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We don’t get to choose the literary genre of our epoch, and in this worst-of-times-worst-of-times political era, we have the Twitter /1
thread. A series of tweets, written by one person and strung together by Twitter’s vertical border wall, the thread has emerged as /2
this year’s ascendant form of argument: urgent, galloping, personality-driven and—depending on your view of the topic—either tacky /3
and misleading or damned persuasive. Readers of political Twitter know well a thread’s opening rumble. Threaders burst into being /4
like tub-thumpers, without warning and from unexpected soapboxes; they generally announce themselves by pounding the bar: “THREAD.” /5
(Sometimes, more recessively, they use the “1/”—a foreboding half-fraction suggesting a first installment with no end in sight.) A /6
conundrum opens the performance, a pedantic premise or a statement of flat-out horror: “Jeff Sessions threatened to jail journalists /7
who use anonymous sources,” “the DPRK might now be able to nuke Boston.” Then, a thread lays out its zealous case—walking /8
readers to a conclusion with a hissing fuse of tweets and links, an artful digression, an awesomely cocksure QED. A thread is a call /9
to something that Twitter culture, in its far-off playful days, used to condemn implicitly: earnest commitment to a train of thought. /10
But the mental smog of Donald Trump times appears to have kindled an almost desperate longing for clarity even among cold-eyed Twitter /11
wags. Threads are regularly deployed by anti-Trumpers on the political right and center but—mostly, let’s not kid ourselves—the /12
left. (Trumpites, for their part, seem to prefer staccato, and the president himself can’t seem to apply himself to essays-in-tweets.) /13
Some threads offer grand doomsday theories about the republic; others tell tales from the deep state; still others patiently explain /14
complex legal principles whose boundaries the president might be pushing on any given day. Particularly for the panicky—readers trying /15
to make sense of Trump’s affaire Russe or seeking solace as norms erode—a well-argued thread can give some narrative to the /16
uncertainty. People who write for a living might be inclined to slag off threads as bloviation, stemwinders delivered by guys you’re /17
stuck next to on a Greyhound. True, some threads lurch like drunks; some are flaky, perverse. But in 2017, even the worst of these /18
fragmented lectures beats the traditional ballads of despair in unsocial media. The competition for political polemic is the /19
op-ed—that slow, lumbering form burdened to groaning with authority and passivity. And, of course, there are the cage matches of cable /20
news—let’s not even talk about those. Because threaders must propel readers through long-line narratives that resist intrusions, /21
they usually get funny and likable, and the tone is refreshingly pushy, urgent. Threads don’t fall back on the tics of journalism, the /22
leads and nut grafs and anecdata. At their literary best, they represent a comet in the coal dust of ideological war. Some days, it /23
seems as if the thread has even replaced the Atlantic-style treatise among much of the commentariat. A thread is quicker off the blocks /24
and can be read in a fraction of the time, but also offers readers the intellectual satisfaction that magazine essays do, that snap of /25
having your mind opened by an expert or a provocateur. Some threaders are stalwarts of government, or media, or academia: Colin Kahl, a /26
former deputy assistant to Barack Obama and national security adviser to Joe Biden; Loren DeJonge Schulman, of the Center for a New /27
American Security; Daniel W. Drezner, a professor at Tufts and Washington Post contributor; Benjamin Wittes, of Lawfare; Matthew Miller, /28
a former Justice Department flack. But others have achieved newfound mini-stardom in the genre: Sarah Kendzior, a writer in St. Louis; /29
Seth Abramson, a lawyer and professor in New Hampshire; Jared Yates Sexton, an academic and journalist in Georgia; Caroline O., a /30
behavioral scientist in Virginia; Eric Garland, who describes himself as a “strategic intelligence analyst.” If there’s one /31
thread that has come to define the genre’s appeal (and its excesses), it might be Garland’s magnum opus of December 11, 2016. In 127 /32
tweets—opening with a thrown-down “time for some game theory,” which soon became its own Twitter meme—Garland offered a winding /33
yarn that touched on the KGB, WikiLeaks, the Iraq War and the right-wing media. Above all, he defended President Obama’s handling of /34
Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign and insisted on the durability of the American experiment, despite the Kremlin’s /35
meddling. Because it took the form of a bulleted essay, and brightened moods with its grandiosity, optimism and folksy wit, Garland’s /36
thread managed to make the post-election one-liners about Drumpf and deplorables seem like small, divisive fry. Garland told me he /37
ad-libbed the thread in real time, hoping to soothe nerves and reinspire confidence. Critics—and yes, a Twitter thread can spawn its /38
own critical ecosystem—argued the thread was OMG-like hysteria and sophistry (and pointed out that Garland offered no actual game /39
theory). But his conviction that there was a patriotic divinity that would shape our ends struck when much of the country was still /40
disoriented by Trump’s November victory—and reached tens of millions of readers. Plus, unlike the fleeting verdicts in traditional /41
media (“This is the day Trump became president”; “Jared Kushner is a moderating presence”), Garland’s contentions have /42
generally been borne out: The intelligence community, the judiciary, a team of faithful politicians and European leaders have refused to /43
take Trump’s shenanigans lying down. A form that requires precise and lively storytelling, and the braiding together of seemingly /44
disparate details and history, has naturally attracted both literary and legal minds. Sexton teaches writing and linguistics at Georgia /45
Southern University, and has published four works of fiction, as well as a recent book of dispatches and analysis from the 2016 campaign /46
trail. Sexton described threading to me as a “linguistic exercise to see how the mind works in quick succession while confined within /47
a certain space.” Abramson has edited or written more than a dozen books, mostly on or of poetry, and is also a graduate of Harvard /48
Law School and former public defender. He calls threading “a formal gesture in the same way a sonnet is.” A fictional flare in /49
the political world might seem like a danger, especially in the age of skepticism about empirical forms like journalism and science. But /50
it’s a virtue that good threads, even while citing gold-standard reporting, are shot through with imagination and irony, not just /51
fact-finding. They aim to raise questions. Dot-connecting and hypothesis—more than bromides—are their strong suits. “I am neither /52
saying I *know* this is true or even that I necessarily *believe* this is true” is how Abramson framed a recent thread. Since a /53
refrain of our political climate is that truth has become stranger than fiction, this kind of theory-testing is urgently /54
important. Threading doesn’t pay, and many threaders have been maligned as hysterics in mainstream media, had their lives threatened, /55
been ruthlessly doxed and received death threats by trolls and bots. I think of threaders as white-hat mansplainers. They persist with a /56
heightened sense of duty, as they see it, to seek the truth about our times. Naturally, their raised profiles and lively styles have won /57
them non-Twitter bylines. But dragging their hordes of followers off Twitter and to a far-flung URL isn’t always easy. As Matthew /58
Miller tweeted this spring, urging his readers to try something different: Here’s a “52-tweet thread from me on Trump crossing the /59
red line, but in a new format called an ‘op-ed.’ Hope it catches on!” /60
