This is the very last thing we intend to say on the Emily Gould New York Times Magazine cover story (until, of course, she rocks a major book deal out of it). However, after all the fuss over how this story ended up a Magazine cover story to begin with, we thought it might bear mentioning that over at the Observer John Koblin has provided a bit of a play-by-play.

Mr. Marzorati [the NYTs Magazine editor-in-chief] had never before heard of Ms. Gould…They talked for around an hour about her “wanting to write some memoirish piece about having lived a fair amount of her life on the Internet in her first years in New York; I was interested.”

I don’t think it was terribly complicated…You’re always trying to entice people with a cover, whether it’s a story like this or it’s a story about Afghanistan. I mean, this just happened to be an intimate story written by a young person who happened to be attractive.