The Causality of Twitter

A while back, Reihan conveyed a lament from Ross Douthat that Twitter was killing The American Scene. TASers were all on Twitter, compressing into gnomic 140-character poems of wonkery and hermeneutics the thoughts they had previously expanded into eight-paragraph blog posts. This was also, I believe, during Noah’s long silence. Noah is not on Twitter, which frustrates his fellow TASers but which makes an obvious kind of sense. An irony you might have seen coming is that Reihan expressed this lament of Ross’s on Twitter. Anyway, I wanted to point out that an inversion of this causality is possible in that my recent TAS post on capital punishment was based on a tweet. I hope this doesn’t resemble apparently similar cases of movies being based on a video games or TV shows being based on commercials for other TV shows.