Smartphones have ushered in a golden age of personal eccentricity

The internet offers a magic button that grants access to a globe-size playpen of oddballs and misfits, says Molly Young.

I hate almost everything about my iPhone: What it does (distract me), what it cultivates (inattention), what it costs and how it looks (inert). But there is one capability for which I venerate this problematic rectangle.

My iPhone has alerted me to a fuller range of human weirdness than I could ever have imagined.