Singles 🔗

While most of this book is threads, this opening chapter contains a curated selection of stand-alone tweets that were either exceptionally popular (as measured by likes and retweets), personal favorites, or both. There are 396 tweets included, out of over 150k, or approximately 0.26%. I have also included my 10 earliest tweets, from 2007, even though there is nothing notable about them, to convey a sense of the early calm before the later storms. Of these 396, I have also highlighted 38 — 0.026% — as particularly noteworthy. In most cases, these are not just notable tweets, but ones with stories of some sort attached, like interesting conversations ensuing, or the tweet marking an evolution in my philosophy. I also classified and tagged these 396 tweets by category, primarily to try and fingerprint my overall evolving vibe over the years. You can see summary statistics at the end of this chapter.

In many ways, for tweet-sized thinking and writing, singles are to threads what short stories are to novels in long form. Many of my favorite writers, such as J. G. Ballard and Jorge Luis Borges, were not only at their best with short stories, but revealed their thought processes the most with shorter forms. Many twitter users I appreciated were masters of the one-off single. I am not sure where I land, but I suspect browsing my most noteworthy single tweets is the best way to get a sense of the gestalt of this book.

While I’m proud of many of my threads, my most memorable tweets, which I can quote from memory, were singles, and I think I’ve captured most of them in this chapter. If you weren’t following me live during my active twitter years, browsing this chapter is probably the best way to get a highlights-reel sense of my thinking through those years. Even more than my long-form blogs, twitter was where I workshopped my thinking.