"Is Michiko Kakutani incompetent or just crazy?" Shall we start with that question? Don't blame me. It's what Google autocomplete gave me when I typed "Michiko Kakutani is." I'm just reporting what the Internet says about her!
Backhanded reality TV casting request of the day, culled from a Gawker inbox:
It's funny and meta to watch Julia Allison get profiled. Since she's already done all the work for us in real time—chronicling her thoughts and moods and outfits on her blog—a profile seems beside the point and out of date by the time it goes to print—we've already seen those outfits and photos, and we already know what events she's been to. Journalists are usually left baffled upon their first introduction to the JA force of nature—when we've been collectively getting her IMs for years! Australia is just now catching on to this Internet fameball/oversharing thing, putting Allison on the cover of a magazine—and including her close personal friend, and also our former editor, Emily Gould. (At this point, Em seems like she wants to erase the Internet and spend a month in a sensory-deprivation chamber.) The profile is very similar to Allison's Wired cover story, except for perhaps the journalist's outright dislike for her subjects.She calls Allison's two sidekicks Mary and Megan "equally terrifying alpha girlfriends." (Touché!) Also: "I meet Gould in the painfully sceney Balthazar cafe in New York’s Soho (her choice)." Dang. However, we finally learn how Julia thinks her baffling Nonsociety startup will earn money!
A reader asks, "Emily Gould and Keith Gessen—are they back together?" Emily Gould is a former editor of Gawker who wrote a cover story for The New York Times Magazine about working at Gawker and dating a different Gawker editor who wrote a Page Six Magazine story about dating her. Then she started dating Keith Gessen, whom she'd written about, somewhat critically, on Gawker. Gessen is a novelist who co-founded a literary journal called n+1 and wrote a novel about being a dude named Keith who went to Harvard, like Keith Gessen. The journal and the novel are the Most Important Journal and Novel of Our Time, respectively. They dated, and then they broke up, and then Keith went to Russia, and we stopped writing about both of them, mostly. But apparently you, the readers, demand to know what's up! Here is THE SCOOP: Emily went to visit Keith in Russia. She stayed a month. Now she's back in New York. We suppose that sort of counts as "back together" except now, obviously, they are thousands of miles apart, again. (The kitten we got Keith that he couldn't take because he was going to Russia did find a home.) The End.
It stands to reason that a show about frazzled females in New York media might include a cameo by Emily Gould, the former Gawker editor now working on her six-figure "book of autobiographical stories" about being a frazzled female in new New York media. Via certain Observer staff Gould is just a degree or two of separation away from Lipstick Jungle creator Candace Bushnell. But after an email tip and way too much (20 minutes!) research, we've determined that those tattoos on the Lipstick extra's arms (above) just don't match up with Gould's own body art. So you (and we) should probably move on to thinking about more important things, like the implosion of Western capitalism. Or, you know, scrutinize this Gould-aping extra some more in the clip after the jump.
Former blog queen Emily Gould suggests the rest of us delete, unfollow, cancel, and block ourselves from the Web. This is notable chiefly because Gould's last big appearance in print was an excessively detailed confessional of her online misadventures for the New York Times Magazine. The social media age is complicated, she complains in a writeup of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody for MIT's Tech Review. Someone stop us before we blog again!Gould, a former Gawker editor who institutionalized oversharing as an element of blog style, now plays the penitent. As a writer, she revealed details of her love life in the course of contributing to a gossip site, one that eventually used her exit as more gossip for the mill. Today, though, Gould can't resist the temptation to revisit her past:
Former Gawker editor Emily Gould has a new article in MIT's Technology Review asking everyone to try turning off the internet (basically) and maybe keep it off until their lives are profoundly altered. Her piece suggests, as an experiment, that the reader "cease to log in to your instant messenger for a week... Delete your profile from Facebook and stop blogging. Stop reading blogs. Stop attending social events you find out about online." (That would definitely alter my life in a profound way!)
Whenever a long-standing couple like Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel hit the skids, we feel the need to play Emma and set the lovelorn kids up with someone new ASAP. And since we were the ones who debunked the news that Jimmy had already rebounded with one of his writers, we feel like we should continue our tradition of suggesting a few paramours for the pair of funny people. See our suggestions after the jump.
We will begin by thanking Emily Gould-former Gawker editor, recent NYT Magazine cover story, and recently-sold book-writer-for providing us with content on a slow news day before a holiday weekend. She's chosen the perfect time to publish a long screed on her blog, titled "How Your Emily Gould Gossip Sausage Gets Made." Whoa! Everyone gets called out. We're all crazy from the heat this week!
Goaded by a commenter, writer Rex Sorgatz wrote a passionate defense of those who share intimate details of their lives online. The media blogger (and recent author of a piece on microfame for New York) had linked to his anonymous Tumblr blog, which documented conversations Rex had about New York and the hookup scene. (The blog was outed even more quickly than Rex expected.) Rex says his pillow-talk conversations weren't oversharing, and fuck you for accusing him of that. So what's his defense, and is there anything still too intimate to blog?
The former Gawker editor, NYT Magazine covergirl, and admitted oversharer has sold her memoir, And the Heart Says... Whatever (organized by her tattoos!), for something in the "low six figures." Publishers Weekly reports it'll "weave a picture of what it's like to be a young person in New York City in the early 2000s through a series of 'honest, searching and wry' recollections." Galleycat thinks the figure was something around $350,000-a very high price, yet much more realistic than the earlier-rumored $1 mil. Bought by Free Press in a pre-empt, it'll be out around 2010. (There will be new Gawker editors to cover the inevitable leaked excerpts by that time.)
OK, former Gawker editor Emily Gould's book proposal reveals that her story will be told through her tattoos—and organized in that way! "While nothing that has happened to me in and of itself has been that noteworthy: Lots of young people have lived in big cities, and have had an assortment of strange and ordinary jobs... there are some truths about doing these things and about writing about them online that haven't yet been expressed." Daily Intel nabbed the proposal and has a small excerpt.
Everyone wants to know what's in her proposed memoir nonfiction book, And the Heart Says... Whatever, but the former blogger for this website is wisely having the proposal messengered around town to prevent leaks. (Nick Denton, however, is having spy-cam equipment installed outside her apartment.) Fishbowl has gleaned that "the word on the street is that whatever Gould has on submission goes beyond the [NY Times Magazine] article, and will focus more on her growing up and less on her time at Gawker." [Fishbowl]
