Debbie Branch

If Gossip Girl didn't exist, it—or rather, She—would have to be invented. With barbarians at the crossings and cultural turpitude rotting the very Manhattan schist beneath our feet, She alone upholds Truth and Beauty and Order. In the postlapsarian moral universe of today's New York, God, and Wharton and Fitzgerald and Bradshaw, are dead; long live Gossip Girl.

Does this city deserve a muse and creator who imagines it better, stronger, nobler than it's been in untold generations, or ever? Unveiled last autumn, the first episode of the series opened with the return of Serena van der Woodsen—the once and future dauphine of Park Avenue; her surname, a plaintive lament for the town's old Dutch aristocracy, long ago suppressed by the arrival of vulgar Britons—after a semester abroad at a New England boarding school.  read more »