If you’ve been following Jeff Mermelstein on Instagram the last couple of years you’re aware he’s been secretly snapping pictures of New Yorker’s text messages as he travels around the city everyday. Those images have finally coalesced into a book from Mack, #nyc, a “multifarious, comic and heartbreaking survey of contemporary life as learned through overseen text messages. Written in the new language of acronym and initialism, truncation and cipher wordplay, interrupted by the occasional longueur, people appear to have few inhibitions when faced only with their own reflection in a phone screen, such that they pour their heart-felt desire and lust and hate and vitriol in unfettered streams of text consciousness.”