The NY Times Magazine has the unquestionable ARTICLE OF THE YEAR about Internet trolls. Like it’s not even a stretch to say that…this is the most compelling thing I’ve read thus far this year and I read A LOT of crap.

It’s hard to pick out one or two snippets, but here’s a couple of my favorites. The story of Mitchell Henderson, a kid who killed himself and found a Myspace memorial the butt of a 4chan.org (the site that creates most popular internet memes) joke.

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ”

Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.

Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.

It’s such a tremendous level of sociopathic depravity that would make a group of people do that. It’s not even like this was another person who did something to their site, they just thought it’d be funny (which it is, in a detached way). And there’s real commitment to the joke too. I can’t imagine even walking a block for the sake of a joke; one of their guys went to a kid’s grave, put an iPod down, and took a photo. Even if you don’t agree with the context, you have to admire that commitment to a bit.

A flat-screen HDTV dominated Fortuny’s living room, across from a futon prepped with neatly folded blankets. This was where I would sleep for the next few nights. As Fortuny picked up his cat and settled into an Eames-style chair, I asked whether trolling hurt people. “I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, God, please forgive me!’ so someone can feel better,” Fortuny said, his calm voice momentarily rising. The cat lay purring in his lap. “Am I the bad guy? Am I the big horrible person who shattered someone’s life with some information? No! This is life. Welcome to life. Everyone goes through it. I’ve been through horrible stuff, too.”

“Like what?” I asked. Sexual abuse, Fortuny said. When Jason was 5, he said, he was molested by his grandfather and three other relatives. Jason’s mother later told me, too, that he was molested by his grandfather. The last she heard from Jason was a letter telling her to kill herself. “Jason is a young man in a great deal of emotional pain,” she said, crying as she spoke. “Don’t be too harsh. He’s still my son.”

Wow, an Internet troll who’s kind of fed up in the head! No way! I also love how the writer paints him as either a James Bond villain or a complete f’ing headcase, yelling about the Internet and child abuse while an adorable little kitty purrs in his lap.

Fortuny’s kind of evil but he also gives readers of the article an insight into how to stop someone from trolling.

He proceeded to demonstrate his personal cure for trolling, the Theory of the Green Hair.

“You have green hair,” he told me. “Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“I look in the mirror. I see my hair is black.”

“That’s uh, interesting. I guess you understand that you have green hair about as well as you understand that you’re a terrible reporter.”

“What do you mean? What did I do?”

“That’s a very interesting reaction,” Fortuny said. “Why didn’t you get so defensive when I said you had green hair?” If I were certain that I wasn’t a terrible reporter, he explained, I would have laughed the suggestion off just as easily. The willingness of trolling “victims” to be hurt by words, he argued, makes them complicit, and trolling will end as soon as we all get over it.

It’s almost poetic how someone who derives worth from hurting others tells others that the key to not being hurt by those who hurt others is to have your own sense of self-worth. It’s almost paradoxical.

No joke, this article is a tour de force. For more, including giving seizures to epileptics, rape fantasies about female Yale Law students, and the Internet’s Tyler Durden, READ THE ARTICLE IMMEDIATELY.