I saw someone write “#jealous” instead of “jealous.” Why? I guess one reason is that the writer is worried about laying his feelings bare, so he’s encasing his comment in a thin shell of humor. (Hashtags are nerdy; the irony of such a mundane hashtag; etc.) Might also be an attempt to be clever or different, albeit one that’s more than played. But the theory I like most involves the same phenomenon I wrote about in a post on the word “metastasize.” In that post, I tried and failed to derive the etymology of the word:

My silly theory demonstrates the rise of a colloquial sense of meta meaning “self-referential” as in metadata, metasearch, and “that’s so meta.” In this age of instant photos, check-ins, status updates, and countless other ways of symbolizing our own lives, I’m not surprised that this form invaded my brain and crowded out the good old Greek.

Self-reference: that’s the essence of a hashtag. It’s a bit of meta-data in the data itself. The writer’s not content with one level of meaning; he also wants to comment on his first thought, to assign it a category or suggest membership in a trend. Whether the poster of “#jealous” knew it, I think he had been gripped by this impulse. He didn’t just say “I’m jealous”; he also said, “There are other people like me.” The second part is a defensive move: It asserts the appropriateness of his comment and suggests that his emotion, while unattractive, is not uncommon.

To me, the trend toward self-reference isn’t a good one. Most of the artifacts I listed in my prior post—check-ins, status updates, etc.—are redundant. They are, frankly, a waste of everyone’s time. More importantly, they separate us just a bit from the heart of the matter. Instead of immediately understanding the poster’s feelings, we have to parse the hash, consider the second level of meaning, and discard it as empty irony or self-defense. If repeating this procedure encourages us to wrap our own thoughts in reference, the trend snowballs, and instead of a more “open and connected” world, we’re left with indirection and separateness.

In “The Image,” Daniel J. Boorstin lamented the proliferation of “pseudo-events”: contrived happenings such as press releases that exist only to be reported. He worried that pseudo-events might crowd out real, spontaneous events, leading us to lose touch with the truth. “#jealous,” then, might be called a pseudo-thought. Its menace is that we lose touch with each other.

Nick Wingfield of the NYT writes that “[Microsoft's] stock has lost 43% in value” since Steve Ballmer became CEO. That’s technically correct: The split-adjusted share price is 43% lower than it was on January 13, 2000, when Ballmer took over. But this measure—the change in share price—is a poor indication of Ballmer’s performance because it neglects dividends. Microsoft has paid $7.07 per share in dividends since it issued its first one in 2004, under Ballmer. An investor who reinvested these dividends would have lost not 43% but 24%—a significant difference.

Sometimes I hate living in this fucking city. All day I deal with little impositions—the incessantly barking dog, the delivery guy riding the wrong way in the bike lane, the truck idling and belching fumes, the ice cream man playing that cloying music on repeat. All of these things are not just inconsiderate; they’re also minor violations of the law. But you deal with it because it’s New York, where anything goes. And you have no recourse anyway. The cops have better things to do.

That’s why I felt wronged when, tonight, four cops and a squad car devoted half an hour to writing me a summons for riding my bike on the sidewalk. When I asked them to consider the situation—I rode on an empty sidewalk for one block, from my street to the pizza shop, so as to avoid riding the half mile around the block—one of them responded, like a soldier, “I just do what I’m told,” and the other threatened me: “Keep talking and you’ll make it worse.”

Give me a break. I spent the morning riding lawfully to the post office to mail in my NYC taxes, and I’m not paying for the cops to police minor infractions with no victims. Today’s attack in Boston makes my complaint seem petty, sure, but the heroism of Boston’s first responders makes New York’s brand of police work seem all the more absurd. Either enforce all of it—the noise code, the idling prohibition, jaywalking, “don’t honk,” the $250 fine against dog poop—or leave us alone.

The cover of the June 6, 2011 issue of the New Yorker depicts eight people on a New York City street. All of them are white. Given the racial composition of New York  (44.6% white) and assuming an equal chance of picking any New Yorker, the likelihood of this scene is less than one fifth of one percent (0.0016).

Now, judging from the the broad, immaculate sidewalks, the middle-aged pedestrians, the conservative clothing, and the proximity of three pieces of well-maintained government property (a flowerbed, a mailbox, a guillotine), we may safely assume that the scene takes place in Manhattan, where, according to the 2000 census, 56.4% of the population is white. Even so, the probability rises to just 1.02%.

But, you say, that isn’t just any Manhattan neighborhood. Look at the vaguely Hebrew lettering in the window, the stately plaque marking a historical site or a doctor’s office, the right angles, the bookstore! Fair enough. If I were to guess, I’d say we are looking at Manhattan Community District 7, otherwise known as the Upper West Side. In this neighborhood, a slice of Manhattan whiter even than Staten Island, almost eight in ten residents are white (78.8%). Ignoring all non-residents — cabbies, vendors, city employees, custodians, nannies, etc — we have a 14.9% chance of capturing eight whites and nobody else on camera.

I’ve also noticed this phenomenon in New York Magazine. A recent cover, entitled “Brooklyn’s Sonic Boom,” depicted twelve Brooklyn-based musicians, all white. What a warped perspective on the borough that produced Biggie Smalls, Lil’ Kim, Lil’ Cease, Jay-Z, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Busta Rhymes, to name just a few. Brooklyn’s been “booming” for a long while.

I have to wonder, are the editors of these magazines aware of their bias? Are they intentionally producing these covers to appeal to whiter-than-average readerships? Or are the images evidence of a more subconscious slant that blocks out black and brown people, who constitute more than half of the city’s residents? It’s hard to say, but I do know that until their covers show a more accurate picture of New York, neither magazine deserves its name.