Yesterday’s New York Times Magazine offers a piece by Jeffrey Rosen about Wonkette’s speculation over who Jessica Cutler slept with.

Okay, there’s more to the story than that. Jessica Cutler is the 26-year-old mail sorter for US Senator Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) who supplemented her $25,000-a-year Senate income by sleeping with guys for money, then posted about it on her blog, Washingtonienne. Once Wonkette’s Ana Marie Cox outed Cutler as the Senate staffer behind Washingtonienne, DeWine fired her and she signed a $300,000 deal to write a novel based on her blog. All this has been fairly well covered in the media and the blogosphere.

While Cutler profits from her behavior, though, others suffer. Cox used clues from the Washingtonienne posts—such as the fact that he was a chief of staff at a federal agency appointed by President Bush— to speculate about one of Cutler’s customers might be. According to Rosen:

In an effort to identify the Bush appointee who was paying for sex, Wonkette posted pictures of 13 chiefs of staff at federal agencies under the headline, ‘‘Would You Sell Sex to This Man?’‘

Rosen suggests that the boundaries between public and private are being redefined thanks to blogs.

Unconstrained by journalistic conventions, bloggers are blurring the lines between public events and ordinary social interactions and changing the way we date, work, teach and live. And as blogs continue to proliferate, citizens will have to develop new understandings about what parts of our lives are on and off the record.

The piece is long (it is from the NYT Magazine, after all), but well worth reading.