For Valentine’s Day, this Brooklyn programmer made a map of crying in New York City

Brooklyn programmer Kate Ray published a map Sunday of the places in New York she’s publicly cried, fallen in love, made out, broken up, gotten stopped by police, had political realizations and more.

It’s called Crying in Public, and it’s a very good opportunity to think about all the non-business, non-career parts of life that matter and create, more or less, the people we are. Fellow cryers are invited to add their own memories and experiences to the map.

“I must be part-canine because the parts of New York that are most mine are the sidewalk corners that I’ve cried all over,” Ray wrote in a very nice post about the map on Medium. “I know all cities are emotional maps to the people who’ve lived there, but in NYC especially we let everything hang out in public. Intense personal moments just seem to happen in parks/sidewalks/the subway more than homes/offices/cars. I once broke up with someone over nine stops of a packed Saturday night subway because it started in Manhattan but he wanted to finish it in Brooklyn.”

For Valentine's Day, I made a mapping-tool for your stories of crying in public – or other intense personal moments that happened outside https://t.co/mOntY5Me9D pic.twitter.com/6hJZcgVIJW

— Kate Ray (@kraykray) February 11, 2018

Ray, who recently joined Bed-Stuy food startup startup Pilotworks, is the creator of some of our favorite internet projects of the past few years, including:

• a site for book mixtapes of suggested reading
• an iOS app for which neighborhood is the “Williamsburg” of every other city in the world
• a forum for solving the collective action problem of women coming forward about sexual abuse and harassment

On Crying in Public, Ray encourages users to create their own maps. The project is open sourced, and people can play with the code on GitHub.