THE WAY WE ARE.

If, in years to come, an average New Yorker is asked to recall the most newsworthy events of June, 2003, he or she will probably be stumped. The biggest story in town was the record-breaking rainfall, which, though significant in the context of global warming and footwear ruination, was soft news. We were not blighted by terrorism, or by political scandal, or even by any particularly egregious celebrity misbehavior, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher's hookup notwithstanding.

However, to Simon Song, an intern on the photo desk at the News, June provided a parade of extraordinary sights and outlandish events. Song, a thirty-eight-year-old native of the People's Republic of China who is enrolled at the University of Hong Kong, has been keeping an online diary of his activities and impressions, along with examples of his photography, at nydailynews.weblogger.com. There, in slightly off-kilter English, he has chronicled his encounters with the city's justice system ("We went to Court House to cover Martha Stewart. We stood in the chilly wind for nearly 4 hours"); the World Trade Center site ("I was deeply moved by what I saw. It gave me strength and power rather than tears and fear"); and the general cultural richness of the city. On June 4th, he recounted, his assignments included "Policemen issuing tickets, the raining day today and a naked demonstration against the animal leather clothes."

While Song's natural readership consists of his friends and his family, the site provides, for the New Yorkers who have stumbled across it, a transformation of our more mundane comings and goings into exotic objects of anthropology. Of the opening night of "Turandot" in Central Park, Song wrote, "It is not a Opera performance. It is more like a after-work big party." And of a subway ride: "This morning, I saw a black girl reading a book 'The Art of War.' I told myself: 'This is a nice book name.' Then I saw the author of the book: Sun Tze. Oh, can you imagine seeing a foreigner, a girl, ...