I think the thing about Twitter that's hardest for other places to reproduce is that it's one of the few places people can learn from in-group conversation from groups they're not a member of.
I mean, that feature is also responsible for some of Twitter's most hilarious conflicts stemming from overstepping/misunderstanding/lack of context. And one million deleted listicles that label Black culture "Twitter Memes". But when it works it's good!
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So, as a side note, some of the shocking #PublishingPaidMe numbers are obviously bad marketing predictions, (mis)informed by a limited sense of what Black writers’ market is. But a lot of the super-high advances for non-celebrities aren’t about actual sales projections... 1/10
but about competition, or the fear of competition— a writer gets a big offer so that the book doesn’t go to another publisher. I think a lot about consensus and diversity— (2/10)
on almost every prize/residency/admissions/hiring committee I’ve been on, no matter the demographics of the committee, it’s much less common for people to agree on candidates of color. Everyone’s individual list of finalists may be plenty diverse... (3/10)
I’m going to make the mistake of trying to have a complicated thought on Twitter, so first let me be clear that I don’t think anyone at all should be able to order a 100 round magazine off the internet, and also
that I absolutely think the Dayton shooter’s history
of threatening violence, and threatening girls and women, is relevant to understanding the pattern of mass violence. (I also think it’s telling that even as classmates were coming forward to say how long they’d been scared of him, a few news sources ran with
“seemed nice no one saw it coming” puff pieces. The benefit of the doubt and an erasure of his longer record of harm, even for a guy who died in a murderous rampage!) But I’m seeing a lot of “a background check could have caught this” and I think it’s worth asking how that works—