BREAKING: Couples carry their angry breakups onto the internet, says the Times in a story headlined "When the Ex Writes a Blog, Dirty Laundry Is Aired." "Duh!" says Gawker contributor Joshua David Stein and, although most Times readers lack his personal experience in the matter at hand, he has a point. This has been happening forever, including on blogs. But it's hard to resist reading through the story, if only for the list of messy breakups:

  • As you know, there's the unsexed housewife whose YouTube post went up barely a week ago (fast turnaround on the trend piece, Times Styles!).
  • A woman called Naked Jen in Santa Cruz went from calling her husband DearSweetDave to linking to his Match.com profile so readers could "share their thoughts." Naked Jen threw up every day and lost her house.
  • "Laurie" of DivorcingDaze.com found out "her ex-husband was having an affair with his boss from e-mail on his BlackBerry... he had told their older daughter he wasn't cheating because the marriage, in his mind, was already over." Laurie has a podcast where she drinks wine with a divorced friend and discusses various topics, including her ex. He sued to try and block her but has been unsuccessful.
  • William Krasnansky wrote a thinly-veiled story about his divorce, which he said forced him to sell his home at "a ruinous loss." As with Laurie, a court upheld his right to publish.
  • Penelope Trunk, who writes the Brazen Careerist blog, thought she was going was going to a marriage counselor picked out by her husband, but when she showed up at the address it turned out he had sent her to a divorce lawyer. Also, "she has written about the problems of a son who has Asperger's syndrome and said that both she and her husband believed the challenges of raising him helped cause their divorce." Trunk and a UCLA emeritus psychiatry professor go back and forth over whether this was a bad move.

[Times]