A new feature from Facebook lets you authorize non friends to "subscribe" to your profile , creating your own personal army of groupies. It's sort of like putting your Facebook into "Twitter" mode, with all the excitement and terror such a combination implies.
The doubters were wrong: the Wired cover featuring dating columnist/microcelebrity Julia Allison is one of the best-selling covers for the tech magazine in the last eight years, Portfolio reports. We suppose that congratulations are in order. So congrats or whatever. Julia's Wired cover outsold Rupert Murdoch's and Sarah Silverman's. (That is 103,000 copies.) Except. She won by default! Sex n' high heels sells, obviousy, and a woman on the cover of a geek magazine—or a celebrity or fashion magazine, for that matter—always does better. And Wired doesn't put very many women on its cover. It's the Sarah Palin effect.
Do you live in one of those "second-tier" cities that seems woefully bereft of despicable and/or overprivileged and whatever the case self-promoting social climbing youngs? Ever find yourself reading, say, a blog…and feeling just a twinge or a pang or whatever of envy for New York's thriving industry of microcelebrity manufacture? [JUST SAY NO.] But Kate Carraway, a writer in Toronto reflecting on that lofty matter of Jessica Roy, actually claims she does. "We have no Julia Allison, the current Wired cover star, and centre of much debate on media celebrity; no Sloane Crossley…" [sic] she laments. Nor do they have a Keith Gessen nor an Emily Gould nor even much, like, blow! "The NY media circus is ordered and replenished by an anxious, aggressive, semi-twisted sense of value, but value nonetheless," she writes, calling for "a collective pursuit of something better and more worthwhile." Well, Kate Carraway, if this is what you deem "better and more worthwhile," allow me to get service-y with you for a minute and and share with you an abridged and hastily-told tale of a group of anxious, semi-twisted twentysomethings who tried to do exactly what you aspire to do in their own "lesser" city.
