What Darren Star Hath Wrought

In 2007, the fetishization of New York is a symbiotic effort. I’m sure Ms. Astor would understand:

It’s not every red-blooded college student in the Midwest — Mr. [James] Kurisunkal, 18, is a sophomore considering a major in English or sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — who knows and appreciates who Ms. [Tinsley] Mortimer, an Upper East Side socialite, is, let alone can tell that she is wearing Dior. “I recognized it instantly,” he wrote.

Mr. Kurisunkal is something of an obsessive about New York’s young socialite set and everything that a hobby like it tends to include — bone structure, bloodlines, boyfriends named Bingo.

In March, he anonymously started Park Avenue Peerage, a compendium of party pictures, society updates, and, once in a while, family histories he put together mostly by culling wedding and death announcements. The next day, he began hearing from readers — and subjects. “I think a lot of people have Google alerts sent to them every time their name pops up on the Web,” Mr. Kurisunkal said. They sent new photographs and, on occasion, something approaching news.

He guarded his identity, filing posts under the name “68thandpark,” until May, when he revealed himself to a New York magazine reporter who was sleuthing around.

“I really am a freshman at the University of Illinois updating this Web site from my dorm room,” he wrote on his blog that week. “I live next to fields of corn and soybeans and my desktop is open with party pictures from Anchor and Marquee. I know.” Not long after, he applied for, and was offered, a paid summer internship at the magazine. This is his last week.

Beyond his evening with Ms. Mortimer, however, his social calendar racked up far more blank spots than engagements and invitations. He said his overall assessment of his time in New York was that “it’s been surreal.”

Over a poulet de grain rôti at La Goulue, on Madison Avenue, he added: “I’d always loved New York and felt like I knew it, but I’d never actually been here. My main exposure to it came from ‘Sex and the City’ and ‘Friends.'”

Mr. Kurisunkal’s unmasking came as the resolution to a parlor game that had been playing out for a while — in some parlors, anyway. Park Avenue Peerage had immediately established itself as the primary competition to Socialite Rank, a catty anonymous blog that saw fit to give the city’s leading “socials,” as they’re called, quasi-mathematical evaluations. New York magazine reported that Socialite Rank was run by a Russian-born brother and stepsister, one of them a former reporter for Fashion Week Daily.

But Socialite Rank folded, and Park Avenue Peerage stands now as peer of the realm. Mr. Kurisunkal said that his site receives an average of 8,000 page views per weekday. “I don’t ever put anything salacious or mean,” he said, explaining why the socialites send in so many pictures of themselves cavorting at functions and private events (trips to the beach, parties at somebody’s parents’ house). “Why put people purposefully in a vulnerable position? What’s the point?”