"Over a poulet de grain rôti at La Goulue, on Madison Avenue, he added: 'I'd always loved New York and felt like I knew it, but I'd never actually been here. My main exposure to it came from 'Sex and the City' and 'Friends.' " That's parkavenuepeerage.com blogger and New York magazine fact-checking intern James Kurisunkal, batting his lashes at the Times today. But is he really a hayseed who knows nothing about NYC that he didn't glean from Carrie and Rachel?

No, James is secretly—or maybe not quite secretly enough!—a total player with a very inflated opinion of his own importance: "The decision to run his site anonymously — even now, he does not use his name — came not because Mr. Kurisunkal is shy. "It's maybe to build some sort of legitimacy," he said. "You don't want to be some sort of pretender. You want to say, 'This is my throne.' "

But is he actually serving his legitimacy-building agenda well in this interview?

Mr. Kurisunkal ... said he has delighted in working at New York magazine, which he called "very horizontal in the way it's run — it's really nonhierarchical." His time has been spent in the fact-checking department, but he said the magazine's publicist told him he was not allowed to discuss more specifically what types of features he has been involved in preparing. "I can say that I'm checking the parts of the magazine that you would assume an intern would be checking," he said.

We wondered how "horizontal" New York magazine really is, so we asked a staffer there (consider your information officially insider!): "Well it's not Vanity Fair. But I mean, he's a fucking fact-checking intern. Which is even lower on the totem pole than the regular interns."

Totem pole, eh? James, it seems you perhaps ought to check yourself before you wreck yourself.

At 18, Blogging His Way Onto The Elite Social Scene [NYT]