Assem Khaled

Photo by Sergi Dolcet Escrig on Unsplash A good writer knows better than to stretch their story beyond its natural conclusion, and for myself and this blog, the writing was on the wall for about a year and change, and I was just scared to embrace it. Shortly after Covid hit — and from anecdotal observation, I gather this has not been only the case for me — viewership took a massive hit across the board after what was a pretty bountiful 2019.

There’s something distinct about the experience of using Twitter that renders human beings completely unrecognizable when contrasted against their meatspace selves. It’s been already established that social media warps the way we present ourselves online because it optimizes for engagement, but Twitter in particular filters our every thought and emotion in a way that I can only describe as eerily familiar, yet unorthodox all-the-same.

It feels like since Donald Trump was gone from the White House, cultural discourse collapsed into a singular narrow continuum from which only a few items at a time can gain traction, but their gravitational pull is as strong as political scandals of the highest order in yester…