The gist of the AdAge piece is this: why? Why do "celebrity blogs" - they cite the dowdy wowOwow and, naturally, Gwynnie's GOOP-y baby - feel compelled to share with a public who obviously was not clamoring for their advice? We've mulled the rationale behind Gwyneth's public responsibility to help us nourish the inner aspect, and the piece points out that it's particularly odd given that, whatever you think of the Palt, no one really associates her with terms like "'good-taste icon' or 'hip, uber-cultured girlfriend about town.'" While less solipsistic, wowOwow's motivation is equally mysterious:

Was anybody clamoring for Candice Bergen's thoughts on loaning money to friends, or Joan Ganz Cooney's opinion about the current direction of the Catholic Church? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no.

So if we're not demanding the advice, why are these people offering it? The fault must lie with the internet, a medium that has unprecedented power to inflate the already healthy ego and wound the meek. For a narcissistic celebrity with delusions of down-to-earthness, the combo of immediacy and remove is particularly deadly: it must seem like now, at last, we have the direct gateway to Gwyneth Paltrow's thoughts and feelings that we always craved, that because we can see what she's thinking and doing now, we always have - or at least, always wanted to.

We all fall prey to this, to a degree - after all, is GOOP or wowOwow really all that different from an unsolicited Facebook tell-all like "25 Things?" In a sense, wouldn't it be disingenuous for those people who make a living off a writ-large narcissism to abstain from the larger cultural narcissism that we all revel in daily? There's been a lot of talk about the self-absorption the internet fosters, from the hundreds of pictures teens have on their social networking profiles to the Twitter updates that chronicle our minute-by-minute lives. And yet, we object when celebrities go public with their equally unsolicited and self-obsessed advice. This seems slightly contrary: we're okay with their making their living out of exhibitionism, but they're not allowed to participate in the sort that the rest of enjoy day-to-day? Or is that what we want: now that we're all celebrities in our own Facebook minds, do we still demand the remove of distance, a pretense of difference and specialness from real celebrities? They already have so much big-scale adulation; why do they also need to take the one thing - the internet‚ which has given so many of us, otherwise voiceless or faceless, a platform and even an identity? I mean, people already hang on their every word; can't we even keep our rants?

Gwyneth's Inner Musings Make Dobrow Very Afraid [AdAge]

Related: Gwyneth Paltrow's New Website: Let Them Eat Macrobiotic Rice!

It would never occur to me to lie about any of this shit, but then, I live in New York, where nothing is even quite expected of me at 29, except that I have quelled most of the anxieties associated with once having been deemed "precocious" and are therefore a decent drinking partner — that is a good assumption; you can't be precocious after 28 and that is a fucking giant relief — and maybe begun desiring babies and am therefore a perilous romantic partner (a poor assumption, I am a late bloomer though.)

At 29, everyone knows they can flatter the shit out of you by saying you look 24, and they do, but at 29 you can also talk most bouncers in New York out of needing to see the ID you keep losing because bouncers can see in your skin that you are not bullshitting them, you are what you say you are: old enough to drink prolifically and profitably with minimal incident; old enough to remember the lyrics to most modern rock hits from the years between 1989 and 1996.

Anyway, so 29 is a great year; what can I say.

A part of me would like to be 55 and menopausal and "fulfilled" by nothing more than egg sandwiches and Dinosaur Jr. songs, just to get over the disappointment already.

Another part of me thinks "wisdom" is just another word for "having re-learned the same five things the Hard Way so many times my abused and feeble mind has actually absorbed the memories" and that fucking yes, I should really start putting fortnightly facials on a charge card so I can pass for 29 in six years, because fucking hell if I trust my own intellect and work ethic to carry me.

And then there is the part of me that flatters myself into thinking that, you know, something has happened in these years that has been coherent and somehow unwasted and that it will lead to something somehow, that I will always feel exactly the age that I am even though I still occasionally date checks "2003," and that maybe I should stay in tonight and struggle with that for a moment.

But it is Friday.

This We Take From Satchel Paige: How Old Would You Be If You Didn't Know How Old You Were? [WoWoWow]
Put Justin Down Madonna; You're Old Enough To Be His Mother [Daily Mail]