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The Rise of the Twitter Thread via: politi.co/2gCMq3R: We don’t get to choose the literary genre of our epoch, and in this /1
worst-of-times-worst-of-times political era, we have the Twitter thread. A series of tweets, written by one person and strung together /2
by Twitter’s vertical border wall, the thread has emerged as this year’s ascendant form of argument: urgent, galloping, /3
personality-driven and—depending on your view of the topic—either tacky and misleading or damned persuasive. Readers of political /4
Twitter know well a thread’s opening rumble. Threaders burst into being like tub-thumpers, without warning and from unexpected /5
soapboxes; they generally announce themselves by pounding the bar: “THREAD.” (Sometimes, more recessively, they use the “1/”—a /6
foreboding half-fraction suggesting a first installment with no end in sight.) A conundrum opens the performance, a pedantic premise or /7
a statement of flat-out horror: “Jeff Sessions threatened to jail journalists who use anonymous sources,” “the DPRK might now be /8
able to nuke Boston.” Then, a thread lays out its zealous case—walking readers to a conclusion with a hissing fuse of tweets and /9
links, an artful digression, an awesomely cocksure QED. A thread is a call to something that Twitter culture, in its far-off playful /10
days, used to condemn implicitly: earnest commitment to a train of thought. But the mental smog of Donald Trump times appears to have /11
kindled an almost desperate longing for clarity even among cold-eyed Twitter wags. Threads are regularly deployed by anti-Trumpers on /12
the political right and center but—mostly, let’s not kid ourselves—the left. (Trumpites, for their part, seem to prefer staccato, /13
and the president himself can’t seem to apply himself to essays-in-tweets.) Some threads offer grand doomsday theories about the /14
republic; others tell tales from the deep state; still others patiently explain complex legal principles whose boundaries the president /15
might be pushing on any given day. Particularly for the panicky—readers trying to make sense of Trump’s affaire Russe or seeking /16
solace as norms erode—a well-argued thread can give some narrative to the uncertainty. People who write for a living might be /17
inclined to slag off threads as bloviation, stemwinders delivered by guys you’re stuck next to on a Greyhound. True, some threads /18
lurch like drunks; some are flaky, perverse. But in 2017, even the worst of these fragmented lectures beats the traditional ballads of /19
despair in unsocial media. The competition for political polemic is the op-ed—that slow, lumbering form burdened to groaning with /20
authority and passivity. And, of course, there are the cage matches of cable news—let’s not even talk about those. Because threaders /21
must propel readers through long-line narratives that resist intrusions, they usually get funny and likable, and the tone is /22
refreshingly pushy, urgent. Threads don’t fall back on the tics of journalism, the leads and nut grafs and anecdata. At their literary /23
best, they represent a comet in the coal dust of ideological war. Some days, it seems as if the thread has even replaced the /24
Atlantic-style treatise among much of the commentariat. A thread is quicker off the blocks and can be read in a fraction of the time, /25
but also offers readers the intellectual satisfaction that magazine essays do, that snap of having your mind opened by an expert or a /26
provocateur. Some threaders are stalwarts of government, or media, or academia: Colin Kahl, a former deputy assistant to Barack Obama /27
and national security adviser to Joe Biden; Loren DeJonge Schulman, of the Center for a New American Security; Daniel W. Drezner, a /28
professor at Tufts and Washington Post contributor; Benjamin Wittes, of Lawfare; Matthew Miller, a former Justice Department flack. But /29
others have achieved newfound mini-stardom in the genre: Sarah Kendzior, a writer in St. Louis; Seth Abramson, a lawyer and professor in /30
New Hampshire; Jared Yates Sexton, an academic and journalist in Georgia; Caroline O., a behavioral scientist in Virginia; Eric Garland, /31
who describes himself as a “strategic intelligence analyst.” If there’s one thread that has come to define the genre’s appeal /32
(and its excesses), it might be Garland’s magnum opus of December 11, 2016. In 127 tweets—opening with a thrown-down “time for /33
some game theory,” which soon became its own Twitter meme—Garland offered a winding yarn that touched on the KGB, WikiLeaks, the /34
Iraq War and the right-wing media. Above all, he defended President Obama’s handling of Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign /35
and insisted on the durability of the American experiment, despite the Kremlin’s meddling. Because it took the form of a bulleted /36
essay, and brightened moods with its grandiosity, optimism and folksy wit, Garland’s thread managed to make the post-election /37
one-liners about Drumpf and deplorables seem like small, divisive fry. Garland told me he ad-libbed the thread in real time, hoping to /38
soothe nerves and reinspire confidence. Critics—and yes, a Twitter thread can spawn its own critical ecosystem—argued the thread was /39
OMG-like hysteria and sophistry (and pointed out that Garland offered no actual game theory). But his conviction that there was a /40
patriotic divinity that would shape our ends struck when much of the country was still disoriented by Trump’s November victory—and /41
reached tens of millions of readers. Plus, unlike the fleeting verdicts in traditional media (“This is the day Trump became /42
president”; “Jared Kushner is a moderating presence”), Garland’s contentions have generally been borne out: The intelligence /43
community, the judiciary, a team of faithful politicians and European leaders have refused to take Trump’s shenanigans lying /44
down. A form that requires precise and lively storytelling, and the braiding together of seemingly disparate details and history, has /45
naturally attracted both literary and legal minds. Sexton teaches writing and linguistics at Georgia Southern University, and has /46
published four works of fiction, as well as a recent book of dispatches and analysis from the 2016 campaign trail. Sexton described /47
threading to me as a “linguistic exercise to see how the mind works in quick succession while confined within a certain space.” /48
Abramson has edited or written more than a dozen books, mostly on or of poetry, and is also a graduate of Harvard Law School and former /49
public defender. He calls threading “a formal gesture in the same way a sonnet is.” A fictional flare in the political world might /50
seem like a danger, especially in the age of skepticism about empirical forms like journalism and science. But it’s a virtue that good /51
threads, even while citing gold-standard reporting, are shot through with imagination and irony, not just fact-finding. They aim to /52
raise questions. Dot-connecting and hypothesis—more than bromides—are their strong suits. “I am neither saying I *know* this is /53
true or even that I necessarily *believe* this is true” is how Abramson framed a recent thread. Since a refrain of our political /54
climate is that truth has become stranger than fiction, this kind of theory-testing is urgently important. Threading doesn’t pay, and /55
many threaders have been maligned as hysterics in mainstream media, had their lives threatened, been ruthlessly doxed and received death /56
threats by trolls and bots. I think of threaders as white-hat mansplainers. They persist with a heightened sense of duty, as they see /57
it, to seek the truth about our times. Naturally, their raised profiles and lively styles have won them non-Twitter bylines. But /58
dragging their hordes of followers off Twitter and to a far-flung URL isn’t always easy. As Matthew Miller tweeted this spring, urging /59
his readers to try something different: Here’s a “52-tweet thread from me on Trump crossing the red line, but in a new format called /60
an ‘op-ed.’ Hope it catches on!” /61
