The NYTimes Sunday Magazine Cover Story, Exposed, by Emily Gould on her life as a professional blogger, has been roundly trashed — see, for example, here, here, here, here, and here, more thoughtful takes here and here — even as it was a most emailed story and made Memorandum.
While I agree with my colleagues that it was fairly frothy, I’m not so sure we’re the best judges. And I’d like to find someone among us who might better explore the truths that lurk in passages like this one:
I didn’t leave my apartment unless I absolutely had to, and because I had the option of working from home, I rarely had to. But while my actual participation in life shrank down to a bare minimum, I still responded to hundreds of e-mail messages and kept up a stream of instant-messenger conversations while I wrote. Depending on how you looked at it, I either had no life and I barely talked to anyone, or I spoke to thousands of people constantly.
Meanwhile, I’ll take this opportunity to further introduce expose myself to TMV readers. From my personal blog, an early post from years ago on why I blog and another more recent post on writing.