Upon meeting Nicolas Winding Refn in the NOMO SOHO suite where he was fielding interviews earlier this week I told him I was weirdly invested in his existential state. “Oh cool,” replied the director of 2011's universally acclaimed Drive.

Here are the first lines of today’s column by the Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker, the real life version of a white character from The Help, in which she bemoans the present day profusion of “showoffs” who engage in “narcissistic indulgence.”

Let's set the scene: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, early afternoon, on a cold winter Sunday. You, an admirer of Impressionism, are taking in a portrait of a woman relaxing by the seashore, painted by French master Renoir. A metal pole and a man in a green Canada Goose jacket appear in front of the painting. He is flashing a dirtbag grin in your direction.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, formerly known as Nicholas D. Kristof, who took the time to write a special blog post about his decision to stop publishing his middle initial ("D."), now mourns the frivolity of people reading the item that he decided to write.

Kanye West is unsatisfied with his ranking on MTV's Hottest MCs in the Game list for 2013, poor narcissist.

The past few months have been full of navel-gazing essays about the relative merits of writers writing navel-gazing essays. Blogger Kate Fridkis weighs in with one more this week—a fairly run-of-the-mill heave in defense of personal writing. One argument in particular deserves to be highlighted:

Every year, thousands of fresh-faced young aspiring journalists flood our nation's college classrooms, in order to learn how to practice their craft. What should we tell them? This, first: journalism is not about you.

Rich girl Lena Dunham sold a book of "frank and funny advice on everything from sex to eating to traveling to work" to Random House for $3.7 million in October on the strength of an illustrated 66-page proposal. Here it is, weighing in at $56,000 or so per page.

Once upon a time long ago, blogs were criticized for making us all more narcissistic and self-obsessed. Then, of course, Twitter came along. And now, the fabled "third wall" of self-referentiality has been breached: a lengthy blog post pondering the implications of a writer's retweet of a tweet about the writer's writing. Tell me: what do you think—about me?

Harvard psychologists have found that people are so desperate to share random bits of information about themselves (their habits, their likes and dislikes, what, all bullshit aside, they really think of Girls), they are willing to give up ACTUAL FREE MONEY to do it.

Yesterday, New York Times foreign correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman (pictured) won a Pulitzer for his reporting on strife and famine in Africa. Though the Times traditionally decides who of its reporters deserve nominations, Gettleman didn't wait for the bosses—he nominated himself. Does that make him an asshole?

Photographed exiting a beauty salon in Santa Monica, Kim Kardashian inadvertently revealed that she not only receives Google Alert emails whenever "Kim Kardashian" appears on the internet, but she actually spends her free time reading her personalized "Kim Kardashian" news alerts. This is remarkable for three reasons:

There's a famous tech saying that all good social networks begin with the question, "How will this software get my users laid?" Twitter wants you to believe it's new redesign has nailed this particular feature.

Bono. This guy. The guy from U2. But you probably know him for being the world's all-around best human. He's not just some rock star that groupies want to bang; he's some rock star who's always writing op-eds about Serious World Issues, which makes an entirely new set of groupies want to bang him.

We are now living in a time in which the first generation in history that never experienced life before the internet is coming into cultural power. And it is awful.

In a sleepy Austrian hamlet today, a hulking superhuman lovingly caressed the buttock of a grotesquely muscled 8-foot-tall bronze state of himself.

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.

Tired of clicking endlessly on Twitter to find out who is loving you, who is quoting you, who is stalking you and who is talking about you? Good news: The microblogging service just made narcissism way less time consuming.

Is your ego underinflated? Do you lack the mass media ubiquity and blind teen adulation required for true self worth? Luckily there's an iPhone app to help! Meet "Fan Mail."

Because Bill Clinton politely asked fringe conservatives to stop encouraging violence against the government on the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Michele Bachmann has decided that he wants to "take her out." In a killing sense. Not romantically.