5. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.
— Teju Cole (@tejucole) January 14, 2013
Read the whole series on Storify (and be sure to check out the Pro Publica report Cole links to at the end, which is both thorough and non-ideological).
Teju Cole has gotten big on Twitter the right way (in my humble view): using Twitter as a creative medium. His growing follower count is an indication that there’s a real hunger for this kind of thing; I do hope more writers will follow his lead. While I’ve personally grown a little weary of his relentlessly grim small fates, there’s no denying their literary quality and inventiveness. And I do love his occasional Twitter essays (or whatever you want to call the above, which is less polemic but more devastating than its predecessors). A just-published essay, “Twitter>The Novel? @tejucole>Teju Cole?” by Sam Twyford-Moore cites and quotes from a couple of Cole’s other Twitter essays, in case you missed them.