I am so god damn embarrassed for GQ magazine. They went and published the following story in their November (year: 2011) issue: "Brooklyn is the Coolest City on the Planet." Oh. God. I can't even look at you, dude.

You could have read this or this or this and killed this piece with plenty of time to find some other bullshit to write about—Lil Wayne's favorite menswear, or whatever. But no. You wrote and published and promoted this god damn story with a press release and everything, and signed your names to it, ugh. How will you show your faces again (in hip Brooklyn)?

Listen to the god damn intro you wrote. "Don't take that as a knock on Manhattan, which is doing just fine. But for the first time since, well, ever, you can spend every New York minute of your trip on the far side of the East River and never feel like you're missing out." Oh. Jesus fuck. I am reading an email from my mom, which has been published in GQ magazine. I was under the impression that that is what I was reading. The editors of GQ magazine have somehow inadvertently been forwarded an email from my mother, and through a series of unlikely mistakes they have copied the text of this email and used it as the intro paragraph for a feature story. That, to me, seems to be the most likely explanation, for this. You continue: "Here's how to explore the place where everything's happening before it's happening." Oh. Christ the lord. Brooklyn, where everything's happening before it's happening. Marty Markowitz's old campaign literature has somehow found its way into the pages of GQ magazine. An email from my mom, Marty Markowitz's old campaign literature, and the text of a 2004 New York Times Style section story have all fallen into a blender and been extracted, word by random word, by a less-than-savvy GQ magazine layout intern who mistakenly arranged them on a page and published them, by accident. This intern just moved to New York last summer to write for Thought Catalog, and he got this sweet GQ internship on the side, and now look, he's gone and done something that will embarrass everyone at GQ who lives in New York, by extension. What a jerk this kid is.

And then after enduring all of that embarrassment just in the first paragraph, the whole god damn story is just about brunch and coffee shops and eating food at the same god damn restaurants that Frank Bruni and Sam Sifton and every other god damn snooty food person wrote about when they were writing their own "Across the bridge from Manhattan where I live lies a vast land by the name of 'Brooklyn' which, to my surprise, has many good restaurants of its own, and just enough 'hipness' that I can refer to it as 'hip' again and again, unto death" stories all those weeks and months and years and years ago. Not that it was a fresh idea back then, but now, dude, it's just, I don't even know. I expected better, I guess. Without empirical justification, I just expected better. No reason, really. Just some old vestige of an idea that GQ magazine would know better. Would do better. Would be "hipper" than that. Way "hipper." Hey, what will all of the cool people who take their cues from GQ magazine think about this? Heh.

I guess shattering illusions is what this crazy city by the name of "The Big Apple" is all about.

[GQ, photo via Kai Brinker/Flickr]