Last weekend, I lost access to my Twitter account for several days. It was hacked, and because it happened less than an hour after I published my newsletter about the new ownership of Twitter, many people expressed suspicion that it was a form of retaliation. However, I have no knowledge of who took over control of my account or why they did so.
During the time that I was locked out, I received a number of sympathetic personal messages about my predicament via text, email, and Instagram. I, on the other hand, wasn’t as sorrowful as people expected me to be. I was a little glib, I’m afraid. I was having a fantastic weekend at the Charleston Literary Festival, with old friends and new; several of the conversations I had were frankly transformative, and will undoubtedly alter my future work. (I was especially moved by conversations with undergraduate students from Oakwood University, a historically Black college in Huntsville, Alabama, who were in attendance.) And the weather was beautiful. I wasn’t thinking about Twitter much at all.