A particular idea of New York City is still pushed as a character itself — "Empire State of Mind," Carrie comfortably ensconced as Park Avenue princess. There are giggles over the restaurant table, a shot of that famed closet. Charlotte is surrounded by pink cupcakes. Samantha shoots a practiced flirtatious look at a guy. Big is on his cell phone in his towncar. Miranda... walks purposefully.

But just as the first movie took the New York City-centric girls to Mexico (not that it added much, narratively speaking); this one takes them to the desert, filmed in Morocco. Possibly it managed to wring out the last New York truisms. One hopes that they'll be more inventive with their inevitable camel jokes than the Montezuma's Revenge plotline of the first movie.

One of the best essays on that movie, I think, came out before anyone even saw it. Emily Nussbaum wrote in New York in 2007, "The sitcom terraformed the city in its image, turning Manolos and Cosmos and those damned floppy flowers into icons, then something so clichéd as to be oppressive, almost regimented. Three years later, the Zeitgeist, having writ, has moved on: to milfs and grups, among other things. And Brooklyn."

But it turned out there were still plenty of women, in New York and elsewhere, who were happy to fall in line with the SATC regimen, Zeitgeist be damned. I saw them nearly cut each other to get a seat at an advanced screening, dressed in their best approximations of what it meant to be a successfully glamorous woman in New York. And it made $415 million.

"God, how we need this movie and need it to be good," Nussbaum wrote in her pre-release piece. By its end, the show had lost its early idiosyncrasy — the characters became more caricatured and almost kitschy, the fashion became more self-conscious and brittle, and everything became slicker. It became less light social commentary, more prescription for a particular sort of femininity. The first movie did that trend one better. It wasn't good, really — not at all as it turns out. But I wouldn't mind if this one were.

Sex And The City Official Trailer [YouTube]

Related: What Is The Point, Exactly, Of A Sex And The City Movie? [New York Magazine]

Earlier: I Like Sex, I Like This City. I Hated Sex And The City

[New York, October 26. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - OCTOBER 26: Ivan Burdos from Puerto Rico sits by her bags while waiting for her husband October 26, 2009 in New York, New York. Burdos and her husband have recently found themselves homeless following a move to New York from Puerto Rico. In a recently released report by the advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless it was revealed that the numbers of homeless people using New York City shelters each night has reached an all time high. Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office eight years ago there has been a 45 percent increase in shelter use with over 39,000 homeless people, including 10,000 homeless families, checking in to city shelters every evening. The group also said that 2009 has turned out to be 'the worst on record for New York City homelessness since the Great Depression. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

If you've ever read about the paralegal who keeps on seeing some dude she calls The One Who Cries for lackluster sex, the sweet but dim college boyfriend who doesn't seem to realize his girlfriend doesn't love him anymore, or the lady who followed her cheating boyfriend to Mexico, as well as that guy who comments obsessively on every post, and wondered, Who are these people? Well — they are real. And they have all the tattoos you'd expect.

From left: The Polyamorous Paralegal, The Horny Editor Visiting The 'Rents, and The Expat New Yorker Trying To Make It Work In Paradise.

Analyzing all of humanity's sexual habits — or even all of the city's — based on a self-selecting sample that is, as Yang writes, comprised of "bizarrely oversharing New Yorkers motivated by the impulse to brag or, as often, the urge to fling their terrible abjection in the face of the world," seems a little daft, but the editor of the feature, Arianne Cohen, hazards a few conclusions anyway. "Married Diarists have approximately triple the amount of sex as single ones (even twenty-something singles) simply by dint of sharing a bed," she writes. "Manhattanites are more likely to have intimacy issues, while Brooklynites are more likely to cheat. As for which gender has sex on the mind more often, I'd say it's a draw — though men are more likely to masturbate, somewhat commonly in public bathrooms."

And, whoo boy, is there a lot of masturbation. Communications technology, in making us all reachable, in giving us all the permanent option to do something or someone else, has made us each subject to "the nagging urge to make each thing we do the single most satisfying thing we could possibly be doing at any moment." Human relationships are a menu of choices, constantly updated via Facebook. "In the face of this enormous pressure," Yang writes, "many of the Diarists stay home and masturbate." (And, though they can't have helped, maybe it's not really the cell phones that bring it out in us. Joan Didion seems to have made the exact same point about the tendency toward option paralysis in this city — minus the self-abuse — when she wrote in 1967, "Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about.")

Then there's this:

An inordinate number of Diarists find themselves at the brink of enjoying one sexual experience, only to receive a phone call or text from another potential suitor. They become a slave to their compulsion and indecision. Consider these snippets in a week of one Diarist, who is deeply conflicted between her Pseudo and Ex:

2:55 p.m. Pseudo G-chats me. Looks like he might be interested in hanging out tonight after all. 9:30 p.m. Meet up with Ex and friends at bar. Text Pseudo to see if he's up for doing anything.

2:20 a.m. At a bar with Pseudo and other friends. Ex drunk-texts me: "Wanna fuck?" 3:17 a.m. Half-bottle of wine plus mucho beer plus a few rounds of shots leads to me texting Pseudo, "Let's get out of here and go back to my place." 3:18 a.m. Pseudo texts back, "I don't feel like dealing with you."

11:45 p.m. At a bar with Pseudo. Ex drunk-texts me.

1:30 p.m. Ex calls and wakes me up. Says he needs to talk in person. 7:49 p.m. Text Pseudo and tell him about convo with Ex. Pseudo replies that he's sorry, he hopes I end up getting what I want. What the hell does that mean? I have no idea what I want, clearly.

This compulsive toggling between options winds up inflicting the very damage it was designed to protect against.

This would be funny if it weren't absolutely true.

Yang, with the diaries, paints a picture of an aggressively devil-may-care kind of young New York that isn't entirely aware of its own contradictions. We seek romance, but avoid emotional exposure. We hedge "The anxiety of appearing overly sincere" against "The anxiety of being unable to love." One 26-year-old diarist says, of his girlfriend, "I want to love her. And I should. I just, well, don't. She's the best girlfriend anyone could ever hope to have. I wish that were enough to love her." Another, aged 39, spends a moment every Sunday looking for M4W posts by Steve, "a disgusting person I slept with back in April," on Craigslist.

There's a thick vein of neurotic self-loathing in these stories, which, though rarely elegantly expressed, has its own kind of appeal. Maybe we shouldn't be asking what the sex diarists tell us about our behavior, but what our willingness to read their reports says about us.

A Critical (But Highly Sympathetic) Reading of New Yorkers' Sexual Habits and Anxieties [NYMag]

That was Gail Zweigenthal, a former editor who covered things like important cruise ship christenings for Gourmet, and who lives — of course — on the Upper East Side. Zweigenthal proudly tells the paper that she lifts weights and walks three miles every single day.

New York, which is already one of the thinner states in the country, is home to Manhattan, where overweight people comprise just 42% of the population. (The national average is 67%.) These data are, of course, derived from the Body Mass Index — and strangely, the fact that while obesity is a serious health problem, BMI is an unreliable indicator of a person's health, goes unmentioned in the Times story. In any case, the reason Manhattan is New York's thinnest county is undoubtedly because it is also one of the state's, and the country's, wealthiest places. In poorer neighborhoods of Manhattan, like Harlem, obesity rates and the prevalence of obesity-linked diseases, like Type 2 diabetes, are higher.

Maybe the fact that food choice — not to mention the choice to join a gym — is in America largely a function of social class and income level is what led reporter Anne Barnard to concentrate exclusively on interviewing skinny rich ninnies for this piece. We have:

• Brian Ermanski, a 28-year-old "slender yet muscular painter" who lives in SoHo and, from a bench outside the restaurant Balthazar, says things like, "It's probably more like 20 percent overweight down here." Ermanski smokes to stay thin.
• Manager of the Madison Avenue Intermix — a store which does not sell clothes above a size eight — Lynne Bacci, who works out "to fit into skinny jeans and tank tops."
• The aforementioned Zweigenthal, who continued, "If I feel fat, I can't enjoy eating. This is unhealthy — that if I gain a few pounds, I'm not happy — but it's the truth of me."
• Exhale Gym and Spa director Susan Tomback, who calls exercise for her clients "a lifestyle thing. It's like a club. They go to brunch afterwards at Sant Ambroeus." Sant Ambroeus is a restaurant whose brunch menu includes a filet of sea bream that costs $39. Exhale Gym and Spa is a gym and spa where membership can cost up to $285 a month.
• One denizen of the Upper East Side who says that she was raised to explicitly connect social class with weight. "My mom always says, 'The smaller the dress size, the bigger the apartment.'"

Then Barnard quotes a 52-year-old plumber from the Bronx named Chuck Ortiz, who, at 6' and 220 lbs, would be classified as just under obese according to the BMI. Ortiz, who eats a $5 chicken gyro for lunch, doesn't understand why wealthy New Yorkers pay for a gym "when there's a park right there."

That's the sort of outer borough logic that doesn't get much play in the land of lunches at Balthazar and $285/month "lifestyle" gyms and stores that abjure a size 10 dress.

Where Thin People Roam, And Sometimes Even Eat [NYTimes]
Top 10 Reasons BMI Is Bogus [NPR]

[New York, June 30. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - JUNE 30: A girl shields herself from a rainstorm with a cardboard box outside a tribute to Michael Jackson at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where the deceased pop star first performed at age 9, June 30, 2009 in New York City. Thousands of people lined up outside the famous theater to pay tribute to Jackson, bringing flowers, singing, and performing impromptu dances. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)

• Noted anti-fur activist has some advice for noted huntress Sarah Palin: "She can suck it." Yet another woman with a legitimate policy disagreement with Sarah Palin. [Huffington Post]
• By the way, Todd Palin's about to break his subpoena cherry, as he's expected to be subpoenaed to testify about his role in TrooperGate. God, if only the Congress could subpoena people to testify about wrongdoing in the Bush Administration! Wait, that's right, they could, but then they wouldn't get their bellies scratched. [Wall Street Journal]
• Once upon a time, in a primary far, far away, John McCain said that former Governor Mitt Romney and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani (pop: 8,000,000, attacked by terrorists in 2001) didn't have enough national security experience to be President. [Huffington Post]

• Unsurprisingly, Sarah Palin's next interview will be with Sean Hannity next week. Apparently, Charlie Gibson wasn't fawning enough. [New York Observer]
• Not that it matters whether he was or not, probably, since McCain's now ahead in the polls for the first time. Apparently, more people think that he is inexperienced than believe that Sarah Palin is. No, for real. [Associated Press]
• Oh, and of course Sarah Palin signed off on the budgets that cut funding for rape kits in Wasilla. [Huffington Post]

• John McCain told a crowd that the "people who decide these things" told him there would be 2-3 Supreme Court vacancies soon. Of course, those are lifetime appointments, so it's either that McCain's in contact with Death or he's forgotten one of the fundamentals of the third branch of our democracy. [HuffPo]
• Speaking of idiocy, Attorney General Michael Mukasey decided today that no one will be punished for the illegal hiring practices in the Department of Justice under Alberto Gonzales. You know, because no one cares, except for those people denied jobs for not being Republican-y enough. And maybe the people fired. And those people transferred for not complying. And Democrats. Well, hardly anyone, anyway! [International Herald Tribune]
• In a blast from the past, corrupt bribe-taking Republican Congressman Bob Ney is getting out of the slammer soon! Democrats have already started a collection to send him to Minneapolis for Labor Day, since he helped them so much in the 2006 elections. [HuffPo]

• Cindy Sheehan, who has vowed to never disappear from the media spotlight ever again, has qualified to run against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in November as an Independent. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer would be rubbing his hands with anticipation, but even he's sick of Cindy Sheehan. [HuffPo]
• Suicide bomber recruiters have apparently tired of using women as suicide bombers and started dressing men up like women to do it. Just kidding! Real women will return to bombing next week. [LA Times]
• New York City's abortion rate is up to 72 abortions for every 100 live births, which is almost 3 times the national average. Advocates blame it on a lack of access to affordable birth control and a reduction in birth control usage. Anti-abortion advocates have already started calling New York City Gemorrah, since they already used up Sodom on San Francisco. [Crane's]
• Mark Penn thinks Obama needs to play up McCain's "record" on women's issues. This is the type of advice you get when Mark Penn isn't getting paid millions of dollars to play divide-and-conquer with your staff. [Politico]