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]

Wise probably deserves no moral consideration for hacking into other women's voicemails because some of them had the temerity to get themselves involved with men Wise herself had dated. (In one case, not until two years after Wise's relationship with the man in question had ended.) Even if it was not illegal — and Wise is defending the charges — it was wrong, and she must have known it at the time. An unlovable woman with a nasty habit of violating other women's privacy: this is textbook Internet-enabled girl-on-girl crime, with the salacious hell-hath-no-fury element thrown in as extra tabloid bait. No wonder "sources" are now calling her "radioactive in the industry."

A former Dolce & Gabbana publicist, Wise was arrested this summer for allegedly hacking into the voicemail of Munich-born Nina Freudenberger, an interior designer whose clientele includes many of Manhattan's elite. Freudenberger became involved with Josh Deutsch, the founder of Downtown Records, who had once been Wise's boyfriend. The criminal complaint details 337 individual calls Wise made, via an online number-masking service called SpoofCard, into Freudenberger's voicemail.

This was not isolated behavior. When the District Attorney added three new victims to the case yesterday, he alleged that Wise accessed a second victim's voicemail 137 times. And to have targeted a third victim 119 times. And a fourth one at least 102 times. Wise is said to have also harassed coworkers and friends; anonymous sources have whispered to Page Six about restraining orders Wise was subject to, about anonymous online comments and threatening e-mails. She targeted not just Deutsch's exes, but also women involved with Jason Pomeranc, a hotelier Wise had a long, on-again, off-again relationship with.

All told, Police say she used the SpoofCard service over 1,000 times to listen to the private communications of women who were, in some cases, complete strangers.

How many times have I looked at the Facebook pages of women a boyfriend has cheated on me with? One thousand times? Two thousand times? Five thousand times? Often enough to notice when one gets a new job, manages to use "it's" and "its" correctly, or deletes from her page the year of her birth. Often enough to know where they live. (At first, I only wanted to know if they were pretty. Perhaps Wise started because she just wanted to hear his voice.)

Wise certainly crossed a line in obtaining information under false pretenses — voicemail is private in a way that a profile on a social networking site is not. And it is not my intention to treat her behavior with any more generosity than it deserves — probably close to none. But what I can't get around, is an uncomfortable feeling of identification with her motivations, with her feelings. I can't help but think there's a certain basic understanding of the world and of relationships that she and I share. I suspect Ali Wise has found herself, as I have, unable to sleep at a quarter to four in the morning because a person she has never met has committed some minute act that has nonetheless created a digital trail, an act which, under the circumstances, knowing about is still somehow less painful than not knowing about. Some people have a native disinterest about these things — they hear about someone they loved very much seeing someone else and either don't feel the urge to know just a little more, or successfully repress it. Some people are seeing someone who's seeing someone else and don't even wonder about the nights he has "plans." Some people are probably smart enough not to torture themselves with Google. But I do. More often than I'm comfortable admitting.

What Wise did was wrong, but I understand it. I empathize. I've been there. And that frightens me.

Perhaps the strangest turn in this whole saga is this factoid, buried in today's Post story:

The blond society babe has at least one person still standing by her — Pomeranc, in whose SoHo apartment The Post found her yesterday.

"It's really rude for you to come up here," she said.

So, it's pretty rich for someone accused of serious, long-term stalking, hacking, and harassment to accuse a reporter of being "rude." But I was strangely touched to learn that Wise still has some kind of a relationship with Pomeranc, and I hope it's not wrong of me to wish that it gives her at least a little comfort right now. Because she's facing up to four years in prison for the kinds of acts that, while most of us would not have committed, might, if we're honest with ourselves, have at least considered. Some of us more than once.

Flack 'Hack Attack' On Love Rivals [New York Post]
P.R. Pals Hang Up On 'Spy' Ali Wise [New York Post]
Former Dolce & Gabbana Publicist To Face Charges From Four Women In Stalking Case [NYDN]

Writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek, "From the beginning, Nikki's death had all the makings of a sensational story. She was gorgeous; it was Halloween, and she was driving a $90,000 sports car." But why did the nine photographs leaked from the scene of her accident become a sick, twisted internet phenomenon? [Warning: The pictures, should you search for them, are VERY graphic, and the family wishes you would not see them.]

California Highway Patrol apologized for the leaked pictures; two CHP dispatchers were to blame. One man's attorney said that he sent the images to relatives and friends "as a cautionary tale" to warn them of the dangers of the road. "Any young person that sees these photos and is goaded into driving more cautiously or less recklessly-that's a public service."

Whether or not the pictures did any "public service" is debatable; what did happen was that they popped up on websites specializing in morbid stuff. A fake MySpace page was set up in Nikki's name, where she was called a "stupid bitch." Commenters wrote things like, "That spoiled rich girl deserved it," and "What a waste of a Porsche."

Nikki's family sued the CHP for negligence, privacy invasion and infliction of emotional harm, but a judge dismissed the case. The Catsourases are appealling. Jessica Bennett notes: "But while libel and slander are regulated by law in the real world, in the cyberworld almost anything goes… Legally, anyone can post bloody images of Nikki Catsouras." The real question is: Why do people want to? Rubber-necking at a traffic accident when you're actually on the road is one thing, but setting up a fake MySpace for a dead girl is another. What possesses a person to email a father bloody pictures of his daughter? And do you think it should be illegal?

A Tragedy That Won't Fade Away [Newsweek]

The most painful thing about Blah Girls is how boring the Web series is. It's like the writers took all the jokes and memes from last year and rolled them into a Hills-like setting (complete with Hills-like pointlessness). Ashton may not realize that on the Internet, jokes have to be super current. Quips about Naomi Campbell throwing cell phones at people? So five minutes ago.

Aside from the moldy topics (including the fresh-from-2002-joke about Gwen Stefani not having pink hair anymore and living in London), the jokes are pretty flat. An example from the "Ex-patriots" episode:

Blah Girl: British guys are so hot! Prince William, Orlando Bloom, Harry Potter...
(A thought-bubble of Harry Potter holding a broom stick pops up)
Harry Potter (In an Elvis voice?): Rub my broomstick, baby.

Hilarious, right?

Another bizarre thing about the website is the racial stereotyping of the black Blah Girl, Tiffany:

Tiffany's bio reveals that her "current location" is "[her] hood" (that's how black people talk!), her biggest weaknesses are "limited edition sneakers" (another thing black people like, right?), and her biggest fear is "getting caught in crossfire." Wait, what?

The Blah Girls also include a token twee gay blogger named Stewart whose pink fauxhawk might lead one to believe that he's a biting satirical representation of Perez Hilton. But that would be expecting too much from this blog. Instead, Stewart is just a stereotypical flamboyant gay who is totes obsessed with clothes and his weight (his bio says that when he grows up he wants to "always be able to fit into skinny jeans") and he supplies the Blah Girls with their celebrity news (or something).

The site also has a heavy product placement deal with Vitamin Water. In the "Adoption" episode, Tiffany says that she wants to drink "Vitamin Water Formula 50" to be "cool like 50."

Hm, I wonder who the site's sponsors are?

Ah, that explains it.

There are some funny things on the site: One Blah Girls' dog is named "Botox." One Blah Girl complains that her step-mother burned down the family summer house after too many "Lexipro and Limoncello cocktails." A caption on a Michael Phelps photo in which he hugs a girl in a bikini reads, "Feel that? That's my ninth medal."

We'd like to think that the site could get funnier. But, since this concerns the doomed post-Punk'd combination of Ashton Kutcher and celebrities (remember Pop Fiction?), we'll pronounce Blah Girls dead on arrival.

Blah Girls
Dude, Is That Your Gossip Site? [Portfolio]

• For those of you who don't recognize the people Obama is embracing, that's Debbie Dingell to the left and Senator Carl Levin to the right. They were two of the four Michiganders who led the fight to get Michigan's full delegate seated at the convention. [Kalamazoo Gazette]
• Which is a roundabout way of illustrating that Democrats are all kissing and making up and coming to the fold and John McCain may be feeling lonely without the ladies he was expecting to come over. [LA Times]
• Except for with Joe Lieberman, he's really pissing the Dems off. He might speak at the Republican convention, by the way, a la Zell Miller. [HuffPo]
• Obama confirmed the month-long rumors today that Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton's former campaign manager, will be joining his campaign. That's gonna be interesting. [Fox News]
• Gore endorsing Obama? Prolly gonna be less exciting unless he shows up with pictures of Manbearpig. Why won't anyone take him serially? [Washington Post]

• In more interesting news, many people are using the web to learn things about the candidates! You know, like, instead of just getting it from the news. [Washington Post]
• Unfortunately, John McCain is not one of those people. He doesn't even know what his own climate change bill is about. [Gristmill]
• And he didn't use it to find out that he was about to hold a fundraiser with a guy who suggested rape victims "lie back and enjoy it" if it's inevitable. Of course, everyone else did. [CNN]