Podcast appearances and mentions of Jason Parham

A new documentary, "Black Twitter: A People's History," explores the rise and cultural impact of Black commentary on social media. The film is based on a Wired article by senior writer Jason Parham, who joins to discuss the series as well as how Black Twitter might affect the 2024 Presidential race."Black Twitter" is on Hulu now.

From ‘Scandal' to social justice, Black Twitter has dominated digital discourse, a phenomenon Prentice Penny explores in his new Hulu docuseries, “Black Twitter: A People's History,” based on Jason Parham's 2021 feature for Wired. Penny and Parham, along with J Wortham of the New York Times Magazine, join host Brian Stelter to discuss Black Twitter's cultural impact, and its future.

For all the influence Twitter has had on our culture, no community there has made quite as much impact as Black Twitter. The virtual community grew from a loose online hangout to an influential cultural force that directed conversations about race and culture not only on social media, but in our society at large. A new documentary miniseries from Hulu called Black Twitter: A People's History charts that monumental trajectory. This week on Gadget Lab, we chat about the rise and solidification of Black Twitter with showrunner Joie Jacoby, director and executive producer Prentice Penny, and WIRED senior writer Jason Parham, who wrote the WIRED cover story the docuseries is based on.Black Twitter: A People's History premieres on May 9th on Hulu. Read Jason's three-part series of stories about Black Twitter. Recommendations:Joie recommends the Met Opera show Fire Shut Up in My Bones. Prentice recommends the YouTube channel Pitch Meetings. Jason recommends X-Men 97 on Disney+. Lauren recommends watching Black Twitter: A People's History and reading Jason Parham's story that inspired the show. Mike recommends trying the new instant coffees that are popping up. (Instant coffee is good now, he swears.) Jason Parham can be found on social media @nonlinearnotes. Joie Jacoby is @joiejacoby. Prentice Penny is @The_A_Prentice Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

Based on Jason Parham's WIRED article "A People's History of Black Twitter, this three-part docuseries charts the rise, the movements, the voices and the memes that made Black Twitter an influential and dominant force in nearly every aspect of American political and cultural life. In this episode, I speak to writer and creator Jason Parham, Executive Producer Prentice Penny and Showrunner Joie Jacoby about their new 3-part docuseries chronicling the history and pivotal moments of Black Twitter. Black Twitter: A People's History is streaming now on Hulu. Instagram: @undunnwithashleydunn Instagram: @iamashleydunn #blacktwitter

In the first episode of Season 1, co-hosts Annie Liontas and Lito Velázquez speak with LitFriends Angela Flournoy & Justin Torres about their enduring friendship, writing in a precarious world, and chosen family. Links https://sites.libsyn.com/494238 www.annieliontas.com www.litovelazquez.com https://linktr.ee/litfriendspodcast https://www.instagram.com/litfriendspodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553436475678 https://justin-torres.com/ https://www.angelaflournoy.com/ https://www.asalisolomon.com/ Transcript Annie & Lito (00:01) Welcome to LitFriends! Hey LitFriends! Annie: Welcome to the show. Lito: Today we're speaking with the great writers and LitFriends, Justin Torres and Angela Flournoy. Annie: About chosen family, the dreaded second novel, and failure and success. Lito: So grab your bestie and— 
 Both: Get ready to get lit! Lito: That's so cute. Annie: It's cute. It's cute. We're cute! Lito: Cute, cute… So you had a question? Annie (00:29) I do. I have a question for you, Lito. Are you a cat or an ox? Lito: I mean, I would hope that the answer is so obvious that it almost bears not asking the question. I'm a cat. Annie: Okay, so Asali Solomon at The Claw asked us all, are you an ox or a cat? Lito: That's a great question. Annie: And as a writer... You know, the oxen are the people who work every day in the field, clock in, clock out, pay themselves a quarter an hour. I'm literally talking about me. The cats are people who are playful, exploratory, when the mood strikes them… Lito: Why are you looking at me when you say that? Annie Lito (01:26) So are you an ox or a cat? Lito: I'm a cat. I think anyone who's ever met me would say I'm a cat. Annie: How does that show up in your writing? Lito: Well, I mean, play is so important to me—she'll be on the  podcast in a couple of episodes, but when I first...was studying with Lucy, that was one of the first things that she spoke about in our class, and it kind of blew up my whole world. I had been writing for a long time already, but I hadn't thought of it as play, or there was some permission I needed or something. So the idea of play is really central to what I do and love. You wouldn't necessarily know that from the novel that I'm writing, which is sort of a dark book. Um, but it did start out with a lot of play and, I'm also, as you could probably just hear, my cat is coming into the room. Annie: Your cat is like, yes, Lito is us. RiffRaff is like, "Lito is cat." Lito: My cat Riff Raff, yes. Smarty pants. Um, he needed to join in on this conversation. Anyways, I'm a cat. I, I'm fickle when it comes to my work. Um. I don't want to work on my novel all the time, which is great because life has found so many ways to prevent it from happening. So in the new year, in 2024, it will be 7 years since I've started writing this book, and it's still, it's going to take a few more months at least. And what about you? Annie:  (03:09) I'm four oxen pulling a cart carrying all of my ancestors. I am very much the immigrant who says, get up, go do the work, come back, go do the work. And believe it or not, for me, there is a lot of joy in that. It's a... It allows, you know, it's Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, actually. So it doesn't feel like drudgery, usually. It does feel like joy. And I'm actually curious for all you LitFriends out there, if you're an ox or a cat. Lito: Yes, that's such a great idea. Please email us at litfriendspodcast@gmail.com, and tell us if you're a cat or an oxen or share on all your socials. Annie: Yeah, maybe we should poll them. That would be fun. Lito: That's a good idea. #LitFriendsPodcast. Annie: The reason I'm asking is because, of course, both Justin and Angela, who we speak with today in this episode, talk about what it's like to go for 10 years between books. "A banger a decade," is what Angela says. Lito: It's so funny. Annie: And you, you know, part of that, they have this very rich conversation about how, when you put everything into the first book, it takes a lot to get to the second book. But I think also there's a lot of play, right? And there's a lot of understanding that writing appears in different forms. And it might be the second novel, but it might be something else. Lito: For sure. I really like how they talk about— that the practice of writing is actually a practice of reading. And I think that any serious writer spends most of their time reading. And not just reading books, but texts of all kinds, in the world, at museums, as Justin points out, art, television, even the trashiest TV show has so much to offer. Annie: (05:12) And there's such a generosity to the way they think of themselves as artists, and also generosity in how they show up for one another as friends, and acknowledging when they fail one another as we as we see in this episode. And I remember my introduction to Justin when I was a grad student at Syracuse. I read We the Animals and fell in love with it, asked him to come do a reading at Syracuse, which was wonderful. And my wife who, at that time was my Bey-ancé, she was turning 30. We had no money. I couldn't buy her anything. Not in grad school. So I asked Justin if he would autograph his story, "Reverting to a Wild State," which is about a breakup in reverse, for Sara. Lito: Oh, I love that story. Annie: And he did, and he thought it was so beautiful, and I was like, "let me send it to you." He's like, "no, I've got it." He just shipped it to me. He didn't know me. We didn't know each other. Lito: He knew you because of books. He knew you because he loved literature. Annie: Yeah. And I remember that in it. I held on to it at a time when that act really mattered. Lito: One of the things I love about our interview with Justin and Angela is how much all of us talk about generosity, and how Justin and Angela display it in their conversation with each other and with us. And I'm just curious, how do you see that coming through also in Angela's work? Annie: (07:00) You know, I remember her talking about how the idea for the book began with this image of people moving around a house at night. This is The Turner House. And she says this image opens up a lot of questions. And one of the things that really stays with me about that book is how masterful she is at shifting perspective, particularly between siblings, which I find to be such a challenge for writers, right? Like your siblings are the people who are closest to you and sometimes also the farthest away. And she gets that so intimately on the page. And of course, in our conversation with Angela and Justin, one of the things they talk about is being family, essentially being siblings. And that's one of the most powerful echoes of the conversation. They talk about being a chosen family and having to choose again and again and again. And that spirit of consciousness and connection, I feel that very much in Angela's work, and of course in Justin's too. Lito: Oh Annie, I choose you again and again, I choose you. Annie: Oh, I choo-choo-choose you! Lito: So stupid. Annie: (08:05) After the break, we'll be back with Justin and Angela. Annie: (08:24) And we're back. Lito: I just wanted to mention, too, that we spoke with Angela and Justin in October during the writer's strike in Hollywood, and just before Justin's new book, Blackouts, was released. And just last week, as you're hearing this podcast. Annie: Just last week. Lito: Just last week! He won the National Book Award for a book that took him 10 years to write. Annie: Absolutely. Annie: Justin Torres is the author of Blackouts, a novel about queer histories that are hidden, erased and re-imagined. Blackouts won the 2023 National Book Award for fiction. His debut novel, We the Animals, has been translated into 15 languages and was adapted into a feature film. He was named National Book Foundation's Five Under 35. His work appears in the New Yorker, Harper's, Granta, Tin House, Best American Essays, and elsewhere. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UCLA. Lito: Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, won the VCU-Cabel First Novel Prize, and was also a finalist for both the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an NAACP Image Award. Angela is a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine, and her nonfiction has appeared in The Nation, the Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Angela is a faculty member in the low residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Lito: (10:36) I'm so grateful that you guys found time to meet with us today, and I've thought about you two as friends since I think this is like the first time you've done something like what you did in 2017, the "Proper Missive"—do you remember that—you published in Spook? And it stuck with me. I was like a big, nerding out, and I bought it and I have it still. And I thought about that. And Justin, you know that you're very personal— there's a personal connection with me because I found your book on my way to my first master's program. No one had said anything about it to me where I was coming from, and it was really great. And Angela, I first found your book. I was so amazed and moved by the talk you don't remember at Syracuse. Angela: I don't remember the lunch. I remember being at Syracuse, and there being a talk, yes. Lito: You inscribed your book, "Here's to Language," which I think is hilarious and also really sweet. And I think we must have said something about language at some point. But anyways, thank you so much both for being here. Justin: Thank you for having us. Angela: Very happy to be here. Lito: So let's start. Why don't you tell us about your friend in a few sentences? So Angela, you can go first. Tell us about Justin. Angela: (11:23) Justin is the first person that I met in Iowa City when I was visiting and deciding if I was going to go there, but was I really deciding no? I'll let you go there. But that I could like, deciding whether I would be miserable while I was there. And so Justin was the first person I met. And feel like Justin is five years older than me. It has to be said.  Justin: Does it? Angela: When I think about people, and I think about like mentors, I have other like amazing mentors, but like, I think that there's really something special about somebody who some people might think is your peer, but like, in a lot of ways you've been like looking up to them and, um, that has been me with Justin. I think of him as like a person who is not only, he's a Capricorn, and he has big Capricorn energy. I am an Aquarius. I do not want to be perceived— Justin: I don't agree with any of this. But I don't know. I don't follow any of this. Angela: But Justin is in the business of perceiving me and also gathering me up and helping me do better. My life is just always getting better because of it. I'm grateful for it. Annie: That is beautiful, all of that is beautiful. Justin, tell us about Angela. Justin: I can't follow that, that is so...  Angela: Acurate! Justin: You're so prepared! You're so sweet! I'm so touched! Angela: Only a Capricorn would be touched by somebody saying that you perceive them and gather them up and make them feel better. Ha ha ha! Justin: I like that, I do like that. Let's see, yeah. I mean, I think that when we met, I had already been in Iowa for a year, and within two seconds, I was like, oh, we're gonna be friends, and you don't know it yet. But I knew it intensely. And yeah, I think that one of the, I agree that I think we keep each other honest, I think. I think that one of the things that I just so appreciate about Angela is that, you know, yeah, you see my bullshit. You put up with it for like a certain amount of time, and then you're like, all right, we need to talk about the bullshit that you're pulling right now. And I love it, I love it, love it, love it, because I don't know, I think you really keep me grounded. I think that, yeah, it's been really (14:09) wonderful to have you in my life. And like, our lives really, really kind of pivoted towards one another. You know, like we've, it was not just like, oh, we were in grad school and then, you know, whatever, we have similar career paths, so we stayed friends or whatever. It's like, we became family. And, you know, every, every kind of major event in either of our lives is a major event, a shared major event, right? And that's like, yeah, I don't know. I can't imagine my life without you. I honestly can't. Angela: Likewise. I gave birth in Justin's home. Annie: Oh! Sweet! Justin: In my bathroom, over there. Right over there. Lito: Whoa, congratulations, and also scary(?)! Angela: It's in a book I'm writing, so I won't say so much about it, but it was a COVID home birth success story. And yeah, like family. Lito: Was that the plan or did that just happen? Angela: Well, It wasn't the plan and then it was the plan. Justin: Yeah, exactly. COVID wasn't the plan. Angela: No. Justin: The plan was Angela was gonna sublet my place with her husband and she was pregnant. And then, COVID happened Angela: There were a lot of pivots. But we did, it was like enough of a plan where we got his blessing to give birth in his home. Justin: It wasn't a surprise. Angela: It was a surprise that it was in the bathroom, but that's a different story. Annie: You blessed that bathroom is all I can say. Angela: Yeah. Lito: We'll be right back. Back to the show. Annie: (16:22) Well, I want to come back to what Lido was saying about proper missives. I love the intimacy. I mean, I know you weren't writing those to one another for kind of public consumption, but the intimacy and the connection, it's so moving. And I was thinking about, you know, Justin, you, you talk about Angela as kind of pointing the way to beauty and helping you see the world anew or differently. And Angela, you talked about how Justin encourages you to take up space as a political act. I'm just wondering what else you all have taught one another. What has your LitFriend taught you? Justin: Yeah, I mean, we did write that for public consumption. Angela: Yes, it was the editor-in-chief of Spook, Jason Parham. Spook is relaunching soon, so look out for it. He just told me that, like, the other day. And he's moving to L.A. So many things are happening. But he reached out to us and was really interested in—he's a big archives guy and like how—he thought it was valuable the way that writers of past generations, they have these documents of their letters to each other, to their editors, to their friends, to their enemies, and how this generation, because we're just texting through it, we don't really have that. And so that was really just the extent of the assignment, was to write letters to each other, which, of course, we still ended up using email to do. But we really tried to keep it in the spirit of a letter and not just something you kind of dash off. Justin: And we were not living in the same place at that time. Angela: No. Justin: So it was, it did feel kind of— Angela: I was in Provincetown, I think. Justin: Yeah, I remember I was on a train when I was, when I was doing— I can't remember where I was going or, but I remember a lot of it was— or a few of those correspondences— because it went over days, weeks. Lito: Yeah, you were going to Paris. Angela: Oh. Glamorous train. You were on the Eurostar. Justin: Wow. Annie: You basically said the same thing then, Angela. Call him out. Justin: (18:32) Yeah, and I think that what I was saying was that one of the things I loved about that was it really forced us to dive deeper, right? To kind of— Sometimes we can stay very much on the surface because we talk every day. And so it was really nice to see, not just what was kind of on your mind in the background, but also how you were processing it, how you kind of made language and meaning out of it. I was just like... I don't know, it's like, I know you're so deep, but then we also love to be shallow. And so it's so nice to be like, to connect from that deep place. Annie: One of the things that I'm so drawn to about both of your work is how you write about family, the way it shapes us, the way it wounds us, what it means to watch family members suffer. You talk about it as the question of the donut hole in "Proper Missive. Angela, I remember you were writing about your father. When you were writing about him, you talk about, "the assumption that a flawed person should be subject to anyone's definition." And Justin, I'm thinking quite broadly in terms of, you know, chosen or logical family. One of my favorite pieces that I teach in my creative non-fiction class is "Leashed," and you write there, "my friends, those tough women and queers were all too sharp and creative for their jobs. If I'm nostalgic, it's not because I was happy in those precarious years, but because I was deeply moved by our resourcefulness." I'm just wondering how you think about, you know, (20:09) family, logical family, and how your lit friendship fits into this? Justin: Who's going first? Angela: You. Justin: Let's see, I think that it's such a great question. I actually like, I use that little short kind of tiny little piece that you referenced. I use that in my book, in Blackouts, that's coming out. I think that, which is a book about chosen family as well, and lineages, and what do you do when you feel there's some kind of disruption, right? That like if you're estranged from your biological family or you know or you just need these connections, these kind of queer connections to and other ways of thinking about family that are not related to (21:06) bloodlines. Like we said earlier, we are family, and we've known that for quite a while. It was something that, I don't know. You know, it's like something that I don't think you ever really need to say. It's just you know who your people are. And I think that, and I think that it's a choice that you make and remake again and again and again. And that is something that is, I don't know, it's so exceptional, right? Compared to bloodlines and biological family, which can be hugely important and bring a lot of meaning to people. But that you're choosing this again and again. Like almost like the kind of past tense chosen family is like, it's like a little bit inaccurate, right? It's like the family you choose, and keep choosing, and you're choosing right now, you know? So I love that. Yeah. Angela: Just that the continuity of it, not in the sense that it's always going to be there, but that like you are, you're like an active, uh, engager like in it. In it, I just think about, I think about that, like, uh, at this point we know each other for 14 years. And the way that there's just necessarily we're not the same people but you have to keep, and you have to keep engaging, and you have to keep figuring out how to navigate different things and I think particularly as like LitFriends there's the huge thing you have to navigate which is especially if you're friends before that you're just like some kids who got into this program that people think are fancy, but you're just like, anything can happen, right? From there to being the capital— going from just like lowercase w, "writer," to capital A, "Author." And like what that, I mean, I've seen many a friendship where that is the rupture. And so particularly figuring out, like, how are you going to navigate that, and how are you going to still be in each other's lives. (23:16.33) Um, one thing I think about, as a person who thinks about family a lot is, with your family, sometimes you can like harm one another, and you'll just take some time off, or you'll just be like, that's how they are. But with the family that you continue to choose, you have to, ideally, you gotta do something about it. You have to actually have the engagement, and you have to figure out how to come out on the other side of it. And that is something that is harder and really in so many ways, all the more precious because of it. And it requires a kind of resilience and also just like a trust. And again, because Justin, you know, likes to gather me up, there's been a few times when I was like, "Oh, no, like, we've got beef, what's gonna happen?" And Justin is like, "we're family, what's gonna happen is we're gonna have to talk about this beef, and then move on." Justin: Yeah. And I think that I think that also you have, you're really good at reminding me to be responsible, right? That just because I've made this commitment, in my mind, right, Like we're committed forever. Like we're family. Like we can't, we can't break up, right? Like it's just like, that's just the way it is. It doesn't get me off the hook of showing up in other ways and being responsible and like, you know, that I can be quite flaky. Angela: I mean, that's just, you've been in L.A. long enough. It's just, you're just becoming native. Justin:  I think I always don't, I don't wanna disappoint you. I don't want you ever to feel like you were looking around for support, and I wasn't there. Angela: Do people cry on this podcast? Annie: We time it. Right at the half hour. Justin: There's been a few moments when I feel it, when I've felt (25:21) maybe that wasn't there enough, you know? And, you know, and if, you know, and like, I don't know, that's when you know it's the real stuff because it like keeps me up at night. You know, I'm just like, wow, you know, what does she need? What can I give? How can I be there? And yeah. Angela: Wow.  There you are. Justin: Here we are. Annie: Lito and I are also family, and it sort of feels never too late. But what you're saying about kind of the like renewing your vows, renewing your commitment over and over, it feels very, very true. Lito: Very true. Yeah yeah yeah. Annie: And life-saving, you know, like life affirming. Lito: It feels real. Justin: Yeah. Look at us. I'm proud of us. I'm proud of you guys too. Lito: It's a love fest over here. Angela: Thanks for having it. Annie: We'll be right back. Annie: (26:26) Welcome back. Angela: Also, particularly again, thinking about a lot of the friends that you have, they're not necessarily also sometimes colleagues. And I think that one thing that Justin really modeled, because I didn't have anything to be transparent about, was just transparency about things. Not just how much he's getting paid for things, but just like what was worth it, what's not worth it, like what is just the way something is and you can like take it or leave it. And I think that in the beginning it was more of me kind of taking that information because I didn't have anybody offering me anything. But now I feel like it's really an exchange of information. And I think that there are people who I love, like, in this industry, if you will, who that's just not our relationship. That doesn't mean we don't have great friendships, but like that is something that like if I'm broke, he knows I'm broke. I never feel the need to pretend and hide or like, you know, and likewise, like if he don't got it, I know he don't got it. It's not, it's just, it just, and I feel like that is something also that is a, it's, um, I think it's important. Especially because you write a book, you know, it does well. And then there are some years in between before you write another. Some of us in this room, maybe take a decade. All of us in this room, maybe take a decade. But yeah, so just really being able to be, to feel like you can still show up at any point in whatever you're doing creatively. Justin: (28:16) Because this is about literary friendships, I think that it's, yeah, there's those two sides, right? There's the business side, which can cause a lot of friction, especially if, you know, things go differently for different books and people have different trajectories. I mean, you're like, you know:  you've surpassed.  Angela: I don't know if that's true.  Justin: But there's that like business side of it. And then there's the literary side as well. And I think that sometimes if it just slides too much into talking about—it's like we could both be selling sprockets, right? There's so much minutiae. It's like we could talk about contracts and whatever and like gigs and da-da-da ad nauseam. And we have to remember to talk about literary side, the literature, the work, the sentences, what we're reading in order to kind of sustain the literary quality of a literary friendship, right?  Angela: One thing I remember you told me, I don't know, ages ago that I thought at the time like oh he's gassing me he's practicing things that he says his students tell me—but now I realize that it is also one of the reasons why our friendship has sustained is you were like ,you know, we can talk about whether a book is successful in 800 ways, but we have to try to remember to just be fans, to be fans of books, of literature, of people writing. And I think that is something that I not only try to practice, but that's something that I think is really foundational to relationship. Everyone can be a hater, and it can be fun sometimes, but like… (30:08) We really do like want to put each other on to the books that we're like excited about. Like I remember when you read or reread Seasons of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih, and I hadn't read it before.  I mean, it's like a, it's a seminal or really a really famous African text, but I had never read it. Or like Maryse Condé, like I hadn't read it as like a real adult and being able to just like talk about that and know that there's a person who's, you know, you could be in polite conversation with somebody who you think is really smart and then you're like you know what I decided I wanted to reread—I don't know—something a person might wanna reread and they're like, Oh, what are you gonna do next? You gonna read a Moby Dick? And you're like, Oh damn, they just shamed me. You know, they just shamed me for being a nerd. But that's not gonna happen here. Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.  Annie: I do wanna go back to something you were alluding to. Angela, you were talking quite openly about it, too, which is shifting from writer to capital A author and the pressure that comes with that.  For the two of you, you had incredible well-deserved success early in your career, but I imagine that doesn't come without a lot of sleepless nights, right? I'm thinking about an interview I heard with Ta-Nehisi Coates where he talks about his friends not reaching out thinking, like, He's good, like, You blew up, you're good. And talking about actually what a lonely position that can be. I'm just wondering, you know, how you've both managed to take care of one another through those highs and lows, or being on that track alongside one another.  And even, you know, competition between lit friends. Justin: (32:13) Yeah, I mean, I think that we're just kind of, like our dispositions: we're very lucky in that I think we, before we met, it wasn't something that we like decided on. It was just before we met, I think we're just boosters, right. We're like, The people we love, their success is our success, right? And I think that's one of the reasons to where we are such good friends, it's because we share that, right? So that I think makes it slightly easier as far as like the competition side of things goes. I think that if it really does feel like you're a family and you're community and like you understand that this is a kind of shared win. I don't know, it's hard to talk about though because we both got really lucky.  Angela: Yeah.  Justin: You know, I mean, who wants to hear from people who got really lucky with their first books talking about how hard it is? You know what I mean?  We just, we didn't have, we didn't have any kind of that disparity between— Angela: Yeah, I'm sure, but—I would say even so—if we had different dispositions, we might be trying to split hairs about who got what. But I think for me—and Justin and I grew up very differently in some ways, but I think we grew up from a class background similarly, and we're both like, We're not supposed to be here, like, what can we get? Like, what can we get? And like, who has the information to help us get it? And so I've never been like, why is he in that room when I'm not in that room? I'm like, give me the intel about the room. That might be the closest I ever get to being in there, but I need to know like what's going on in there. And that has, I think, been the way that I just view any success of anybody that I know. that I feel like I can ask those questions to is like, not necessarily like, oh, can you put me on? Like now that you have something, can I have some of it? But just like, just information, just like, what's it like? And that to me is really useful. But also I think that one thing, when you have people, not just Justin, but like other friends and mentors of mine, when you have people who are honest and upfront about whatever kind of success they've had, you… you just realize that there's a lot of different ways to feel successful, right? Because I have friends who, to me, I'm like, they made it, but they're not convinced they have. And I have other friends that, like, to the outside world, they'd be like, wow, they have a little book, nobody cares. But they feel like they did it, you know? And so I realized it's so much about disposition also. Lito:   Do you feel that a lot about being each other's boosters? I mean, obviously it's about your personalities and who you are as people. I'm also curious how much of that, like Angela, you said you were a gatecrasher. You feel like a gatecrasher a lot. I don't know. What are your thoughts on intersectionality? How does it inform your work and your friendship? How does it affect how you boost each other? I'm also curious if there's something particular about lit friendships that intersect with intersectionality and those categories, especially for people who form intimate relationships with men.  Justin:   Wait, say more.  Like how do blowjobs come in?   Angela:  (36:01.171). I was like one thing we have in common is— Lito: More like, less blow jobs, more like having to deal with men and the various ways they, you know, respond to patriarchy.  Justin: Yeah, I think you kind of said it, right? I think that there's something about hustling and figuring out, like, how am I gonna find some stability in this world.  And I mean we have nominated each other for every single thing that there is. If either one of us gets a chance.  Angela: Till the end of time.  Justin:   Till the end of time, right? And it's just, and I think that, and we've shared all information about everything. There's no, and I think that that's kind of like that quote that you read before, right, about this nostalgia and feeling nostalgic, not for the precarity, but for the way that it bonds people, right? The way that the precarity, like you pull, you share resources, you pull resources, you come together and you talk shit and you don't let people get too down in the dumps and depressed. And you're like, no, we're going to do this. We're going to get ourselves out of this hole and we're going to pull each other up. And, and that I think is like, that's, that's the secret, I think.  Angela: Are you answering the question about men?  Justin:   Oh, men!  Angela: And dealing with men.  Justin: I love that I was just like, oh, you're talking about blow jobs. But no, you were talking about patriarchy.  Lito: Same thing, really.  Annie: In the room I'm in, we do not think there's a difference.  Justin: It's fascinating, right? Because when we were at Iowa together, I remember some of the critiques I got from some of the men, some of the straight men, some of the white straight men, was about a kind of provincialism to my writing, right? That what I was writing about was small and minor and just about particularities of identity and that it wasn't broad and expansive and it wasn't universal. That was expected. That was the kind of critique that was expected. The world has changed so much and so quickly in the last 15 years. It's hard for me to kind of wrap my mind around because that kind of thing, I wasn't, I didn't feel indignant. Maybe I felt a little.  Angela: Yeah, you just, but you just like knew you were going to ignore them. Like, you know, like, but no, but you didn't feel like you were going to, like it was worth, except there were some instances we're not going to get into details, but like, it didn't feel like it was worth spending, like unpacking it or trying to call them out. You just were like, Oh, boop, you're over here. Like, you're not.  Justin: Yeah, yeah. Like, I've been hearing this shit my whole life. Like, it wasn't like, there's no space for this kind of thing in the workshop. I was like, this is the world. This is unexpected. But now I don't think that would fly, right?  Angela:   No. I think maybe in like 70% of workshop spaces that I have been in. Well, I guess I've been running them. But like, I just don't, but like also just the disposition of the students is that they assume that somebody is going to like say something or push back on that. But also I guess maybe more broadly the idea of when you say intersectionality, what do you mean exactly? Lito: I think I wanted to keep it open on purpose. But I think I mean the ways that all of these different identities that we take up and that are imposed upon us, how they intersect with one another, race, class, et cetera. Yeah. Angela: I think one of the reasons why Justin and I gravitated toward each other probably in the beginning and why we ended up in Spook is because I think that—which maybe is also not happening 15 years from then—there is a way that back then, there was a way that even your identity could be flattened, right? Like you're Puerto Rican, which means that you are like a lot of things, right? One of those things like, one of it's like we're both diasporic people, right? But that's one of the things that I think a lot of people would not necessarily think is like a kinship between us, but like I've seen pictures of Justin's cousins. I know I'm giving Primo over here. Like I know what I'm doing. And like that's one way that I think that our relationship feels like, like we just felt like kin when we first met because of that. I think that there's just a lot of ways that in a lot of spaces in this country, you're just not allowed to like have all of those parts of you in the room because people just don't understand it or they do, but they just don't want you to be that also.  Justin: It's not convenient.  Angela: Right. Which is why I was like, of course, Jason would ask you and I to be in Spook, which is a magazine that's a black literary magazine. Cause Jason gets it. Shout out to Jason again.  Justin: I can't believe he's moving to L.A., that's so exciting.  Angela: Supposedly like any day now, he's just gonna arrive. There's just ways that when you find your people, you don't have to always separate these parts of you and you don't always have to keep reminding them also, they sort of understand. But also parts of you change obviously and the way that you feel about your identity changes and your people will embrace that and keep, you know, keep making space for that too. Justin: Making space.  Annie: We'll be back in a moment with Angela and Justin. Lito: (42:22) Hey Lit Fam, we hope you're enjoying our conversation with Justin and Angela. We are quite awed by their thoughtful discussion and moved by their deep love for each other and their art. If you love what we're doing, please take a moment now to follow, subscribe, rate, and review the LitFriends Podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Just a few moments of your time will help us so much to continue bringing you great conversations like this week, after week. Thank you for listening. Annie: (42:59.178) Back to our interview with Justin Torres and Angela Flournoy.  Lito: Justin, you have your sophomore book. How do you feel about it? Are you going to write a sequel for We the Animals like you talked about at one point? Angela, same question. Are there sequels coming forth for you, Angela, to Turner House, or are you moving on to something else? Or you sort of briefly mentioned another book about, uh, I remember you mentioning at some point a book about friends, four female friends, if I remember correctly. Anyways, what's coming next?  Annie: Yeah, and I wanna know about the dreaded second novel because I feel like that's where I'm at. I feel like that's where a lot of writers get stuck. Jutin: Second novel's awful. I mean, you think the first one's bad. You think it takes everything that you have inside of you and then you're like, oh, I've gotta do it again. And yeah, I don't know. I really had a very hard time with it. And I mean, nobody knows better than Angela. I really, really didn't feel like I was up to the task. I knew that I wanted to do something different. I knew I wanted to kind of change the way I write and be a different kind of writer, but I just felt like I was falling on my face.  Even after it was done and out until like last week, I was just, I just felt anxiety about it, and I felt really neurotic and I was being really neurotic. And I remember the other night we were hanging out and drinking and maybe there was some mushroom chocolate involved. I was just, like I was just on my bullshit and Angela was just like stopped and she was just like, What is it gonna take to make you happy? Like what is it gonna take? Like look around. And it was like, it was a really good intervention. But then it also led to this conversation about happiness, right? And about like whether that is the goal, right? Like feeling kind of tortured and, and feeling like this gap between what you want for your book and your own capabilities. And that never goes away. You just live in this, in this torturous phase. And like, maybe it's about just coming to acceptance with that, rather than striving for happiness. I don't know. But it's still ringing in my ear. What is it gonna take?  Lito: It's a great question.  Angela:   Maybe some projection, I don't know, on my part.  I am still working on that novel. It's due at the end or at the beginning of next year. It's gonna come out in 2025. You know, God willing. And... similarly the second novel, I think it depends on your disposition, but I think both of us are very interested in and task ourselves with having real skin in the game with what we right. That means sometimes you got to figure out where you get that skin from.  Lito: There's only so much.  Angela: Like, if you played yourself for the first book, then it's gonna take a while. And when I think about, like, when I try to count for the years, I don't know I could have done it any quicker. Like, I just don't know. And I don't think that's gonna be the case for every book, but I do think between that first and that second, especially, were you 30? Where were you? I was 30, yeah. And then I was 30, too. I was 30 also when my book came out. You're just a baby.  You're just a baby.  Lito: Do you fall into the trap of comparing yourself to other people? Well, they wrote a book in two years and I— Justin:  (47:07) Yeah, sure. I mean, I also like compare myself to people who took longer like that feels good. That feels good.  Angela: Listen, I'm like Deborah Eisenberg. Just a banger every decade. That's it. That's all I owe the world. A banger a decade. Lito: A banger a decade. I like that. I like comparing myself to Amy Clampitt, who wrote her first collection of poetry, like in her 70s or something and had some success.  Justin: I generally wish people would slow down. I mean, I get that sometimes there's just like an economic imperative, right? But if you're lucky enough that, I don't know, you get a teaching job and you can slow down, why not slow down, right? Like, I don't know, sometimes I feel like there are a lot of books in this world. And the books that somebody spent a lot of time over, whether or not they are my tastes—I'm just so appreciative of the thoughtfulness that went in.  You can feel it, right? That somebody was really considering what they're building versus dashing it off. They should slow down, if they can.  Angela: But I also feel like we need both kinds. There are people who I appreciate their books, their kind of time capsules of just like, this is the two years, this is where I was. I think of Yiyun. We need an Yiyun Li and we need an Edward P. Jones. Edward P. Jones, you're gonna get those books when you get the books. And Yiyun Li, every couple years, you're gonna get something that, to me, I still, they still feel like really good books, but they're also just like, this is where she is right here, and I respect it and I appreciate it. Everybody can't be one or the other, you know?  Justin: You're right, you're right, you're right. It's much fairer.  Annie: She's someone who, I mean, you know, seems to have changed so much even within that time period. And we had her on a couple of episodes ago and yeah, she's just on fire. She's amazing.  Justin: (49:06) And people speed up as well, right? Because her first couple of books, there were big gaps. And then same thing with like Marilynne Robinson, right? She had massive gaps between books. And then suddenly it starts to speed up. And they're coming out every year, every two years. Yeah. Annie: It's the mortality.  Lito: Well, and life, well, I think lifestyle too, right? Like what you do, how busy you are and what you do out in the world. Like going out and meeting people and being gay in the world, that takes up time.  Annie: And your work has had other lives too. I mean, I'm thinking about how We the Animals was adapted to film in that beautiful, intimate portrait. And I know, you know, Angela, you've been working with HBO and some projects as well. I'm just, just wondering if you want to talk about your work in these other media, how it's been, and even thinking about the strikes, right? Like the WGA-SAG strikes and how that has been on the ground too.  Angela:  Very happy that the strike is over. Solidarity to our SAG-AFTRA brothers and sisters still out there. I passed them on the way here on Sunset. I did honk, wish I was out there today. But I think that for me, it's just like a bonus. Like I, especially now, there's a way that right now writers will say things that are a little snobby like, Oh, I could never be in a writer's room, the group project, man. But like when now that I know so many TV writers living here and I've met so many over the past 146 days on the line, I realized that it is, you just have to be so nimble and agile and you have to also be so not precious about story. But no less smart. A lot of things might end up on TV dumb, but I don't want to blame the writers for that. Now that I really have a real understanding of just how the sausage is made and just how big of like a game of telephone it is—and how much you have to relinquish control because at the end of the day it's like you're making this text, it's literary, but it's also like an instruction manual. It's a completely different way to think about writing. And I don't know how long I live in LA or how many like of those kind of projects I will do but I'm really grateful. And one reason I'm really grateful is because doing those projects and having those years where people thought I wasn't doing anything, but I was actually writing so much and like doing so many revisions.  It helped me realize that there is a way that I blame MFAs for making us like feel very siloed. And like, if you're supposed to be a fiction writer, that's the only thing that you do that's like an output that anyone cares about. But it's so new—like, how many screenplays did Joan Didion write? Like James Baldwin wrote screenplays. Before, it was just like, you're writing, you're writing. Like it's all, it all is the job. And I think every time a poet friend of mine like puts out a novel, sends it to me, read, sends it for me to read—first off, they usually are very good. But then also I'm just like, yes, fiction writers, I think, I don't know who did it. I blame graduate programs, but they have put themselves in this small box. Justin: But yeah, I mean, it's like the MFA, a lot of them feel like teacher training programs and that the next step is teaching. But if you don't want to teach the old models, definitely like you just write for TV. Angela: You write for film, you write for magazines, newspapers, you just do the thing. And that has felt very freeing to me, to just see meet more people who are doing that and also to allow myself to do that. Justin (52:49) Yeah, I mean, I really enjoyed the process of having my film—the book made into a film. I think I had an unusual experience with that. Like a lot of times the author is cut out or, you know, is not deferred to in any way, or nobody's inviting you in. I think because it was such a low budget film, and the director is just a really wonderful person who is incredibly collaborative.  He wanted me involved in every single part of it, and so I loved that. I think, I don't know, I think I might wanna adapt Blackouts for a play. I've been thinking about it lately. Angela: You should. I mean, in so many ways, it is kind of like a two-hander. Yeah. I could see it. Yeah.  Justin: A two-hander. Look at you ready to lingo. No, that's some biz lingo.  Lito: That's going to be the title of this podcast. It's a two-hander. How has art shaped your friendship? And I mean, art, like other genres, we've talked about getting out of the box of fiction, but what movies or art or music do you love to talk about or do you just talk about everything or anything that you're watching and how have other genres affected your work? Like, do you listen to music? Are you influenced by visual art?  Angela: You wanna talk about things you watch on television? You ready to come out in that manner?  Justin: No.  Lito: You watch lots of TV? No. Are you a Housewives person?  You're a Housewives watcher, aren't you?  Justin: Housewives is too highbrow for me. I have like a…I have a secret fetish that is mine. Angela: You have to keep some things for yourself. Justin: Yes. But it's just like, that's how I turn my brain off when my brain needs to be turned off.  Annie: I will wait another decade for that story. Justin: I also like culture and high art as well. You write about art a lot. You do profiles. Angela: I do. I wish I did it more. It's just everything, you know, takes time. I think for me, like when I think about—I just am learning different ways to make a life out of, you know, out of your mind and out of art. And one thing that I've learned when I talk to, like visual artists, particularly, is this idea—I think poets also have this—but fiction writers, a friend of mine actually, a poet, recently asked me, like, how does a fiction writer get a practice, like a practice of writing? Practicing their craft in a way that like a visual artist, you know, they go to the studio practice or poet might have a practice. And I don't believe necessarily that sitting down to write every, you know, three hours every day is the same thing. Because like if you don't know what you're writing, but I really do think that practice is more grounded in reading.  Justin: And reading, I think reading literature for sure, but also reading the world, right? And that's what you do when you go to an exhibit or you go to a museum or you go to a concert or whatever, right, you're like reading, you know, and you're reading the experience, you're reading for other things.  Lito: Is there anything you're both fans of that you both talk about a lot? Any artists or musicians or movies? Justin (56:26) You know, I think that we have some lowbrow sharing tastes. But I think that our highbrow, I don't know. We don't talk a lot about our pursuant— I think I'm into a lot of, like when I was looking at, when I was putting together Blackouts, I was looking at a lot of archival photos and like the photos of Carl Van Vechten, I just, I'm obsessed with…  I've been spending a lot of time with them, thinking about him and his practice. I think that, you know, I like all kinds of stuff. I'm like a whatever, what's that horrible term? Culture vulture?  Angela: I don't think that's what you wanna say. But I know what you mean, yeah.  Justin: Yeah, I am democratic in my tastes. I'm just like, I like everything. We don't have a lot of shared tastes, I don't think.  Angela: Um... No?  Justine: No.  Annie:  I sort of love that. I mean, it, um, the friendship, belies, that, you know, it's only a bonus in that way. I think Lito and I also have very different tastes. There's something kind of lovely about that. Lito: I remember Annie making fun of me for not being hardcore enough in my taste in hip-hop. Annie:    I guess we're putting our dirt out there too.  Lito:   We'll be right back with the Lightning Round. Annie:   Ooh, Lightning Round. Annie: (58:12) Thank you both for talking with us today. This was really wonderful. We really feel the honesty and warmth in your friendship and we're so appreciative that you're sharing that with us today and with all of our LitFriends. We're excited for both your books and we're so grateful you spent the last hour with us.  Angela: That was a pleasure.  Justin: Thank you. Lito: All right, we're gonna we— wrap up the podcast with a Lightning Round, just a few questions. We will ask the question and then I guess we'll do it this way. When I ask the question, Angela, you can answer. And when Annie asks the question, Justin, you answer first. Sorry, first answer first. You're both going to answer the question. What is your first memory?  Angela:  My sister roller skating through sprinklers and falling and hitting her head. Justin: I literally have no idea. I, yeah, I don't know. It's a blackout.  Angela: How many times have you said that?  Lito:  Very on brand.  Angela: You've had a long book tour. Justin: I'm practicing.  Annie: Who or what broke your heart first?  Angela: Is it too deep to say my daddy? I know.  Justin: I was going to say my daddy.  Angela: That's why we're friends.  Justin: I know. It's so sad.  Angela: (59:37) Daddy issues.  Lito: Who would you want to be lit friends with from any time in history?  Angela: Toni Morrison.   Justin: Yeah, maybe Manuel Puig. He seemed really cap and hilarious. And also a brilliant genius.  Angela: I need Toni Morrison to tell me how to raise my child. And to still write books. Someone help me. Annie: What would you like to see your lit friend make or create next, maybe something collaborative or something different or a story they haven't told yet?  Justin: I mean, I think I would love to see you actually write something kind of ekphrastic. Like I'd love to see you write about art. I love when you write about art. I love your thoughts about art and art makers. So maybe, like, a collection of essays about culture. I'd love that. Angela: Besides this two-handed, this play, which I would love for you to write. Maybe there's more, I mean, there's more voices in the book than two, though. So it doesn't have to be. Justin is a poet. I have said this since the beginning. I'm ready for this collection.  Justin: Never occurred to me in my life. Angela:   That is not true.  Justin:   Well, writing a collection. Angela:   Okay, well, I would love for you to write a collection of poetry.  Justin:   Maybe I will. Maybe you just gave me permission, as the children say.  Angela:   Mm-hmm. I know.  Lito: If you could give any gift to your LitFriend without limitations, what would you give them?  Angela: I would give him a house with a yard and a pool.  Justin: That's what I want.  Angela: In a city he wants to live in. That's the key.  Lito: That's the hard part. Justin:  (01:01:35) Um, I would give Angela time to be with her thoughts and her craft. I guess what does that involve?  Angela:   This is because I call myself a busy mom all the time.  Justin: You are a busy mom. Angela: (01:02:08) Thank you, that's a nice gift. Time is the best.  Justin: I mean, it's not as good as a house with a pool.  Angela: I know, because I can use my time as wisely as possible and yet—no pool. Lito: Well, that's our show. Annie & Lito: Happy Friendsgiving! Annie: Thanks for joining us, Lit Fam. Lito:   We'll be back next week with our guests, Lucy Corin and Deb Olin Unferth. Annie: Find us on all your socials @LitFriendsPodcast. Annie: I'm Annie Liontas.  Lito:   And I'm Lito Velázquez.  Annie:   Thank you to our production squad. Our show is edited by Justin Hamilton. Lito:   Our logo was designed by Sam Schlenker.  Annie:   Lizette Saldaña is our marketing director.  Lito:   Our theme song was written and produced by Robert Maresca.  Annie:   And special thanks to our show producer, Toula Nuñez. This was LitFriends, Episode One.

Bestselling novelist and former Twitter employee Robin Sloan joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about how Elon Musk's ownership of Twitter and the rise of new platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Meta's Threads are shaping a new ecosystem of social media. The co-hosts and Sloan grapple with the unruliness of Twitter over time, political polarization on different platforms and the risks of disinformation, and what the end of Twitter—now rebranded as X—might look like. Sloan reflects on the role social media plays (or doesn't) in authors' careers, as well as his own decision to leave Twitter. Finally, he reads from his 2012 novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/ This episode of the podcast was produced by Amanda Trout and Anne Kniggendorf. Robin Sloan Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore Sourdough “Conspiracy Museum” (The Atlantic) Others: “Robin Sloan leaves Twitter's Media Partnerships team,” The Next Web, November 11, 2011 “Bay Area author Robin Sloan dishes on 'Sourdough,' Twitter and books,” San Jose Mercury-News, May 18, 2019 “How to Write Science Fiction That Isn't 'Useful,'” Robin Sloan interviewed by Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic, May 15, 2020 “The Age of Social Media Is Ending,” by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, Nov. 10, 2022 “Threads users looking for 'genuine connection' as Twitter-like social media platform goes back to basics,” ABC News (Australia), July 14, 2023. “Social Media Is Dead,” by Edward Ongweso Jr., Vice, Nov. 8, 2022. “Social Media Died When It Stopped Being Social and Became About Making Money,” by Enrique Dans, Forbes, May 13, 2019 “With the rise of AI, social media platforms could face perfect storm of misinformation in 2024,” CNN Business, July 17, 2023 “Threads, Twitter, and the Future of Social Media,” by Sriram Krishnan, The New York Times (Opinion), July 15, 2023 “Zombie Twitter Has Arrived,” by Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic, July 6, 2023 “The Weaponization of Social Media and Real World Consequences,” by Dave Davies, National Public Radio, October 9, 2018 “Conservative social networks like Gettr and Parler keep making the same mistake,” by Casey Newton, The Verge, Jul 6, 2021 “Tucker Carlson's show on Twitter makes ad deal with anti-ESG shopping app” by Brian Schwartz, CNBC, July 16, 2023 “Taylor Swift Gets Political On Social Media As Nashville Elections Start,” by Aimée Lutkin, Elle, July 15, 2023 “Despite cries of censorship, conservatives dominate social media,” by Mark Scott, POLITICO, Oct. 26, 2020 “Robin Sloan's 'Sourdough' Is a Fascinating Riddle” by Andy Newman, The Atlantic, Dec. 5, 2017 “Book Armageddon is a Myth: Interview with Robin Sloan” by Lex Berko, Vice, April 10, 2013 “More than eight-in-ten Americans get news from digital devices” Jan. 2021 Study by Elisa Shearer, Pew Research Center, Jan. 12, 2021 “Conservative Social Media— A New Norm?” by Kayla Morrison, Brown Political Review, Dec. 3, 2022 “Robin Sloan: Describing the emotions of life online,” by Josh Kramer, New Public, Mar. 13, 2022 “Computer Stories: A.I. Is Beginning to Assist Novelists—Robin Sloan” by David Streitfeld, The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2018 “The Infinite Deaths of Social Media” by Jason Parham, WIRED, May 4, 2022 “Social media is doomed to die” by Ellis Hamburger, The Verge, April 18, 2023 “The Future of Social Media Is a Lot Less Social” by Brian X. Chen, The New York Times, April 19, 2023 “Delhi Man Creates Device Which Allows You To Order Pizza With Your Mind,” by Anoushka Sharma, NDTV, July 21, 2023 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jason Parham, senior writer at WIRED, walks Jon through the evolution and legacy of Black Twitter. Parham's three-part series, “A People's History of Black Twitter,” follows the online community from its early days of late night takes, through an era of platform dominance, and into an uncertain future. He joins Offline to discuss how Black Twitter has shaped the last ten years of discourse and activism, how the internet complicates cultural appropriation, and what will happen if Twitter fades away. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast. 

#BlackLivesMatter. #OscarsSoWhite. #Zola. These huge cultural moments come from one of the most chaotic, beloved, and influential communities online: Black Twitter. But with Elon Musk at the helm, the future of the community is in question. What's next for the digital public square and by extension Black Twitter? Host Brittany Luse sits down with Jason Parham, senior writer at WIRED, to discuss why he believes, "There Is No Replacement for Black Twitter"; and why his three-part oral history, "A People's History of Black Twitter" is needed now more than ever.You can follow us on Twitter @NPRItsBeenaMin or email us at ibam@npr.org.

Elon Musk's presence has loomed over Twitter since he announced plans to purchase the platform. And for these few weeks that he's been in charge, many concerns have proven to be justified. Musk laid off 3,700 employees, and then 4,400 contractors. He is firing those who are critical of him. The verification process, perhaps one of Twitter's most trusted features, has been unraveled. He's offered severance to those who don't want to be part of “extremely hardcore” Twitter. Following the results of a Twitter poll, he reinstated the account of Donald Trump, who was suspended from the platform for his role in inciting the January 6th attacks. So, what happens now? What of the many social movements that manifested on Twitter? While some movements and followings may see new manifestations on other platforms, not everything will be completely recreated. For example, as writer Jason Parham explains, “whatever the destination, Black Twitter will be increasingly difficult to recreate.” In this episode of Community Signal, Patrick speaks to three experts: Sarah T. Roberts, associate professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, trust and safety consultant Ralph Spencer, and Omar Wasow, assistant professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Political Science and co-founder of BlackPlanet, about the current state and future of Twitter. They dissect the realities facing the platform today including content moderation, loss of institutional knowledge, and uncertainty about Twitter's infrastructure, but also emphasize the importance of Twitter as a social utility for news and more. This episode also touches on: The reality of moderating a platform like Twitter What platforms actually mean when they say they're for “free speech” How Musk tanked the value of verification on Twitter Big Quotes On the future of content moderation at Twitter (8:28): “There's no way possible with the cuts [Musk has] made that he's going to be able to do any type of content moderation. … [He] isn't going to have anybody who remotely begins to know to how to do that [legal compliance and related work].” –Ralph Spencer Sarah T. Roberts' moderation challenge for Elon Musk (11:19): “I want Elon Musk to spend one day as a frontline production content moderator, and then get back to this [Community Signal] crew about how that went. Let us know what you saw. Share with us how easy it was to stomach that. Were you able to keep up with the expected pace at Twitter? Could you … make good decisions over 90% of the time, over 1,000, 2,000 times a day? Could you do that all the while seeing animals being harmed, kids being beat on, [and] child sexual exploitation material?” –@ubiquity75 Bumper sticker wisdom doesn't make good policy (15:46): “Everything [Musk has said about free speech] has had the quality of good bumper stickers but is totally divorced from reality, and that doesn't bode well, obviously.” –@owasow The responsibility in leading a social media platform (19:41): “One thing that we are seeing in real-time [at Twitter] is what a danger there is in having one individual – especially a very privileged individual who does not live in the same social milieu as almost anyone else in the world – one very privileged individual's ability to be the arbiter of … these profoundly contested ideological notions of something like free speech which again is continually misapplied in this realm.” –@ubiquity75 Musk's peddling of conspiracy theories (20:29): “[Musk is] running around tweeting that story about Nancy Pelosi's husband, the false article about what happened between him and his attacker. What kind of example is that to set? … What it is to me is like this kid who has way too much money, and he found a new toy he wants to play with.” –Ralph Spencer Leading with humility (21:23): “[If you're running a site like Twitter,] you have to have a ‘small d' democratic personality, which is to say you really have to be comfortable with a thousand voices flourishing, a lot of them being critical of you, and that's not something that you take personally.” –@owasow There are always limits on speech (23:50): “When you declare that your product, your site, your platform, your service is a free speech zone, there is always going to be a limit on that speech. … [CSAM] is the most extreme example that we can come up with, but that is content moderation. To remove that material, to disallow it, to enforce the law means that there is a limit on speech, and there ought to be in that case. If there's a limit on speech, it is by definition not a free speech site. Then we have to ask, well, what are the limits, and who do they serve?” –@ubiquity75 “Free speech” platforms are not a thing (25:25): “When I hear people invoke free speech on a for-profit social media site, not only does that not exist today, it never has existed, and it never will exist. Let's deal with what reality is actually giving us and talk about that instead of these fantasies that actually are pretty much not good for anyone involved.” –@ubiquity75 The social weight and trust that verification brought to interactions on Twitter (32:52): “[Twitter] has outsized social impact, whether it's in the political arena, whether it's in social movements, whether it's in celebrity usage, all of these things have been true. In terms of political movements, the good, bad, the ugly. We saw an insurrection against the United States launched by the President of the United States on Twitter, so it's not all rosy, but the point is that Twitter had this outsized power and part of that could be attributed … to this verification process that let a lot of high profile folks, prominent individuals, media organizations, other kinds of people in the zeitgeist or in the public eye, engage with a certain sense of security.” –@ubiquity75 How does Twitter sustain its infrastructure amidst the mass layoffs and resignations? (39:18): “We have good reason to fear that [Twitter's] infrastructure is going to get considerably worse over time. [Musk has] fired enough of the people. … In a lot of ways, [Twitter is] like a telephone company. It's got a lot of boring infrastructure that it has to maintain so that it's reliable. [Musk has] taken a bunch of these pillars or blocks in the Jenga stack and knocked them out, and it's a lot more wobbly now.” –@owasow Musk's Twitter user experience is not the common one (48:23): “[Musk is] obsessed with bots and spam, but why is that such a compulsion for him? Well, he has 100-plus million followers, and when he looks at his replies, there's probably a lot of bots and spam there. That's not where I live because I'm a civilian. His perspective is distorted in a way partly by the investment around him but partly also by just being so way out of proportion to almost any other human on Earth.” –@owasow About Our Guests Omar Wasow is an assistant professor in UC Berkeley's Department of Political Science. His research focuses on race, politics, and statistical methods. Previously, Omar co-founded BlackPlanet, an early leading social network, and was a regular technology analyst on radio and television. He received a PhD in African American Studies, an MA in government, and an MA in statistics from Harvard University. Ralph Spencer has been working to make online spaces safer for more than 20 years, starting with his time as a club editorial specialist (message board editor) at Prodigy, and then graduating to America Online. During his time at AOL, he was in charge of all issues involving Child Sexual Abuse Material or CSAM. The evidence that Ralph and the team he worked with in AOL's legal department compiled contributed to numerous arrests and convictions of individuals for the possession and distribution of CSAM. He currently works as a freelance trust and safety consultant. Sarah T. Roberts is an associate professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She holds a PhD from the iSchool at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her book on commercial content moderation, Behind the Screen, was released in 2019 from the Yale University Press. She served as a consultant, too, and is featured in the award-winning documentary The Cleaners. Dr. Roberts sits on the board of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, was a 2018 Carnegie Fellow, and a 2018 recipient of the EFF Barlow Pioneer Award for her groundbreaking research on content moderation of social media. Related Links Elon Musk takes control of Twitter and immediately ousts top executives (via NPR) Omar Wasow's website Omar Wasow on Twitter BlackPlanet.com, founded by Wasow Ralph Spencer on LinkedIn Sarah T. Roberts' website Sarah T. Roberts on Twitter Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, by Sarah T. Roberts Note from Patrick: After 5 years, this is Carol's final episode as editorial lead on Community Signal. We'll miss you, Carol! The Twitter Rules Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig Elon Musk says Twitter will have a ‘content moderation council' (via The Verge) Democratic U.S. senators accuse Musk of undermining Twitter, urge FTC probe (via Reuters) We got Twitter ‘verified' in minutes posing as a comedian and a senator (via The Washington Post) How Much Did Twitter's Verification Chaos Cost Insulin Maker Eli Lilly and Twitter Itself? (via Gizmodo) Patrick's (somewhat sarcastic) Twitter thread about the policies he hoped the platform would put in place to address Musk's conflicts of interest Saturday Night Live's content moderation council sketch Transcript View on our website Your Thoughts If you have any thoughts on this episode that you'd like to share, please leave me a comment, send me an email or a tweet. If you enjoy the show, we would be so grateful if you spread the word and supported Community Signal on Patreon.

If you've opened Instagram recently, you've certainly seen Reels. The photo-sharing app has started aggressively pushing the TikTok-like video feeds onto its users, a move that has sparked a heated response. Longtime users, and even celebrities like Kylie Jenner, have been urging Instagram to ditch the feature, which in addition to showing you more viral videos also shows you fewer updates from your friends and loved ones. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri has defended the move, saying that Instagram is sticking with Reels and showing more videos in general, no matter how you or the Kardashians feel about that. This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs joins us to rant about Reels and why all the social media platforms are copying TikTok now. Show Notes Watch Mosseri's recent video about Reels (on Twitter, of course). Read Kate's story about how Instagram keeps showing her sick kids. Recommendations Kate recommends the book The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism by Adrienne Buller. Lauren recommends the Jordan Peele movie Nope and also Jason Parham's WIRED review of the film. Mike recommends the Netflix show How to Change Your Mind and John Semley's WIRED story about the companies racing to engineer new psychedelic drugs. Kate Knibbs can be found on Twitter @Knibbs. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Writer Jason Parham -- our first ever repeat guest -- chats with Brittany and Eric about the distinct way he covers digital life, the ways Black creators are holding platforms accountable, and the radical heart of TikTok and OnlyFans.

Jason Parham is out with a three-part feature in ‘WIRED' chronicling how Black Twitter came to exist in its current form. To put together this history, he spoke with the people who have been there since the beginning.

If you've been on Twitter, then you've been on Black Twitter. No other subsection of social media has produced ideas and movements as influential or as dynamic as those that have come from Black voices on Twitter. In the early days, it existed as a space where Black people could connect, bat around some jokes, and share their experiences. Over time, Twitter's Black community grew to become a driving force of real-world social change. It catalyzed culture and led to important movements like #OscarsSoWhite, #MeToo and, of course, Black Lives Matter. This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior writer Jason Parham joins us to talk about his three-part oral history called “A People's History of Black Twitter,” what it means to be Black online, and how Black Twitter has changed society. Show Notes:  Read Jason's oral history of Black Twitter (Part I, Part II, Part III). Also read his September 2020 cover story about TikTok and the evolution of digital blackface. Recommendations:  Jason recommends the show Jett on Cinemax. Lauren recommends the July 28 episode of the Daily podcast, The Saga of Congress's Jan. 6 Investigation. Mike recommends The Summer of Soul on Hulu. Jason Parham can be found on Twitter @nonlinearnotes. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys. If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired.“I think of myself some days as a critic. Some days I think of myself as a journalist. But I essentially mostly think of myself as an essayist, somebody who is trying to bridge those two traditions. My approach to writing now is kind of simple…I’m always writing about things I like and want to hear about.” Thanks to Mailchimp for sponsoring this week's episode. Show notes:   @nonlinearnotes jasonparham.com 00:45 "TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface" (Wired • Aug 2020) 1:00 Spook 1:45 Evan (@henrylittleboots) on TikTok 18:30  "The Reality of Dating White Women When You're Black" (Ernest Baker • Gawker • Jun 2014) 21:30 "Gawker Media's Responsibility to Diversity" (Jan 2015) 24:00 Gawker Cuts Seven Staffers as It Goes All Politics (Peter Sterne • Politico • Nov 2015) 29:15 Longform Podcast #335: Kiese Laymon (Peter Sterne • Politico • Nov 2015) 30:00 "And Lo, With Russell Westbrook, Humanity Outpaced Science" (Wired • June 2017) 30:00 "How Oprah’s Network Finally Found Its Voice" (Wired • June 2018) 39:15 Longform Podcast #157: Margo Jefferson 39:15 "Ripping Off Black Music" (Harper’s • January 1973) 43:00 "Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry" (Wired • May 2019) 44:15 "When Influencers Switch Platforms—and Bare It All" (Wired • August 2019)  

Welcome, welcome. As with the last edition, you can now listen to this newsletter (and find it in Apple Podcasts, if you’d rather subscribe that way). First, to kick things off, some self-promotion. My regular radio show Hot Sauce Radio can now be found on Souncloud which, tbh, is probably better than hosting on Mixcloud, where I was before. More people use it. Better on mobile, even if you don’t have the app. Anyways, the most recent show is a freestyle mix featuring Joni Mitchell, J Dilla, Arthur Russell, Bowie, Helado Negro, Steve Lacy, and a bunch more. I had a lot of fun putting it together. So go forth and listen to Hot Sauce Radio Episode #4. Now onto the goods! Prompt Twitter is, as defined by Brian Feldman, a Twitter trend that began in 2019 which are “slightly elaborate phrasings of mundane questions.” One of the worst prompts I’ve seen recently is “reply w a baby pic that exudes the energy you have now” and it’s just people posting baby pics. Yeah, I would hope that someone posting a younger version of their own face might have some aesthetic consistency. It’s the same face! Yeesh.Prompt Twitter is a perpetual motion machine of everyone asking everyone else to smell each others' farts. The obvious allure of it is that all parties gets what they want out of it. The prompter gets to seem authentic and interested in their audience (they are not) and the promptee gets permission to make the conversation all about themselves – “I wasn’t going to say it but someone asked!” Twitter famously prompts users with a generic “What’s happening?” but its users pick up the slack by creating specific activities for each other. Prompt Twitter is tailor-made for #brands to jump in and feel very of-the-moment, patting themselves on the back for being of the cultural zeitgeist or knowing what’s, like, trending. Brian has a good write-up of how thinking about Prompt Twitter can give you a good understanding of TikTok, and a certain segment of content that’s just “Prompt Twitter on steroids,” versus the actual compelling content, which is when users subvert the trending sounds and formats to end up somewhere new. That’s some of what makes TikTok so good! (Related: I’ve ben featured—OK, quoted—in PR Week on how I’ve counseled brands on their TikTok strategy and dealt with how to measure it campaigns.) So, there is a lot of fun to be had on TikTok. But there is a lot about TikTok that’s not good. I’m not even going to broach the national security, Trump vs. TikTok issues here. TikTok has a unique ~culture~ and platform nuance that set it apart from your Instagrams of the world. That culture (and so much of internet culture, memes, and the like) often has a nasty bent to it, mirroring society and exacerbating the problems underneath. From WIRED’s September cover story written by Jason Parham, TikTok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface (yeah, like the cover of a paper magazine, y’all):Over a period of two months, I heard from 29 Black creators who shared stories about muted posts, in-app harassment, and incidents of racism. They said the problems on the app are deeper and more widespread than simple isolated incidents. “Ever since I joined I've felt like the app is against me,” one told me. Another added, “It's disgusting how much they have allowed to go unchecked.” Together, their experiences belie the perception of TikTok as an app of joy and creativity, revealing instead a place tangled up in an ancient pain—a site of blurred visions and youthful ignorances, where flattery quickly turns into mockery, mockery into theft, and theft into something altogether more disturbing.The quickest route to TikTok stardom (for white creators/influencers)? Digital blackface. Copy Black culture, Black cultural expression, Black chart-toppers, Black language. This is not unique to TikTok but might be more pronounced than on other platforms, and it can be so personal, given that sounds of an individual Black person—their voice, their music—underpins viral content for white people.But digital blackface proliferates in ways beyond “platforms.” Reaction GIFs are one of the common uses of digital blackface, for example. So: TikTok as a cultural force and a platform of #GoodContent in the year of our lord 2020? Yeah, not necessarily. Well, I mean, look. It’s not just TikTok. Writing in Noema, UCLA associate professor Safiya Noble lays bare how big tech has failed to improve humanity, brought further into light by COVID-19. In short, instead of being partners in building the public good, Big Tech continues to profit from its erosion. Rather than contribute to the public coffers so that we can fund the public institutions we so desperately need to support, the titans of Big Tech are trying to come to the rescue through philanthropy and expressions of personal goodwill, making private donations at a tiny fraction of their personal wealth into the charitable and non-governmental organizations of their choosing. But these kinds of private drops into the desperately under-funded public pool, in exchange for eschewing the kind of tax responsibilities that working-people face, further erodes coordination and fair distributions of power and resources.OK, in other news, the NBA appears to have figured out how to do sports during a pandemic, but it seems like a pretty non-replicable solution for other leagues or sports to do. One thing for certain: Greg, lifelong Dallas Mavs fan, is pretty excited to see Luka and KP suit up and SHOCK THE WORLD in the playoffs. (Look: Pistons first-and-foremost for life, but I have to have one new sports team that I’m a Dallas resident and it sure isn’t going to be some of the other teams down here.)Thanks for reading and/or listening and I’ll be back soon, I promise. Love you all. Greg Get full access to Greg's Newsletter at greg.substack.com/subscribe

Jason Parham 6/30/2019. I Kings 17

We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of sister Mabel Madea Simmons. The iconic character, created and played by Tyler Perry, is being retired after 20 years of captivating and aggravating audiences on stage and screen. Join us as we gather with some special guests (including Jason Parham of Wired Magazine) to reflect on Madea’s life and legacy with a funeral service at the Nod-to-God Holy Tabernacle.

In hour 13, Rembert is joined by Jason Parham of Wired and SPOOK, and Tommy Vietor of Crooked Media. Rembert Browne is hosting a 24-hour podcast marathon to raise money for his former youth tennis camp, Coach Wink's NJTL, in Atlanta to attend the US Open. You can donate to the cause at advantagekids.co/donate

B & E sit down with Jason Parham, senior editor at The Fader, for a free-wheeling conversation on things like barbershops, pain, and DMX. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Writer and editor Jason Parham joins me. He's currently a Senior Editor at THE FADER and formerly of Gawker. We discover his Wikipedia page, talk about existing on the Internet, his literary magazine SPOOK and the times we met Ms. Tina Lawson. +1 SEGMENT: - Catching the feels for Instagram Stories. Mint Aero Bubbles. - Ms. Tina Lawson's Instagram Footnotes: http://theseam.co/aiatla-podcast-jason-parham/ Follow Jason on Twitter: @nonlinearnotes

On this week’s program, Dr. Minor welcomes in Dr. Jason Parham, an infectious disease specialist at UMMC. The conversation is about acute respiratory infections. When you are experiencing symptoms that can be common like congestion, cough, sore throat, or runny nose, how do you determine when are they severe enough to see a doctor? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.