Hit Website in France Revels in Humiliation

A website inviting users to share tales of misery and humiliation has become one of the most popular sites in France, the Wall Street Journal reports. The editors of "Vie de merde"—roughly, "a crappy life"—sift through about 1,000 submissions a day and post those that strike a chord for being funny, original, touching, or some combination thereof. Typical: "My boss came into the office and asked me, 'What are you working on?' I replied, 'My departure.' He'd forgotten I had just been laid off."

An American version—F My Life—also is doing well. "It's like there's a kind of solidarity among all countries when it comes to misfortune," says one of the site's collaborators. "We are all in a big, international pile of crap—but we're in it together." We've even got a new word for the lexicon, courtesy of a psychologist commenting on the shift toward sharing such tales with as many people as possible: Extimacy.
(More France stories.)