I was absolutely prepared to agree with you, Isaac. We live in a Gawker culture, voyueristic and self-important. Of course, human beings have always been gawkers but there is something more than a little deranged about the hyperurban, in-the-fishbowl culture of the sort that Emily Gould lived in. And in the fishbowl are piranhas and she was one, chewing up others but getting chewed up, too. But I was strangely moved by her piece. Who can say what is in a person's heart, Isaac? You may well be correct but after long experience, I have learned just how complex it is trying to read the text that is buried within the human heart. You think person A is redemptive material but it turns out not, you believe that person B is a lost cause but she strides in at the eleventh hour and literally saves you.

I don't read blogs such as Emily's, but from reading the piece in NYT Magazine, my impression is that she has, finally, reached adulthood.  At age 26!  That girls keep secret diaries is nothing new (Anne Frank), but that they now keep public diaries (Emily Gould) is, well, child-like.  The only lesson here is deferred adulthood.  I'm all for that.

Raylward: Excellent comment.

I don't know who Ms. Gould is--I don't think I've read anything of hers--but the first sentence in her article tells me that she was 24 in 2006, and thus is 26 or 27 now.

I know nothing about her, her past or her future, but I'll go out on a limb and predict that whatever sins she has committed to date are trivial next to the list she will be able to produce in another 26 or 27 years. It takes years to properly piss on someone you love, to take just one example. Racking up the opportunity costs--self-inflicted damage to one's organism, a self-centered consumerist lifestyle that wittingly squanders the Earth's finite resources--can take decades to really do right. There is the issue of sloth, which becomes easier to justify as one's metabolism sags as we age: let the youngsters hold the petitions outside Safeway, let them pick up litter at the beach; I can barely get off the couch to take a leak--besides, I've paid my dues (as if my dues were anything less than infinite). And, as we get lazier, we usually gain more power and money, both of which help immeasurably in our never-ending quest to be the biggest self-serving jerks on our blocks. And of course many of us participate in the decades-long debacle known as parenting, which pretty much single-handedly fertilizes the psychoanalysis industry.

Gould, like the rest of us at her age, has only begun her career as an asshole. If one is truly interested in Ms. Gould's remorse, I suggest they catch up with her in 2035 or so. Like the rest of us, living or not, she will have quite a bit more 'splainin' to do.

I started to read that article, then realized how long it was, and realized I knew all I needed to know from the pictures on the side.

About those pics, does anyone besides me think tattoos are the most woefully misguided of Generation Y's fashion statements?

I mean, a clip-art rose is a banal nullity in my 5-year-old daughter's "Princesses" coloring book.  Tag it onto the finely sculpted alabaster of an otherwise lovely young lass's lovely shoulder and it graduates from banal nullity to bloody eyesore.  Jesus!

Though come to think of it, personal blogs and tattoos do, I think, stem from the same sort of lay-it-all-out-there ethos, consequences be damned.  

Am I the only one who had never heard of this girl or Gawker? And I'm a part of the same generation as she!