@MayorEmanuel
The Two Writers
American Journalism Review has a new story about how The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal convinced Dan Sinker to out himself as @MayorEmanuel:
A month earlier, for example, a reporter for the NBC-owned television station in Chicago requested an interview. @MayorEmanuel told him to “just call the office: (312) FUC-KOFF.”
When Madrigal received no response, he tried a different tack: “I think it is incumbent on you to at least tell me to fuck off,” he wrote, also providing his e-mail address. “It’s the only time I’ve ever used the F-word in my Twitter feed,” Madrigal adds.
@MayorEmanuel brushed him off. But a short while later, Madrigal received an e-mail from an anonymous e-mail account. The subject line read, “OK, asshole.”
“There were two points in it,” Madrigal says. “One, if you tweet about this, it’s over before it even started. And two, you’re the journalist — you pitch me.”
Snarkmarket’s part of the story, too. There’s a link to The Two Mayors, and I got to talk to AJR’s Greg Masters about why I think Madrigal got the scoop. I’m particularly delighted I got quoted talking about one of my favorite movies, comparing Alexis’s appoach to @MayorEmanuel to “W.W. Beauchamp sidling up to William Munny at the end of Unforgiven.”
[Warning: violent. Munny = Eastwood. Beauchamp = Saul Rubinek, in the glasses.]
Also, if you missed it, definitely check out Dan Sinker’s appearance on Colbert, where he is way more William Munny gentle father than William Munny/@MayorEmanuel murderous sonofabitch:
| The Colbert Report | Mon — Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Dan Sinker | ||||
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The Last Hours of @MayorEmanuel
As a follow-up to my earlier compilation, “The Two Mayors,” here is the stunning conclusion to the story of @MayorEmanuel. He won the election and as predicted by Mayor Daley, vanished into a time vortex in order to save the multiverse.
I’ve also been boning up on my @MayorEmanuel backstory, and man, it is totally batshit in the best possible way. There are layers and layers to this thing that I couldn’t even guess at, and a few I’m probably still missing. In short, the anonymous author(s) of the thread have been building towards this science-fiction/comic-book resolution of the story for a while now, first planting the seeds months ago, then grinding them up like fine celery salt.
You can read a quick-and-dirty PDF of all of @MayorEmanuel’s tweets here, assembled by @najuu (h/t Carla Casilli). I’m not Storifying the whole thing, because 1) Twitter’s archives have a hard time going back that far in the Storify interface and 2) even if they did, I’m not stupid. But I would like to do my small part to gather the limbs of Osiris just here at the end. Enjoy.