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By Root 779 0

and the appointed day, I found myself anxious, not knowing what to expect. MOB’s only goal was to attract a crowd, but as an event it had none of the typical draws: no name of any artist or performer, no endorsement by any noted tastemaker. All it had was its own ironically wild, unsupportable claims—that “tons” of people would be there, that they would constitute a “mob.” The subject heading of the e-mail had read MOB #1, so as to imply that it was the first in what would be an ongoing series of gatherings. (In fact, I was unsure whether there would be a MOB #2.) As I was gathering my things to head north the seven blocks from my office to the mob site, I received a call from my friend Eugene, a stand-up comedian whose attitude toward daily living I have long admired. Once, on a slow day while he was working at an ice-cream store, he slid a shovel through the inside handles of the store’s plate-glass front doors, along with a note that read CLOSED DUE TO SHOVEL.

“Is the mob supposed to be at Claire’s Accessories?” Eugene asked.

Yes, I said.

“There’s six cops standing guard in front of it,” he said. “And a paddywagon.”

This was not the mob I had been anticipating. If anyone was to land in that paddywagon, I thought, it ought to be me, and so I hastened to the site. The cops, thankfully, did not seem to be in an arresting mood. But they would not allow anyone to enter the store, even when we told them (not unpersuasively, I thought) that we were desperate accessories shoppers. I scanned the faces of passersby, hoping to divine how many had come to mob—quite a few, I judged, based on their excited yet wry expressions, but seeing the police they understandably hurried past. Still others lingered around, filming with handheld video cameras or snapping digital pictures. A radio crew lurked with a boom mike. Despite the police, my single e-mail had generated enough steam to power a respectable spectacle.

The underlying science of the Mob Project seemed sound, and so I readied plans for MOB #2, which would be held two weeks later, on June 17. I found four ill-frequented bars near the intended site and had the participants gather at those beforehand, again split by the month of their birth. Ten minutes before the appointed time of 7:27 p.m., slips of paper bearing the final destination were distributed at the bars. The site was the Macy’s rugs department, which in that tremendous store is a mysterious and inaccessible kingdom, the farthest reach of the ninth and uppermost floor, accessed by a seemingly endless series of ancient escalators that grind past women’s apparel and outerwear and furs and fine china and the in-store Starbucks and Au Bon Pain. By quarter past seven waves of mobbers were sweeping through the dimly illuminated furniture department, glancing sidelong toward the rugs room as they pretended to shop for loveseats and bureaus; but all at once, in a giant rush, two hundred people wandered over to the carpet in the back left corner and, as instructed, informed clerks that they all lived together in a Long Island City commune and were looking for a “love rug.”

E-MAIL MOB TAKES MANHATTAN read the headline two days later on Wired News, an online technology-news site. More media took note, and interview requests began to filter in to my anonymous webmail account: on June 18, from New York Magazine; on June 20, from the New York Observer, NPR’s All Things Considered, the BBC World Service, the Italian daily Corriere della Serra. By MOB #3, which was held two weeks after the previous one, I had gotten fifteen requests in total. Would-be mobbers in other cities had heard the call as well, and soon I received e-mails from San Francisco, Minneapolis, Boston, Austin, announcing their own local chapters. Some asked for advice, which I very gladly gave. (“Before you send out the instructions, visit the spot at the same time and on the same day of the week, and figure out how long it will take people to get to the mob spot, etc.,” I wrote to Minneapolis.)

Perhaps most important, the Mob Project was almost immediately taken