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24 Twitter Moments We Treasure

Sure, information technology's hell. Only what almost the magic?

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Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer

What is the value of Twitter? That question has been summit of mind since the company agreed this week to exist purchased past Elon Musk for $54.twenty a share, giving the social network a market value of near $44 billion. A company's stock price, of course, can alter: Only a year agone, Twitter sold at $70 a share after the company announced goals to double its revenue by the end of 2023. And Twitter's value is wrapped up in other senses of the word — its usefulness, its ability to provide pleasure and intrigue and news — a notable challenge for a platform synonymous with the give-and-take hellsite. One of the nifty questions surrounding the Musk acquisition is whether Twitter's value for shareholders, users, and the media organizations stuck to it like barnacles on a whale will rise or drop. While many a wag has noted Twitter really couldn't get any worse, the past decade in this country has shown us there's always more room to fall. With that in listen, New York'south staffers have offered 24 moments when Twitter really was memorable, every bit a reminder of what Twitter one time was and, for better or worse, what it could be.

1 afternoon in 2010, while watching Scott Baio, a pretty confront of the 1980s, go after Jezebel, the site where I worked at the time, for the crime of republishing his own tweet about his taxes subsidizing lazy people, I too tweeted. You see, the real-time meltdown of a marginal cultural figure nevertheless felt novel. The complete details are lost to poorly migrated image libraries and deleted tweets, but I recollect that Baio, a proper name-searcher, replied a few times and chosen me the Existent Racist, and the record shows that his wife took to Facebook to telephone call all of united states of america "lesbian shitasses" and declare that her husband had more course in his piss than we did. Memes were made. What could be more low-stakes agreeable than a washed-upwards star fulminating on Twitter and his wife threatening to enlist the chaser general considering she believed Baio's supporters' comments were beingness suppressed on a private website? Thrillingly, what nosotros one time saw just onscreen was talking dorsum at us, and information technology was saying something wholly stupid. Six years later, Baio would headline at the Republican National Convention to endorse Donald Trump. —Irin Carmon

Exercise you lot remember where yous were when Rihanna sent Ciara a decapitated equus caballus in the form of a tweet? I do non. But I do remember blacking out soon thereafter. The engagement was February 11, 2011, precisely 9 days prior to Robyn Fenty'south altogether. Infamy. There was not much worth tweeting about in February 2011 — simply every bit in that location'due south not much worth tweeting about at present — except, I don't know, that decade-late Blackness Eyed Peas halftime testify and the Egyptian revolution. And then … forth came Rih, sent hither (Twitter) to destroy the states … but mostly just Ciara Princess Harris (now Wilson). She nuked the timeline and issued a capital punishment at approximately 11:22 p.g. ET, sent from Twitter for BlackBerry (RIP).

Twitter was invented for moments like this. The bird app was always an overcrowded cell of adult bullies and big mouths (now it has the warden it deserves!), except typically the ones doing the squawking do information technology with cowardice. Rihanna knows merely brazenness. If 2022 Twitter'southward main function is to turn every person on it into a personality or parasocial nightmare, then Rihanna dragging Ciara through its town square is some relic from when breaking decorum On Here was about more than a like or a ratio. Rihanna retaliated in unkind words afterward Ciara told E!'s Fashion Police (RIP) that she's not squeamish IRL and doubled downwardly with the tweet "Trust me Rhianna u dont want to come across me on or off the phase" when Rih called her out on her bullshit. Bonafide celebs weren't supposed to practice that; they're still not. At all-time, you sub and permit the fans do your dirty work. (Y'all weren't supposed to tweet about how Drake doesn't write his raps, either.) If I'k gonna cherish anything from Twitter history (RIP), I gauge information technology's that bleep in time when its billionaire users didn't have their billions yet and tweeted with their whole breast, when those 140 characters (RIP) were nearly selling nada but the raw truth where everyone could run across it. Good luck booking that next phase.
—Dee Lockett

A moment of fleeting wonder: On August xxx, 2012, Clint Eastwood delivered a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention. The party had reserved this piece of precious real estate for Eastwood, believing his cinematic magic would make for compelling television. What happened instead was shambolic, as Eastwood stammered through unrehearsed, unwritten remarks centered effectually an inscrutable attempt at a comic routine in which he spoke to an empty chair where he pretended Barack Obama was sitting.

On Twitter, everybody — Republicans, Democrats, the undecided — was able to scout it happen in real time together, united in shock that the Romney campaign had permitted such an amateur debacle. (We were all and so naïve.) Y'all simply couldn't believe it was happening, and you could share your disbelief with everybody else having the same sensation at the same moment.

What made this episode so magical was that it mobilized the best aspects of the platform — its contemporaneity and connectivity, the feeling yous become watching an exciting game at a crowded sports bar — without all the atrocious components: the rabid context collapse and bad-faith tribalism. Maybe one reason people proceed coming back to a site that makes them experience bad is their memories of the times it gave them something they couldn't get anywhere else. —Jonathan Chait

Just because someone is maxim something out loud doesn't mean you have the natural right to empathise what they're saying. In any discursive ecosystem, context clues are earned through familiarity, camaraderie, and genuine commutation. Or by intensive, invasive surveillance. That's why the best part of Twitter, the net'south high-school cafeteria, is not the tweet. It's the subtweet: Y'all gotta know who is talking, what they're talking about, why they can't merely say what they're saying outright. Some of my favorite subtweets came in a ambiguous serial of messages from the since-deleted account @truthtrain14 dorsum in October 2014, which grumbled missives like "CA-xl/43-44/49-44/44-50/36-44/49-10/sixteen/xiv-52→49/476-10s." Unintelligible mush.

But through a likely combination of familiarity and surveillance, CNN, which would shortly brand a great bargain of coin from its divination of tweets, managed to suss out what @truthtrain14, along with other accounts with names like the West Wing–inspired @brunogianelli44, was upward to. It was classic subtweet reverse applied science. The mush turned out to be polling numbers, the kind that congressional campaigns — in this case, Republican — would have loved to share with dark-money political groups with whom they were legally bound from coordinating. Convenient! And when CNN started asking various big-name Republican political outfits, including the National Republican Congressional Committee and Karl Rove'south American Crossroads, most these convenient tweets, the tweets got deleted! This is the archetype fate of so many subtweets that become besides all of a sudden legible. (For what it's worth, the Federal Elections Commission said the tweets were a "potentially alarming" skirting of the law but ultimately decided that pursuing the matter "would have been an unwise use of Commission resources.")

Twitter is not a public square where everyone knows everything and can robustly discuss our collective happenings. Twitter is a glommed-together blob of private squares, a place where everyone is talking, e'er, over and around and at and through one another. Sometimes people talk to each other, but everything is just overheard. If you insist on an all-encompassing knowledge of every word uttered in your immediate vicinity, you need to put in the work. —Melvin Backman

It was the jump of 2016, and I had recently started working at The New Democracy as a web editor. We had published a serial of profiles of the presidential candidates and asked the writers to do a "takeover" of our official Twitter business relationship as part of the social-media campaign. Readers would inquire questions, the authors would respond, hopefully a couple hundred more people would click on the commodity itself, and then … I'k not sure what was supposed to happen after that (the money certainly didn't roll in!), but it felt like this was what Twitter should be used for. Anyway, ane of the authors was Patricia Lockwood, and at the stop of her shift, she tweeted, "fuck me daddy" at @realDonaldTrump, who was then in the midst of destroying the rest of the Republican primary field. Full-blown panic ensued in-house while the rest of the cyberspace enjoyed the sight of a 100-yr-old journal of ideas asking its daddy to do naughty things to it. ("Trump has not nevertheless responded to The New Republic'southward offering," wrote New York Magazine'southward Brian Feldman at the time.) It was only six years agone, but it now seems similar a far more innocent era, when the context collapse of lodge was not all the same complete and it was genuinely shocking for writers, magazines, and presidential candidates to interact with each other this way. Now it seems similar a harbinger. —Ryu Spaeth

Forgive me for mixing my Ezra Koenig metaphors hither, but this tweet

really is a tab in my brain that I'k afraid to shut. I sent it to Vulture senior news editor Morgan Baila just the other mean solar day when we were discussing summer footwear for maniacal walkers, using the changed example of inelegant shoes to explain why I can never habiliment Birks, not even the Manolo ones. I've included information technology as an epigraph in stories. And it has, vaguely, informed my shoe-ownership philosophy. (I can assure you this isn't a body-dysmorphia affair. No costless feet pics to prove information technology.) Only what has actually stuck with me is that it's the truth with a topcoat of sprezzatura — you can totally tell Koenig drafted tweets and workshopped them to convey a dashed-off-ness as fake as his transatlantic accent. At present he's got a child with Rashida Jones and isn't so active on Twitter anymore, but I like to think nigh the fourth dimension when he'd regularly drop modern aphorisms like this, each i much labored over to project learnèd cleverness. Information technology was an image thing, to be sure, but maybe it was for u.s.a., too, to recognize all the uncool work that goes into looking cool online and to exist okay with doing it ourselves. Because if you're not a endeavor-hard on the net, why are yous fifty-fifty here? —Chelsea Peng

I don't dear much nearly Twitter, simply what I did love was having a identify to regularly post an image that most captured my worldview in a way that I could pretend made sense. I posted it all the time in 2019 and 2020, oftentimes every bit an expression of my deep concern about the badness of the discourse or the politics or the earth, rarely with any commentary. It was an prototype of a tawny frogmouth, and most people who responded to it thought it was an owl.

And it looked so worried, which is how I felt. And how I feel. And it was nice, briefly, to be able to express how fearful I felt in a way that didn't require me to write either 8,000 words or 280 characters, via an epitome that probably didn't fifty-fifty rails for about people. But I so deeply appreciated the people who would like my worried bird considering they made me feel less solitary in my worry. And in the fast-running currents of its rancorous bad faith and poison, I judge that'south the one thing Twitter did occasionally provide: the cursory feeling of beingness less alone in your anguish. —Rebecca Traister

I know, I know, the whole Agent Orange President Cheeto thing is played out at this juncture, and I hate to sound similar an MSNBC dad, and most Trump tweets are homogenous lumps of spitty grievances unworthy of analysis — but I'll never forget waking upwards on May 31, 2017, the morning after my 21st birthday, hungover as all sky and hell, to a dining hall ringing with "covfefe." "Covfefe?" I said. "Covfefe!" said my friends. "Covfefe!" said a professor. "Covfefe!" chirped the robins and wrens. The president's Twitter typo gripped a delirious nation, compressing its author's abandon into a single funny word. Here was a butterfingered fool, here was a sloppy gerontocrat. With my altogether celebration over and my head on burn down, I drifted back to world and began to call back — as we'd all been thinking for months — "Haha, nosotros're in danger." —Brandon Sanchez

In the olden times of Twitter, the @ was all the same included in the character count. This was earlier threads and blue lines or any other little product tweaks that made conversations betwixt big groups of people even remotely neat or tidy. And so when a agglomeration of people were all tagged into one chat, it was called a "canoe."

This quirk of Twitter circa 2014 gave united states i of the greatest moments in the history of the platform: the Dandy Dong Canoe. What happened was that an increasing number of people were added to a canoe (again, a tweet with a agglomeration of @s) with short dong jokes — Howard'due south Dong, Dong of Solomon, Dong Days of Summer — over and over again. There were countless variations, nearly of them lost to history, simply I'thou pretty certain that was the extent of it: just a running, growing thread of dick jokes that were inescapable once yous were in the canoe. It'southward probably the epitome of a "you had to be in that location" moment, merely I swear information technology was the most hilarious thing. As an internet friend I've only ever known as Simply The Tape wrote that day, "thanks all for bringing me along in the canoe Twitter was invented for." —Willy Blackmore

In 2018, I read a Ben Affleck tweet and information technology felt like seeing a shooting star.

So rarely does a truly, truly A-list celebrity go on Twitter to address the discourse, much less a ginormous back tattoo, but on March 29, 2018, Affleck logged on to clear the air. "The Smashing Sadness of Ben Affleck," the New Yorker slice to which he was responding, written past pop-culture savant Naomi Fry, claimed that Affleck's garish — literally his discussion — dorsum tat made him "Homer Simpsonesque" and wondered what a world without Good Will Hunting–era Ben Afflecks looked similar. What if all men in Hollywood were reduced to their bad tattoos and muddied grayness towels? Would the globe experience different? Affleck's tweet boasts only almost 19K likes — a bourgeois amount, barely viral — only stands out regardless in my corner of the net. No i expected him to use the platform to give a quick mental-wellness check-in. It's like Leonardo DiCaprio going rogue and of a sudden addressing his penchant for dating 20ish-year-olds. ("@NYMag," I imagine he'd write. "Don't worry well-nigh me. Worry nigh our planet, which barely has 25 years.") Imagine doing just fine! On Twitter! Could not be me. —Morgan Baila

I tin't say I've enjoyed witnessing our democracy crumble over misinformation during the 2016 election or getting caught in the crossfire of shouty, scoldy urbanism bros who seem to think $three,000 apartments are affordable. Simply every time I've said, Plenty! I've had it!, and vowed to quit Twitter cold turkey to protect my sanity, something truly funny on this cursed platform changes my heed. I've stayed for tweets that make me laugh at just how terminally deranged our culture has become as a distraction from the fire-hose news wheel that Twitter helped create: Bossip calling out the Kente-Kloth-Klad Kongress. Room Raters making light of the fact that all of us alive on Zoom now. Johnny Depp narrating, in deadpan, the filthy texts he sent about Bister Heard.

Practice I have time to follow a trial? No, but skilful thing the denizens of Twitter practice and volition neatly excerpt what I need to know. Today I saw a Tweet about a fake Fox News study on Snickers' "beloved dick vein" existence a casualty of cancel culture. And Snickers' pandering assurance that the dick veins remain. Is this a healthy coping mechanism? Definitely non! And I don't care! —Diana Budds

Kevin Durant became the NBA's premier villain when he left the Oklahoma Urban center Thunder in 2016 for the Gilt Land Warriors, the squad that had merely beat the Thunder in the Western Briefing finals. Fans hammered him. Durant fought back — not only from his official blue-check Twitter account just from a burner he might or might not have created to defend himself. He even seemed to respond to a critic from his official account when he meant to tweet from the burner, telling user @ColeCashwell that "KD can't win a championship with those cats."

In a 2020 podcast, Durant admitted to having burner accounts, stressing that they weren't for talking shit just for participating in other communities. "I was like, These people really made me delete what I relish," he said of the drama around his burner. Just this morning, later a flurry of posts provoked past criticism from Charles Barkley, Durant tweeted at user @Swav_ay:

Spoken like a truthful affiche — i who will never quit Twitter, no matter which billionaire buys it. —Chris Crowley

On March 8, 2013, MLB reporter Ken Rosenthal replied to a user with an all-caps exhortation to actually put in the fourth dimension to read the story the user was commenting on. A few things made this a perfect tweet. For ane affair, the content was painfully relatable to anyone who has ever wanted to shout "READ THE Column" at someone in the replies, as Rosenthal did here. Besides: The about compelling reason to stay on Twitter is reporters like Rosenthal, who (if yous curate your follower list correctly) can requite y'all a useful feed of real-fourth dimension news. Merely mostly the tweet has stuck with me because the answer was famously sent to a user named @MrSugarPenis, a perfect reminder that, for better or worse, all kinds of people are playing in the aforementioned dumb sandbox each and every twenty-four hour period. —Joe DeLessio

One day in 2016, I got a pure hitting of the kind of ridiculousness Twitter could whip up. I had been walking through midtown when I saw two men unloading a taxidermy zebra out of the back of a truck. It looked so lifelike. I took a picture show and tweeted:

My follower count was infinitesimal, but somehow BuzzFeed got hold of it. With 1 retweet, my afternoon exploded. Local news reporters began contacting me virtually the Runaway Zebra. Brute-rights activists were furious. I was accused of beingness an net hoaxer. Every bit always, people found a way to connect information technology to Donald Trump. Diverse Twitter tribes contorted the zebra picture to their own ends. And then they all moved on. —Shawn McCreesh

It'southward well established that Brand Twitter is embarrassing and annoying, no affair how thrilling it was the first time Moonpie told Carl's Jr. its burgers tasted like a virgin cooked them (or whatever). Just for me, it's all worth it for the day in 2014, dorsum when brands were but tentatively maxim "on fleek" and Steak-umm was mostly tweeting things similar "There is no sincerer #beloved than the dearest of #food," when the US Airways Twitter account posted a ludicrously pornographic photograph involving a model of a 777, a naked adult female, and … actually, but those 2 things, plus flash photography. Fifty-fifty better, the picture show was sent in response to an unhappy customer whose plane had sat for an actress hour on the tarmac, forth with this text: "We welcome feedback, Elle. If your travel is complete, you tin can detail it here for review and follow-up." My timeline was immediately full of ecstatic allusions to the photo, which the company didn't manage to delete for an hour. Information technology felt similar the moment when we all realized the volatile potential of the platform, and it proved more than anything since and so that the nigh important tweets, the ones we all log on in hopes of glimpsing, are the ones sent by accident. —Emma Alpern

Every bit with Cassandra, it came to him in a dream: a hollow K&M's cookie shaped similar a hand and filled with Greek salad, a dish that Twitter user @thatfrood re-created using a silicone mold with G&G's marking the knuckle bones.

The King's Hand moment was full of the toothsome weirdness I associate with a sure corner of Twitter. Like an image that circulated in 2019 doctored to mimic the feeling of having a stroke, the impression it produces becomes less clear the longer you lot contemplate it: Which king'due south mitt is this? Are we honoring him or cannibalizing him? (@Thatfrood told BuzzFeed News that, in his dream, it was the main course of a festival feast.) It's ornate, formalism, kittenish. "I was thinking, This doesn't make sense," he told BuzzFeed. "Only of course it doesn't make sense. I saw it in a dream."
—Erin Schwartz

What were you doing while a Taylor Swift–parody update account got out of Israeli military prison house? Two years ago, @LegitTayUpdates, who goes past her first name, Na'ama, went viral at the end of her two-calendar month sentence. During that fourth dimension, she nonetheless posted from the within, merely with paper and pen, her notes photographed and uploaded by a friend. Attributable to doxxing threats, the then-19-yr-old is no longer on the app, except as a folklore legend. Screenshots of her viral tweet explaining, "I refused to join the IDF lmao," now brand the rounds with captions like "hoping she's safe and well." Twitter is either a constant "social-justice warrior" town hall or a fan-guild meeting gone out of control, depending on whom you ask over the age of [redacted]. For possibly this one moment, it was the best version of both. Around 50,000 likes later, Vogue wrote "The Viral Taylor Swift Stan Story That Fabricated Me Dearest the Net Again," and Teen Faddy interviewed Na'ama well-nigh politics back when it was still rare for Taylor Swift herself to share her beliefs. "For years in Israel, everyone around me told it was 'us vs. them' — them being Palestinians — and I believed it because I trusted the people in my community," she told the teen magazine. "But as I grew older and saw more than videos and articles virtually the things my government is doing in Palestine, I couldn't do zero." It's a reminder that activism isn't a option for many in this generation — information technology'due south as forced onto them as the net age — and that speaking out on Twitter can do something other than create meta-conflicts with far-right trolls. For those, we may but have to shake it off. —Zoë Haylock

As soon as the news arrived that Cynthia Erivo would be playing Elphaba and Ariana Grande would be playing Glinda in the movie version of Wicked, I canceled my plans for the evening to simply … tweet. Later years of joking that this film would never go made (I'k all the same not convinced), an extremely loud just aptly ignored corner of the internet was given a megaphone. I hosted my first ever Twitter space because I was overwhelmed by the number of threads, DM groups, and tweets existence texted to me off-app. It was a cute, glistening example of how Twitter not merely encourages but fosters community. I accept made countless friends through snarky musical-theater Twitter. I'll even embarrassingly acknowledge that relationships with every human I take seriously dated started from chatting via Twitter DMs. The night of the Wicked movie casting announcement reminded me that this community of people who beloved theater but exercise non pursue it professionally in any manner still has a home — a infinite to besiege, even if information technology isn't backstage or in a rehearsal room. —Zach Schiffman

My flight had been delayed, and I was stuck at an airport in Florida when the Cats trailer dropped. Nosotros are all now desensitized to the expect of Cats, or as desensitized every bit one can be to its litany of visual terrors, so it'southward difficult to put into words just how alien and upsetting it was to collectively witness information technology for the start fourth dimension. Cypher had always looked like the Cats trailer before, and nothing ever will again, not even Cats, which, of course, went through much more cosmetic work after the trailer came out (it still concluded up a botch job, merely still). On July 18, 2019, the official Cats film account tweeted, "This Christmas, yous volition believe," already positioning the film every bit a straight affront to Jesus himself. This was the first time nosotros saw the cats' strange human proportions, their nude physiques, Judi Dench's and Jennifer Hudson'south contradistinct faces floating flatly in front of their hirsuite heads. Nosotros saw James Corden belly-bump a cat into a trash tin can. Nosotros saw Jason Derulo yell MILK! We saw how modest the cats looked in relation to a fork and a knife. The grouping shots were something out of a Goya war painting, writhing and disturbed. Hours later, I got off an airplane, opened Twitter, and the whole thing was however wall-to-wall Cats.

These are the moments when Twitter is at its all-time and still worthwhile to me. In the by year solitary, we've had similar experiences with Nicole Kidman'due south AMC ad, Gal Gadot'south "acting" in the Decease on the Nile trailer, and Pauly Shore's Pinocchio. Times when, in an otherwise pretty much siloed and stratified media landscape where no one's tuning in to spotter the same thing at the same time, we tin commune over some kind of monoculture. And more often than not, it's non the monoculture we demand merely the one we wretched bunch deserve: disgusting and atrocious.
—Rebecca Alter

Celebrities don't have to tweet, merely some of them dear to postal service. They're just like us! So the best moments on Twitter come when, off in the altitude, you tin can hear a publicist yelling, "Take their phone away!" Twitter is a great avenue for stars to reveal that they're every bit frustrated and petty as the rest of us, as when Constance Wu tweeted, "fucking hell," correct after Fresh Off the Boat was renewed because she clearly wanted to do something else. Simply my favorite celeb-frustration tweet is great because it'south so vague: Dorsum in 2016, Jennifer Hudson wasn't nominated for a Tony for Featured Actress in a Musical for the revival of The Color Purple. (Cynthia Erivo went on to win Lead Extra in a Musical, accelerating her career.) In response to a fan, Hudson tweeted, "my presence was used for my glory, not my talent. I'k not surprised." Yes, the musical got a good amount of publicity for casting an Oscar winner, just was Hudson albeit she didn't have the talent for awards recognition? Or that the producers didn't desire her to get attention? She apace deleted the tweet, but I've thought about information technology ever since. When I show up somewhere and no one seems to pay attention to me, my presence is existence used for my celebrity, non my talent. When I'k ignored by a waiter trying to get a check, same. It makes no sense and yet all the sense. Twitter is where a celebrity can acknowledge that being a celebrity is everything and still not enough. —Jackson McHenry

I don't love Meghan McCain. [Pauses.] But I love the brand of stanning her, if that makes whatever sense — and without Twitter, we wouldn't take this tweet, or this one, or this thread comparing the icon's hairstyles from her stint on The View to desserts. There might not be any speedily searchable beingness of this video of McCain being asked about nepotism. Imagine … if we had never gotten to witness this takedown past Joy Behar on Valentine's Day 2022? All I'm actually trying to say is that if Twitter were to die, so would this paradigm.

And who wants that? —Wolfgang Ruth

Reminiscing nearly Twitter'south greatest hits, I'm tempted to cite a moment when the unabridged site appeared to be united in shock, cloy, or mockery of a "main character." There are many such candidates to choose from; for my money, null captured the dreamlike madness of 2016 quite similar a certain unintentionally hilarious Darren Rovell tweet. But those commonage freakout moments — in which it seems every bit if everyone on the platform is discussing a topic that's sensical only to those who spend hours a mean solar day on it — likewise exemplify the kind of airtight-loop insularity that may be Twitter'due south worst feature. (At that place's a connection here with the dismal ritual, during the Trump years, in which most of my feed apparently felt the obligation to brand a C+ joke playing off whatsoever piece of insanity he had just tweeted. Let'southward hope those days never return.)

So for my favorite moment, I'll become with an occasion of personal triumph. In 2013, an essay I wrote for The Awl (RIP) blew up on Twitter — the showtime fourth dimension I'd experienced some mini-version of virality. Many people I admired but did not know read and liked it. The episode served as a reminder of Twitter's positive attributes: I've made several actual friends, cultivated of import professional relationships, and been exposed to some very smart and very funny people I wouldn't otherwise have known well-nigh. For all of its downsides — the insularity, the grinding groupthink, the bias toward doom and gloom, the utter addictiveness of the product — Twitter is oftentimes both useful and, cartel I say, fun. Possibly this is rich coming from someone who has complained well-nigh the place a lot (that Awl essay was about Twitter annoyances!), but the stylish stance that information technology's an irredeemable "hellsite" isn't only wrong but extremely dull. I just promise Elon Musk's stewardship doesn't prove the naysayers correct. —Benjamin Hart

When I started my career, President George Due west. Bush-league was waging war on the press, but information technology seemed adequately unlikely that he would pop into the Jezebel comments department to inform me personally that I was a "pathetic reporter who doesn't want to know the truth," as Donald Trump once said of a New York senior journalist. For a while, Trump had an axe to grind confronting New York, and he did a lot of it on Twitter. In 2013, shortly after I started at the magazine, Trump tweeted and retweeted attacks on @NYMag and its employees 42 times, according to the Trump Twitter Annal. Thanks to Twitter, I knew Trump had called for people to cancel their subscriptions to the "failing, dull abd [sic] totally biased New York 'Ragazine'" which he felt was "lifeless and dead" and full of "Bad people, faux writing!"

Luckily, much like Trump's obsession with Robert Pattinson dumping Kristen Stewart, his involvement in New York was fleeting. Although he relentlessly attacked countless other media outlets and journalists during his fourth dimension in role, for some reason @NYMag was spared. Now that he'due south gone, I can go back to enjoying Trump's brilliantly backhanded compliment to my employer: ".@NYMag is a piece of garbage only I call back information technology is very nice & charitable that they employ the no-talent illiterate hack @jonathanchait." (When asked how he felt about information technology, my colleague Jonathan Chait said, "His tweet should accept had an 'and,' not a 'only.' Otherwise, no notes.") —Margaret Hartmann

As opening gambits go in the history of literature, few lines resonate more than "Y'all wanna hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It'southward kinda long but it'south full of suspense 😂😭" Like lots of cracking writing, this was a revision — the famous "Zola" Twitter thread, by Aziah Wells, was really its third publishing attempt. (The commencement two times she posted, "no ane cared," Rolling Stone reported.) Information technology's incredible, electrifying, stylish — and made for a wonderful picture show. Just you already know what Twitter's single greatest contribution to American literature is. And, similar the Zola thread, it'south virtually women and men, and Twitter'due south format is integral to the storytelling. Information technology'due south an essay that needs to exist a thread; information technology needs the pacing of the scroll. Yous can hear the speaker take a breath and the modulation of his volume (particularly when he cites Proverbs). Written past Solomon Missouri, a (divorced) pastor at the Kyles Temple A.M.E. Zion Church in Durham, North Carolina (which is not for auction), this Twitter thread is so difficult-engraved in the literature of our time that a perfectly punctuated tweet of a single word can bring the whole original rushing in: "Tulum??????"
—Choire Sicha

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