, ever again.

Perhaps anticipating that eventual query, the couple went above and beyond normal wedding photography on the day they became husband and wife, inviting a photographer into their room after the wedding to photograph them in intimate repose (though we suppose that's NSFW old hat for Duhamel). Kindly, they then made those photos available to Elle, and thus, the world. Still, we're a little perturbed; if there were ever one day to photoshop a veil onto Fergie's labia, we were sure this would be it. Next time?

• Fergie, Josh Duhamel Release New Intimate Wedding Photos [Us]

It just confirms the notion that Doerr hasn't been paying attention. Anyone who's been reading Robert Scoble's blog knows about the virtues of oversharing. It makes for great entertainment. But if there's any correlation between checking FriendFeed every 15 seconds and business success, it's lost to us. Next time, John, just mention your daughter and cry a lot. It worked wonders at TED last year.

I HAVE NOT EVER HAD PLASTIC SURGERY!!!

I am definitely not against it at all, but haven’t yet had it! Personally, lip injections are the thing I would never do—even if I didn’t have full lips.

I think lip injections look very fake and bad and I wouldn’t want to kiss anyone with stuff in their lips—so I wouldn’t do it to myself.

This is a picture of me when I was about 14 years old in a bikini. I hope after seeing this you guys will never ask me a plastic surgery question again! I have had a size C since I was 11 years old! So one day I will definitely get a lift, but I am waiting until after I have kids. Until then I rely on a great supportive bra! LOL!

Somehow, we doubt that Kardashian's scandalous teen picture will finally end the attention paid to her body, though it may arouse conflicted, brand-new scrutiny. Here's a tip, Kim: when that appreciative email comes from Andy Dick, don't answer it!

• I Never Had Plastic Surgery! [Kim Kardashian]

"While the discussion was pretty interesting," our student spy continued, "it was pretty crazy/meta to be
talking about someone whose private life I clearly have been following on a website devoted to this new kind of 'surveillance.'"

I'll say. From the partial reading list below, it looks like we've come full circle: from Foucault to Lodwick. The kids are so screwed.

SC 030 Deviance and Social Control (Fall/Spring: 3)

This course explores the social construction of boundaries between the "normal" and the so-called "deviant." It examines the struggle between powerful forms of social control and what these exclude, silence, or marginalize. Of particular concern is the relationship between dominant forms of religious, legal, and medical social control and gendered, racialized and global economic structures of power. The
course provides an in-depth historical analysis of theoretical perspectives used to explain, study and control deviance, as well as ethical-political inquiry into such matters as religious excess, crime, madness, corporate and governmental wrong-doing, and sexual subcultures that resist dominant social norms.

Consider the opinion of psychologists, Julia Allison:

Some studies have found that excessive talking about problems can contribute to emotional difficulties, including anxiety and depression.

Get off the internet, Lena Chen:

The term researchers use is “co-rumination” to describe frequently or obsessively discussing the same problem. The behavior is typical among teens — Why didn’t he call? Should I break up with him? And, psychologists say, it has intensified significantly with e-mail, text messaging, instant messaging and Facebook.

Caveat: having friends to overshare with is considered good for self-esteem; the obsessive oversharing itself is not.

Caveat 2: these lessons could just as easily apply to, say, Rex Sorgatz as to Emily Brill. Oversharing knows no bounds.

Stop it!

[NYT]

We laughed at useless rich girl Brill for her dramatic(-ally blogged) declaration that "even my weekend in bedford wasn’t entirely restful because i still felt ‘on duty’ because i knew i’d be writing about it." Ha! But! Consider this from taser-loving, reporter-helping, cult-like-following-inspiring professional PR man Peter Shankman's long new blog post about how much he hates hearing the phrase "Why Don't You Do Some Work?":

Was having a conversation the other day with someone via IM. She asked me where I was, and I told her I was talking from the lobby of the W hotel in Times Square, waiting to have a drink with someone who runs a marketing firm.

“The W Hotel?! What a tough life! Will you please do some work?!” she IM’d back. It was around 3pm. She didn’t know I’d closed two deals, brought three new advertisers to HARO, and gotten one client onto CNN. Not bad for someone who, according to my friend, had to be nagged to “do some work.”

Shit. Do we really want to open this floodgate? Can you already see where Shankman is prepared to go (at incredible length) with this? That's right, into an exposition of the awesomeness of Peter Shankman and his awesome work-play life balance!

I’ve heard virtually identical comments resulting from Facebook or Twitter updates that have included “Driving from LA to SF, stopped to get gas outside some wind farm,” “Sitting in the lounge at Gatwick, munching on a bagel,” “Singapore–>EWR flight delayed, hitting Duty Free, anyone want anything?” “Sitting on the hood of my rental car, watching the sunset from the desert outside of Eloy, Arizona,” and of course, “working from the Ranch, waiting for them to fuel the plane,” which of course, is code for “handling a client issue via conference call, with my skydiving rig on my back, hoping I’ll finish the call before the next load goes up in the air.”

Just in case you didn't catch his Twitter updates: he goes skydiving! Have you ever been? No? Well some people just aren't born adventurers, don't feel bad.

So Let’s translate “why don’t you do some work” into what it really is: “How come your job lets you fly all over the place, and have meetings in really cool places, and why can’t mine? Your job certainly doesn’t seem like work, why does mine?”

My answer to them? Because you don’t want it badly enough. If you really did, you’d have it. You’d take the risk, and play the game. (In actuality, that’s all it ever is - one giant game.) Face it - Having a job where you’re not the boss is, well, safe.

Peter Shankman thinks you're a pussy, no disrespect intended.

Like to read thousands more words about how Shankman can close client deals on his cellphone immediately before parachuting out of a plane and Twittering about it on the way down and, upon landing, running a road race that ends in a TV studio where he is doing an on-air interview? Read all you want!

"An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind."
—Walter Bagehot

"Everybody's talking trash these days, so why not keep quiet?"
—Dennis Rodman

With openness comes vulnerability. Vulnerability in the sense of: ‘I’ve ripped my ribcage open for you to see my heart and if you reject it, I think I’ll die.’ And with that level of vulnerability I didn’t notice it happen, but a great deal of defensiveness set in. And it’s really effected many of my relationships.

It plays itself out in really destructive ways such as:

* Setting unattainably high expectations and then being highly critical when not met.
* Instead of listening and having a normal discussion, shutting down completely in angry defensiveness.
* Walking away from several professional opportunities because I didn’t think they ‘appreciated’ me.
* General paranoia in the form of, “Everyone thinks I’m a space case” kind of garbage.

• Brooke Knows Best [VH1]

Being able to write secretly on my blog allowed me to highlight, through my female and feminist perspective, that if a woman enjoyed casual sex it did not make her 'dirty' or a 'slut' or pathological: it just meant she liked sex - and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that.

...Writing anonymously and not having to worry about people judging me, or about my violating others' privacy, I recounted, explicitly, the sex I had had, be it good or bad. I spared no detail, because I wanted to reflect the reality of sex in the most truthful way possible, in the hope that other women who read the blog would relate to my experiences, and that the men reading might unlearn some of the bad habits they'd seemingly picked up from the falsities of porn.

Little did I know that, a couple of years down the line, all my lovers, exes, friends, neighbours, colleagues and family would be reading the blog too. But that's exactly what happened when I lost my anonymity in August 2006.

"Faced with a woman who's written about sex, Brit blokes are more liable to stare at the ceiling and nervously share their insecurities, rather than just getting stuck in, so to speak.

'I feel weird being in bed with the Girl with a One Track Mind,' one English guy said to me, as we lay side by side, not touching. 'You're not,' I sighed. 'You're in bed with Zoe.'"

Cassandra:

Seeing all these heated opinions about Emily makes me just want to put a cold cloth on my forehead. We've heard it before, and it's senseless. I've had my share of frustrations with Emily's overshare too, but when I see comments criticizing Emily for media-whoring, I just have to wonder if anyone was paying any attention at all. It's like Lit Crit 101 — examine the author's work. Emily didn't engage in anything as a cynical exercise. She really cares about this stuff, about relationships and life and making sense of them as she finds her way in the world. She seems to really believe that other people must share her concern about the "HOW" of life — how to live right? How to handle relationships?

Like yea, I got kind of annoyed when her posts seemed to just be lazy and navel-gazing and thoroughly checked out. But you know, then we have to look at why our reaction is so strong and out of proportion to her crimes. Why you, me, we, the creative underclass or whatever, can't give this 26-year-old girl room to just develop and make mistakes and find her voice. Where our generosity went, and our willingness to see things from a different point of view. I wonder this about Gawker all the time — like, as we commenters criticize every bit of behavior and decisions that others make in their lives, how much of it is a weird way of putting pressure on others to conform and be just like us? To excise anything that makes them individual and interesting and themselves? And why are we threatened by that?

Emily put herself out there, but God bless her delusion, it's because she thinks she's contributing some perspective to how young people think and manage relationships, and these things that haven't been figured out. And you know, she has a point— have you figured it out? I haven't. So maybe we shut up and listen a bit and evaluate her argument and debate it and realize that even though Emily's writing is all about Emily, it's actually paradoxically also not about Emily at all.

So I don't know. The way Emily looks at the world, and picks it up, and examines it, and agonizes about it, seems to hint more at the natural instincts of a novelist than any of the pretentious fools she seems to like to date. I would say her only mistake is in taking second-billing to her boyfriends all the time. It's an identity issue. Her writing style is not elegant; it needs to be developed. But how's about we all maybe stand back, see her as a fellow traveler in our own struggles, and cut the bullshit in which we pretend we're better than her?

Plus she is a feminist and there are a lot of misogynistic mofos all up in here.

...I maintain that Emily's work is not about Emily. For two reasons: Emily's theme of "what the fuck am I doing with my life" applies to us all. And when you read her writing,you think of your problems. When you read Balk, you just think Balk is smart or funny. You don't think about you.

@cassandra:
It's not that at all!

Commenting is a public, identity-driven feedback mechanism. It is a process whereby we establish personal brands in the course of analyzing the material - or, as threads progress, other comments. It is built not on conformity, but on conflict; typically it's the fastest way for people to disagree and find each other. In the course of this process, you often find groups forming together to shout down an opinion, but that's value-added; strong ideas achieve buy-in from the body politic. It's an expression of processes that used to be wrapped in circulation figures or sales, and it moves lightning-quick toward consensus. This could be mistaken for conformity, but it's really just a rapid information exchange.

Furthermore, the debate isn't about what we're doing to Emily. It's about what Emily provides us. She doesn't present a sports event, market movement, or important event for us to analyze; she presents us with her own life and attempts to establish its events as indicative of the world at large. There is a value in such things, but I'm afraid that all she's shown me so far is a stark desperation for material and cultural success, a modicum of writing talent, and a shameless disregard for other people's reputations.

Where do I see that ending? Psuedo-celebrity. Minor financial success. A body of inconsequential low-culture pieces about the froth of young men and women in a Machiavellian world of abuse and distrust. She furthers every aspect of what I find disdainful about internet culture toward no noble end whatsoever.

And none of this is as bad as the fact that her writing, initially, seemed genuine, raw, and destined for something larger. Instead, she's already hooker her perpetual media motion device meager dark energy of her "persona" and doesn't seem to be concerned that, absent intervention, the height of her journalism career might be the time she dueled her ex-boyfriend's article with her own. How sad.

The point is that Emily is self-obsessed in exactly to the degree to which her entire generation is self-obsessed. I used to think Emily was only interested in Emily, and that is partly true — but then if you think historically about other writers accused of being that, they actually end up being generational touchpoints. There is not one Emily. There are millions of Emilys, is what I'm saying.

@ADismalScience: Well-written, sir. I see what you're saying. Re: Emily, I would only argue that she is still in the stage where her raw talent really promises something bigger in the future. But we keep expecting her to advance slowly and quietly, and I think it's time to accept that our culture has changed forever, and that the author-as-personality is a permanent change. Emily's generation has some bizarre lack of filter and needs to be looked at. In another generation, she might have labored in obscurity, but that's impossible now. We've always celebrated young, attractive, self-obsessed writers. ALWAYS. But also, it's going to be like this, forever, because these are the people who are writing now. They are Gessens and Goulds and people who want to be famous.

As for commenter culture, I understand what you're saying about the marketplace of ideas, and I used to believe it, but I don't now. Beyond funny comments — which there are plenty of here — there is a rush to polarization on commenting boards that often has little relation in scale or impact with the actual subject at hand. People get crazy when they get on the Internet. There's an immense tear-down impulse that I think has gotten out of hand. It's like people want to differentiate themselves by what they hate. And so they have to hate more things.

Emily Gould Introduces Oversharing to the New York Times Magazine [Gawker]

What of that breed of users who, despite all the warnings, could care less who sees what? They continue to post salacious photographs of themselves. They reveal deeply personal information. They inspire parental tsk-ing. They open themselves up to identity theft, hurt feelings and job loss. And that may be the point.