The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

In a 1998 story headlined “Loving Leo,” The Boston Globe described a new metric for measuring popularity: Meanwhile, on the teen message boards of America Online, there are more than 30,000 postings from young subscribers pertaining to DiCaprio. The next highest number for any star, teenage actor Jonathan Taylor Thomas, is 15. That second statistic is obviously (and absurdly) incorrect. It’s mostly evidence of how new and confusing the internet still was in 1998, when a mistake so egregious could go unnoticed by a major metro newspaper and all the smaller papers that reprinted it in syndication (the story hit the AP wire and ran uncorrected all over the country). It’s entirely possible the newspaper copy editors proofreading the article had never heard of AOL chat rooms and had little idea what “postings” even referred