January 10, 2004

| Scenes from the Drug War >>

Do you think people who’ve never heard of a blog actually find this article interesting?

The linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy — a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.

Well isn’t that poignant.

Really, what is the New York Times Magazine’s target audience? I’m more and more beginning to suspect it’s a group of time travelers from half a year ago, curious about what cultural developments have transpired in the interim. Next week in the NYTM: What is a “metrosexual”?

UPDATE: There’s some quality snark about this article flying over on MetaFilter. Sample:

“It was early September, the start of the school year in an affluent high school in Westchester County, just north of New York City, where I was focusing my teen-blogging expedition. The halls were filled with students and the walls were covered with posters urging extracurricular activities. (”Instant popularity, minus the hazing,” read one.) I had come looking for J., a boy I’d never seen, though I knew many of the details of his life.” - Such the brave anthropologist, this Nussbaum, hacking her way with a machete through the dense tropical jungles which encircle NYC, to dare to meet the exotic, tribalistic young savages of the Westchester County suburbs!

She’s lucky that these bone-in-the-nose primitives did not just throw her into a big kettle and boil her for dinner.