Illustration by Michael Byers

The onset of middle age used to mean that one could ease into becoming a bland old fusspot, free from the burden of remaining attuned to the microscopic upticks of the cultural barometer. You’d have bought a reliable European sedan, started making bad jokes to waitresses and receiving all your news from Time. Blissful irrelevance was the calling card.

But thanks to a confluence of factors, the generation gap that once created a comfortable buffer between youthful folly and mundane adulthood has all but eroded. Instant Internet access to the entire history of popular culture has played a role. There’s also the trend toward flat, decentralized workplaces, where those of us who watched the Nixon impeachment sit in open offices next to co-workers who were still teens when the first African-American president was elected. And not least of all is the fact that so many 40-somethings—men and women of my generation—refuse to act their age.

We now exist in a timeless culture. As media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues in his new book, Present Shock, there is no past or future—only right now. “The present isn’t so much a culture of its own as it is an amalgamation of all the periods we’ve been through,” said Mr. Rushkoff. “And this makes it difficult to belong to a particular generation.”

The old generational identities that once defined us have broken down, and the net result is a messy temporal mashup in which 40-somethings act like skateboarders, 20-somethings dress like the grandfather from My Three Sons, tweens attend rock concerts with their parents and toddlers are exposed to the ethos of hardcore punk.

It didn’t used to be like this.

“I worked at Limbo cafe on Avenue A in the early ’90s, where The Paris Review would do readings for the drag queens, squatters and smackheads,” recalled Michael Rovner, a 42-year-old former magazine editor who is now a principal in the content marketing agency Mr. Finn Content Works. “These 45-year-old swells from the Upper East Side would show up, and it always seemed like they were crashing our party. But now I’m in my 40s and younger people don’t look at me that way. I can go see Sky Ferreira at Glasslands, though I suppose I do run the risk of being called ‘sir.’”

The lines are blurred, the edge has been dulled and the traditional time lines have been jumbled. We all now feed from the same cultural trough. And while the Baby Boomers are busy preparing their sloops for that sunset sail into retirement (provided their 401ks haven’t taken on too much water), the graying of Gen X has been postponed indefinitely.

While the erosion of the generation gap may seem like a positive step for society—longhairs trusting people over 30, Archie Bunker making peace with Meathead—the liberation provided by this breakdown is largely symbolic. As Mr. Rushkoff put it, “Culturally, everything is just one level deep, one search away.”

“There are no longer the same generational divides, but I think that’s also because no one is experiencing much of anything in depth,” he continued.

Which is not necessarily a condemnation of our 140-character society, or the technology that wrought it. The Internet has unlocked the creative potential of humanity, and it is making people more accountable for their actions. But for me and many of my generational cohorts, this interconnectedness has also resulted in a lot of extra homework, as we’re now expected to keep up with every new ripple in the sea of culture.

You may know, for instance, that Skrillex is the EDM dude with the weird haircut that all the suicide girl baristas had last summer—a trend that, of course, has spawned at least one Tumblr. I didn’t. So I had to do a little studying, in order to communicate intelligently with my younger co-workers.

It may sound trivial, but maintaining all this awareness is tiring business. Though I feel neither old nor outmoded, I just turned 45. Assuming I manage to walk the Earth for as long as my recently deceased father did, the first half of my life is over. By even the most generous definition, I am middle-aged. As such, I tire easily.

And I’m not alone.

“It’s gotten exhausting,” said Kyle Smith, the 46-year-old author and New York Post film critic. “I have to keep up in some ways, otherwise my cultural references risk sounding like Grampa Simpson’s. But I’m also supposed to stay on top of reality TV, Homeland, everything on HBO, the latest politician’s gaffe and whatever’s trending on BuzzFeed, Vine and Twitter? I can’t do it. There aren’t enough hours in the day. And I just don’t have the desire.”

Illustration by Michael Byers

Even when we make an effort to avoid new information, it finds us, thanks to the constant stream of social media and the omnipresence of digital devices. Sure, some of this is self-imposed. And, yes, one could move to a remote cabin in Montana and do nothing but read the works of David Foster Wallace and annotate old perfect-bound issues of The Baffler, but there isn’t much money in that kind of thing these days.

Besides, if one were truly to unplug, one would run the risk of missing out on what Jezebel editor in chief Jessica Coen refers to as “eye-opening intergenerational experiences.”

“Whereas once it might have been easy to slowly disconnect from pop/youth culture and fade, blissfully ignorant, into irrelevance, now ‘disconnecting’ means literally to deny yourself the full experience of a dominant cultural medium,” said Ms. Coen, who, at age 33, splits the difference between the Millennials and Generation X.

Some of my peers on the brink of middle age do succeed at ignoring the noise. Stephen Metcalf, a Slate contributor and author of the forthcoming Junk, about the unexplored relationship between Reaganism and pop culture, feels the greatest gift he’ll give to coming generations is his out-of-it-ness.

“I’d love to not seem like a used-up husk,” he said. “But realistically, if it hasn’t been on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, I haven’t heard of it.”

As an aspiring fuddy-duddy, Mr. Metcalf suspects that Generation Xers aren’t the only ones who are suffering due to the loss of the generation gap. “There’s no more ‘gap’ in the traditional sense,” he said, “but isn’t this just another theft, courtesy of the Boomers? Isn’t the Alternadad taking away his kids’ turn at self-definition?”

Take rock concerts, for example, those smoke-filled dens of electrified wizardry which young people used to seek out in defiance of their parents. Now they’re family outings. If you’ve been to venues like Madison Square Garden or the Barclays Center recently, you’ve probably seen second-graders rocking out to Canadian power trios and aging British quartets right alongside their guardians.

One wonders what the result of all this generational commingling will be. Will our children be forced to go to further extremes to rebel? Or maybe they’ll become archly conservative boors in response to all of this enforced hipness—the mature grown-ups we’ve not yet had the guts to become.

It would serve us right.

I know that I’m part of the problem.

My nearly 5-year-old son is well versed in the lore of the Ramones and could offer a dissertation on the original Star Wars trilogy. His younger brother recites the lyrics to Beastie Boys songs like they were nursery rhymes. I have introduced them to the cultural totems I once cared about, but I wonder if I am shortchanging them in the process. Not to mention infantilizing myself.

(This topic was covered some in Neal Pollack’s Alternadad: The True Story of One Family’s Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America, in which he takes his toddler to the Austin City Limits festival, among other generation-sharing adventures.)

But maybe that’s the key. There does seem to be a deeper fear of growing up for men and women of my generation—an insecurity about what comes next. Many of us can’t say with confidence whether we’ll have a job in 10 years. Or what our bank accounts will look like in 20. Retirement will be, for many, an impossibility. So perhaps as long as we act like kids, we can deceive ourselves into thinking we are still young, that we have at least one more chance to get it right. Even if, in so doing, we abdicate our roles as serious, solid citizens. As adults.

I know guys whose style of dress and off-duty interests haven’t changed a lick since college. They devote their free time to movies about comic-book heroes, to video games and to fantasy football. No, they aren’t hurting anybody. But perhaps what we really need to do is put on suits and take our wives out for expensive dinners, like our dads before us.

My father was 45 when I was born—the age I am now. Though he was always youthful and athletic, even to the end, he was a child of the Great Depression, a first-generation American Jew who grew up poor and scrappy in a shared rental duplex on Detroit’s west side. He seemed to have become an adult the day he graduated law school.

In his early 50s, my father was a dark-haired force of nature in double-breasted suits who was as feared in the courtroom as he was generous outside it, and my view of what adulthood is supposed to be is modeled on this snapshot of him. He seemed older and more respected than I can ever imagine being.

When my father wasn’t working—and he was almost always working—he was reading the evening papers, listening to baseball games on WJR radio or watching old cowboy movies. The things I was interested in—punk rock, BMX bikes and National Lampoon—were simply not on my father’s radar. I didn’t take this as a lack of interest. He was loving and warm and present. He just seemed too adult to have an idea that things like Black Flag or Foto Funnies even existed.

He had his interests and I had mine. The difference was that, like most of my generation, I became defined by those interests. And have been ever since.

Perhaps what is truly lost with the erosion of the generation gap is this sense of actual adulthood—the maturity to stop caring what my interests in pop culture say about me; the comfort in being seen not as an equal, but as an elder (even if my younger co-workers stop asking me out for drinks). As Mr. Rushkoff told me, “Maybe that’s the generation gap we’re longing for—the permission to let go of the search.”

Mr. Peretti, also a co-founder of The Huffington Post, praised Mark Zuckerberg for connecting people, making practice out of Stanley Milgram’s six degrees of separation theory.

“Facebook is the place where everyone is going to have to be no matter what,” agreed Michael Wolf, Yahoo’s newest board member. “So it’s almost like a utility.”

Reuters social media editor Anthony De Rosa likened it to the “plumbing” or the “on-ramp” of the Internet.

“So even though Facebook is regarded as a walled garden it still has its fingers in different pies?” asked moderator and I Want Media founder Patrick Phillips.

Yes, Mr. De Rosa said, Facebook has “tentacles.”

Jezebel editor Jessica Coen said she has started making assignments based not on what people will be searching for, but what is most likely to get passed around on Facebook.

“There’s something very democratic about it,” she said. It’s now Jezebel’s top traffic driver.

According to Mr. Peretti, the shift from search to social had raised the bar for editorial quality. He recalled a week when searches for “Rihanna nude cell phone pics” drove “huge” traffic to The Huffington Post.

“Nobody posts their on Facebook or Twitter feed, ‘Hey, I heard there’s leaked pictures of Rihanna nude online. I have some time this weekend. Anyone know where I can find those?’” he said.

“Instead, you’ll post on your Facebook or Twitter, ‘Join me in helping the people in Japan after the tsunami.’ Or a really smart article from the Harvard Business Review. Or you’ll post a funny thing, because laughter is social.”

Even BuzzFeed’s famous cute animal pics are part of the social fabric, he said.

“Having empathy for living things is part of what makes us human.”

“But is the most sharable content the best content?” asked Mr. Phillips, citing BuzzFeed’s latest, “Does Your Cat Have A Drug Problem?”

In response, Mr. Peretti offered a parable from offline life.

“You’re at a Parisian café, and you’re reading your Sartre book and you’re reading Le Monde and you’re thinking of the big issues of the world and you see there’s a dog under the table next to you and you pet the dog. You don’t suddenly become stupid when you pet the dog.”

Molly Young.

What makes a Molly?

Molly Lambert.

They were three exemplars of the value of a well-constructed personal brand, and each is now more than merely Internet-famous. Ms. Young contributes regularly to New York after leaving a job at the Daily; Ms. Lambert works for Grantland, where she now sticks images of celebrities between her paragraphs on ESPN’s dime; Ms. McAleer launched a women’s-interest site, HelloGiggles, with the actress Zooey Deschanel, and is a writer for the new CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls.

 

Molly McAleer.

I Gchatted a friend who works in finance to tell her I’d been assigned to write a piece on “the Mollys.” She replied “write it in the p.o.v. of edith z.” The Hairpin blogger Edith Zimmerman may be the Molliest of Mollys. She wrote bizarre and fantastical fake letters from women’s magazines for The Awl and ghost stories on her personal blog. She brought that brand of flustered, wacky pixieishness first to The Hairpin, the women’s interest site she edits, then to a GQ cover profile of Chris Evans. The piece, which was controversial even among the magazine’s editors, was more revelatory of Ms. Zimmerman’s half-self-deprecating exultation of her L.A. exploits than of anything Captain America had to say, in the same way that Molly Young’s New York articles sneak in turns of phrase like “weenie-tuggers” and “girl crush," and Molly Lambert smuggles fan-fic footnotes about how Kate Moss is like “the cool best friend who knows all the good shows and parties to go to and brings you” onto Grantland. Another freelance writer, Marisa Meltzer, posted a photo of herself doing the “hand-heart” gesture on her Tumblr after publishing a piece on the phenomenon in the New York Times Styles section; she also posted a picture of her bedroom, suggesting that she considered submitting it to a blog of teenage bedrooms though she is “aged way the fuck out” now. Mollyish writing hinges on a cute mashup of ingratiating cuteness (hand-heart! Weenie-tuggers!) and hard ambition (the Times! New York!), starring a narrator in on the joke.

Such is the appeal of Mollyism—especially to straight, male dude-itors—that the literary eye-lash batting generally manages to survive the delicate transition from personal blog to print. (Whether Ms. McAleer’s voice will make the trickier leap to TV remains to be seen, but examples like that of Ms. Zimmerman and Ms. Meltzer indicates that the blog voice can thrive in print.)

According to Wired editor Bill Wasik, the Mollys are doing what writers have always done. “It's pretty common and always been common that you start with voicier writing in less established organs,” said  “and you move to better- established organs that pay better and you bring the writing, but you show that you can report out and structure and bulletproof a magazine feature.”

But voicey is one thing. The Mollys have taken to a whole other level. The intimacies of Tumblr have vastly amplified the confessional mode. As Maud Newton noted in a recent essay in the Times Magazine (which briefly employed Ms. Zimmerman as a web columnist), there’s a frantically conversational tone on social media: “‘Oh, hi,’ people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.” Ms. Newton phrased this as a universal concern--perhaps we're all a little bit Molly.

Tumblr happens to be a nearly perfect platform for showcasing a writer’s wry take or sharp attitude while requiring minimal effort. “Sometimes, you see a blogger where they’ve only written two sentences, but they’re really witty,” said Jezebel editor Jessica Coen. “Tumblr’s really easy to read and you can go through 100 entries in ten minutes.”

The coquettish particularities of Tumblr as a platform—which encourages a sort of literary fan dance, in which a writer’s identity remains largely hidden even as she’s laying bare her interior monologue—invite a certain amount of projection from readers. Choire Sicha, proprietor of The Awl and a keen observer of the Molly phenomenon, noted over Gchat that “my problem is that digital presence is weirdly so obscuring? it's like, you look at someone's tumblr and you're like, what the fuck is your name? what's your email? where DO YOU WORK, HOW OLD ARE YOU?”

Near instant reader feedback also encourages a certain style of writing. “I remember the days of Tumblarity,” said Maura Johnston, music editor of the Village Voice, recalling an early feature of the platform that ranked users based on their readers’ devotion. “If I write something, I do hit the reload button to see if people have responded to it… it’s the blogger’s dilemma: you can work really hard on something that’s thought out and reasoned or you can post about ‘I fell in love today and this is why’—and that greeting card-ready stuff will triumph.”

“One of the things that’s been lost in this new, fast publishing age,” Ms. Johnston added, “is this grooming period for a lot of young writers thrown into the deep end after school. You see things like Thought Catalog”—the website full of glum young boys and girls curating confessions about themselves in a super-breezy tone—“and you don’t have people thinking about things. There are a lot of lazy constructions or lazy ideas.”

Which is not to say that there’s not considerable drive behind the cozy bed-head tics—just that the ambition is tempered by an appealingly easygoing quality. “Mollys just want to have fun,” Mr. Sicha pointed out. “That’s why they’re so endearing, even when they’re glum or emo or sincere… But they’re full of kicks.”

Mr. Wasik said that the kicks are hardly going to damage the writers’ credibility: “We're entering an era where it's not as if, if you want to write an essay for The New Yorker, they’re going to be freaked out by the fact that you have this Tumblr devoted to being funny or being silly. People get that writers have different sides to their personality.”

That presumes people can tell the Mollys apart. Ms. McAleer, the 2 Broke Girls writer, said: “It happens to me all the time—people say, ‘I read your stuff on Grantland every day.’” Molly is a memorable name, so people will assume that it’s all the same person.” She and Ms. Lambert, both of whom live in Los Angeles, are friends.

“We’ve all gotten emails for the other Mollys,” said Ms. Lambert. “It’ll go back and forth a few times before you realize it’s meant for someone else.”

Ms. Young, who lives in New York, stands apart, and declined an interview request. She told The Observer via email: “I just don't think that anyone gives a shit about me, even if I share a name with these cool people.” Super Mollyish thing to say.

And there’s always an up-and-comer. “No molly list now is complete with[out] molly oswaks,” Mr. Sicha told us via Gchat, of a writer whose work (“Mad Men’s Betty Draper Is A Real Bummer,” “The Melodrama of Miley Cyrus”) has been featured on Thought Catalog and in The Believer. “THERE’S A NEW MOLLY,” he told us. “MOVE OVER MOLLIES.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Molly McAleer

What makes a Molly?

Three well-known Internet writers--Molly Young, Molly Lambert, and Molly McAleer--share more than a name. The three have long attracted attention for their similar methods of self-promotion on the blogging platforms Tumblr and Twitter.

"WoA provided an unintended occasion where many of them wrote on the SAME THING AT THE SAME TIME," the post read, in part. "This is where writers are finally forged; not in the pages of glossy journals or daily unedited personal tirades: But where the voices of the town square become part of the group mind."

All the same, recent Columbia graduate Hillary Busis, who recapped the show for The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog, wasn't thrilled to engage the group mind when she learned that Mr. Saltz himself would be providing recaps for New York.

"When I saw his first post I was like, 'Oh, people will care a lot more about what he's saying than about what I have to say,'" she said.

The rise of the Internet television recap has been an inevitable side effect of a medium that allows for instant reactions, favors a freelance model and realizes that the winner of a reality show will dominate Google searches on the day following a season finale. Many sites, Entertainment Weekly's for one, offer straightforward play-by-play summaries of a show for people who haven't watched, but nearly every major publication and journalistic blog now offers some form of instant analysis of popular shows. Slate and Vanity Fair, where James Wolcott offers a Mad Men post-game, are two of the less likelier spots that have joined the recap game. New York currently employs some 30 writers to cover as many shows.

Then there are the sites where recaps take the main stage, like the NBC-owned Television W ithout Pity, whose editors work right out of 30 Rock. That site is home to Jacob Clifton, who has become known for his sprawling 27-page recaps of shows ranging from American Idol to Doctor Who.

"It's a performance," said Mr. Clifton, who lives in Austin, Texas, but has gained a reputation among New York editors. "Not to compare myself to anybody else but my image of myself has always been sort of Derrida or somebody, Barthes, in a shop window being like,  'Well here's what the story's really about.'"

The rise of the recap was swift. Jessica Coen, the editor of Jezebel who has also worked as an editor at Gawker and New York, views the current model as dating back to Gossip Girl, a show that Gawker began recapping in part because it provided the opportunity for a reliable hit-garnering weekly feature.

"It's got a lot of smart little pop culture references, it kind of plays with viewers. It talks back, it's aware of what people are writing about them. The OC was kind of the original Gossip Girl," said Ms. Coen, who wrote about that show on her own blog before coming to Gawker. "This was when blogs weren't huge for-profit enterprises just yet. Everybody recapped The OC, everybody talked about it."

Compare that to today, where stand-up comedian Max Silvestri says he has three friends who are paid to recap Top Chef alone. Mr. Silvestri is currently at work on a pilot for Comedy Central and pens frenetic recaps of Top Chef himself, for the food blog Eater.  "I guess I've now done three or four seasons?" he said. "Maybe five. Jesus, such a waste of time."

"It's great for the audience of the people that watch your show but then you're spending four hours on a freelance humor piece that has a very small market of people that are going to read it," Mr. Silvestri said. "I always sort of struggle with that. I'm like, 'Why am I doing this?' 'Why aren't I writing something that's a little broader?'"

But for young writers hoping to get a foot in the door, the increased demand for recappers can only be viewed as a good thing--after all, it's a paycheck and it beats, say, fact-checking, being a paralegal or waiting tables in terms of literary gratification. Ms. Busis, who now recaps Mad Men in addition to Work of Art, recalled when her editor at The Wall Street Journal offered her a freelance Gossip Girl post, unsolicited.

"I don't really remember how he knew that I watched it but I wrote back right away and I said, 'Sure,' because it sounded awesome since I was going to be watching it anyway," Ms. Busis said. "Then all the sudden I got another email saying, 'Can you be our regular Gossip Girl recapper?' and I was like, 'Sure.'"

Gawker's Richard Lawson is something of a posterboy for this kind of online Horatio Alger narrative. He worked in Gawker's ad sales department but through the strength of his comments on the site secured a writing job and is now the go-to name in online television recaps, distinguishing himself with his playful extra-narrative adventures for the shows' characters.

"I think it's an accidental byproduct of my being able to kind of just go a little bit nuts with the recaps, because they were never supervised and they weren't edited or anything," Mr. Lawson said. "I get to showcase a lot more of me as a writer than you can see in a short post about Marc Jacobs or whatever."

"Richard's an incredible talent," said Choire Sicha, who edited Gawker when Mr. Lawson was first published there. "And in this weird change or whatever that we're still now in, the world has to accommodate talents like Richard's."

And Mr. Lawson's name is on the lips of publishers. He's had meetings with people at a "big agency" but struggled in translating his voice to a comic novel format. Mr. Clifton has found the vaccum of working without commenters difficult-- he's close with his, a handful have even come out to him via email--and has serialized all four of his novel efforts online.

Right now, the career path of the TV recapper is largely undetermined. One would think that the job would lead to a career in traditional television journalism.

"But of course how long is the kind of more formal, old-school criticism going to be around? Or is this just going to take over?" asked Times TV critic Ginia Bellafante -- who, incidentally, recaps Mad Men for the paper. "I certainly hope it doesn't, but how viable is a TV critic's career anymore?"

Mr. Lawson had a taste of this. He left Gawker in 2009 for a new job at TV.com, a more mainstream Web site owned by CBS, before returning to Gawker after five months.

"I did these depressing phone interviews with TV actors and I was one of twenty they were doing in an hour," Mr. Lawson said. "But that's good; I mean you would have to cut your teeth there to become the next Virginia Heffernan or whatever."

Ms. Bellafonte attributed the proliferation of recapping to a fundamental change in the TV medium. "I think it is a confluence of the popularity of blogging in general and the nature of TV now," she said. "TV is longform. Even if blogging had been all the rage in 1988 there wasn't as much to say."

Mr. Sicha has taken a public anti-recap stance, banning them from his site, The Awl. "We broke the ban once or twice," he said. In addition, the site has run Natasha Vargas-Cooper's "Footnotes to Mad Men." "Natasha found a way to go in sideways and started her own Tumblr--then we're like, 'Hmm, yes! Come to us!' Now she has written a sort of profound book of cultural studies about a TV show, based essentially on a Tumblr? That's new."

Mr. Sicha isn't sure how long the traditional model of criticism, like Mr. Saltz', will exist. He pointed to Bravo's new watch-along iPad app as an example of this. "They're turning all of their viewers into recappers!" he said.

Ms. Busis, for her part, intends to continue freelancing her recaps. When asked if she gives any considerations to a show's popularity--as getting in on the ground floor of a show that becomes a hit could lead to a higher profile--she said she doesn't.

"I didn't really think that Work of Art would take off, and it didn't, but I would have been watching it either way," she said. "I mean my thinking was, 'It's summer.' What else are you going to do, right? Nothing else is on."

dduray@observer.com

The piece is flatly expository. "Who exactly is Jezebel?" the reporter asks at the end of the first paragraph, before going on to talk about traffic, ad revenue and serial features on the site. "One popular feature, Midweek Madness, is a tongue-in-cheek dissection of the week’s glossy tabloids." Do go on!

The Times reporter Jennifer Mascia talks to Jessica Coen, the site's executive editor, and recently departed fouding editor Anna Holmes. But where is discussion of how the blog will change after Ms. Holmes? Where is talk of new undertakings by Ms. Coen?

“I wanted Jezebel to be welcoming,” Ms. Holmes told The Times in a 2008 piece about the site and its quandary over how to handle nasty commenters. Is Jezebel the same site now?

Ms. Mascia shows glancing awareness of other mini-controversies surrounding the site, mentioning the back-and-forth with The Daily Show and grabbing a nugget from Emily Gould's highly critical article on Slate earlier this month. But Ms. Mascia adds nothing. It's very much a "she said, she said," which we don't really need The Times for.

After paraphrasing Ms. Gould's point, the piece continues:

But Ms. Coen says that Jezebel’s audience is so loyal because its readers are not condescended to, but leveled with. “It’s great to see such a devoted audience,” she said. “You see that your work matters to people.”

It's as simple as that? The piece could have also used some real reporting around Jezebel's allegations against The Daily Show, but the reporter has nothing more to offer on that score. Or any score.

She wore a fetching strapless dress, carried a flashdrive of music from a friend (which she threatened to use as a switchblade, or maybe a Taser), and urged guests to try the deviled eggs distributed throughout the room (like Easter eggs, sort of, she said).

When Moby arrived, he greeted her like an old pal. David Schwimmer also put in an appearance: He was overheard outside the party saying that he had only come to retrieve his girlfriend, which he swiftly did. He wore a hat pulled low, presumably to shield partygoers from the glare of his celebrity.

In general, though, the boldfaced names skewed more internet-famous than I Love the Nineties. Lockhart Steele (Curbed), Alex Balk (The Awl), and Jessica Coen (Jezebel) all came. As The Observer caught up with Crosley, ur-Gawker Elizabeth Spiers sat across the room, threatening to share embarrassing stories.

"Is this a free book party?" asked Steele, prompting a half-serious dispute with Coen over the ethics of getting friends' stuff for free. Shouldn't you be willing to support their efforts, Coen wanted to know? Steele said he just wanted a copy with Crosley's signature and her number. Crosley liked this idea: for the last book, she'd drawn cakes when giving autographs, but the recipients tended to think the pictures were little houses or something.

Drawing is not among her talents, but throwing parties is no problem. The Vintage/Anchor publicist assessed the gathering with a practiced eye.

"I underplayed the ratio a little," she said, explaining the bustling-but-not-oppressive crowd on the restaurant's second floor. If it had been someone else's party, she'd have invited 30 percent more people than she expected to actually come. This, she noted, was the same factor by which one should overstate Bookscan figures.

How did it feel to be promoting her sophomore collection?

"You don't take lots of pictures of the second baby," said Crosley.

But she swore she did not mean this in a negative way! She wasn't jaded or anything.  Besides, there are advantages to having a bestselling debut (I Was Told There'd Be Cake) under one's belt. The Times, which had "ignored" her first book, paired this one with Emily Gould's for a review in last Sunday's paper. And while others objected to the pairing, Crosley claimed not to mind--it wasn't like the paper had panned one and loved the other, after all.

Her only reservation was the large, glinting cuff bracelet she wore to the photo shoot.

"I look like I'm She-Ra, Princess of Power," Crosley said.

How did you find the place?

My good friend has a broker who she swears by, and he hooked me up with my last apartment. I was pleased with my last apartment but they didn't lower the rent when everybody else in town was lowering the rent. So I called this broker, and said, 'I'm willing to move, I'm not in a rush, but if there is something as nice as what you put me in the first time around, in the same neighborhood, but for much less, then let me know.' And this came up.

What are the top five things in your apartment you can't live without?

My computer because it's my office and my livelihood. What else can I not live without? I've always found that the answer to this kind of question is my computer. Does my iPhone count? I want to say something cultured. That print there is relatively new. It's important to me and I would be sad to lose it. I found it in a flea market in Buenos Aires for under $10, and it's almost 40 years old. What do other people say?

Lockhart [Steele, Curbed Network publisher] says books.

I was going to say my books, but it seems so pretentious. I'm pretty minimalist; can I just say three things? You know, I moved from L.A., and I've been here for around six years, but compared to the amount of stuff you can have in L.A., you become so stripped down here that you learn to live without almost everything. My clothes, my bed—it's a really nice bed. I sleep well.

Which thing in your apartment has the best back story?

The print. I was in Argentina for two weeks over Thanksgiving this past year. There is an area of Buenos Aires called San Telmo where there are all these crazy old stores with all these Argentine antiques. I didn't know the significance of what was what and my Spanish isn't the best, so I couldn't really shop at the antique places. But there is this giant mercado there. It's where the locals in this old neighborhood do all their grocery shopping, but it also has the most ridiculous flea market. I'm not even sure why one would shop there, but there are no tourists, and there's really old, dusty bric-a-brac.

I was rummaging around and I found this rolled-up print. I didn't know what it was, so I opened it. I thought it was really cool—it was from 1971, and the artist made under a thousand of them. It was under $10. The dollar doesn't go as far in Argentina as it used to, but it still goes pretty far. So I was really happy with that. Then I blew $350 on the frame.

SLIDESHOW > SOME OF JESSICA COEN'S FAVORITE THINGS 

Which room do you spend the most time in?

Here [living room with desk, couch, TV, bookshelf] because this is where I work, and this is what I come home to. The TV, everything, is in here. The bedroom is the sleeping spot. I don't keep a TV in there; the only books that are in there are the ones I read when I'm going to bed. Because of the nature of working online, everything is really frenetic. I know that my bedroom doesn't look particularly Zen, but comparatively speaking, there's nothing in there but a bed.

Do you keep your neighbors close, or at arm's length?

The night I moved in, I had nothing to set up, I was playing music from my computer, and the second the music came on: knock knock knock. There was the woman from across the hall. She's in her late 50s or 60s, and she knocked on the door, and asked what I was doing here. I said, 'Well, I just moved in today.'

'Oh, well, this place has been vacant forever.'

"Well, didn't you hear me move in today? It was very loud.' She didn't hear me move in. But she's very concerned that people are going to try to break in through the roof, so any time there is an unusual thud, she is outside right away.

Also, there are heating problems sometimes, typical New York stuff; so our top-floor crew, we're always checking in with each other about the status of the heat and the hot water.

PREVIOUSLY > Curbed Network publisher Lockhart Steele

Adam Pasick, the editor in charge of Atlantic Media's business site launch, has abandoned ship to take Jessica Coen's old job as online managing editor for New York, according to Jeff Bercovici.

David Bradley's Atlantic Media has been planning to launch a business site since last October, but the project has been put on hold indefinitely.

Mr. Pasick was left in charge of the new business site after Slate founder Michael Kinsley, who was hired to work on the launch, left the project to write a column for the Atlantic Wire.

The business site is left without an editor as Mr. Bradley's company works on the relaunch of the National Journal to compete with Politico.