counted as plagiarism, âor if [Lehrer] modified his words to stop just short of doing so.â Or maybe both men had drawn from the same source: âIn the footnotes Lehrer cites page 661 of Desmond and Mooreâs 1991 biography of Darwin. Anyone who has a copy of that book is invited to check the wordings.â
But even if it wasnât plagiarism, Engber was âconvinced that Lehrer hasnât changed his ways at all. Heâs set his course as clearly as can be. Heâll recycle and repeat, heâll puke his gritty guts out.â
No matter what transgressions Jonah had or hadnât committedâit seemed to meâhe couldnât win. But his
Book About Love
is scheduled to be published by Simon & Schuster around the same time that this book will appear, so weâll all learn at once if it will win him some redemption.
Four
God That Was Awesome
D uring the months that followed, it became routine. Everyday people, some with young children, were getting annihilated for tweeting some badly worded joke to their hundred or so followers. Iâd meet them in restaurants and airport cafésâspectral figures wandering the earth like the living dead in the business wear of their former lives. It was happening with such regularity that it didnât even seem coincidental that one of them, Justine Sacco, had been working in the same office building as Michael Moynihan until three weeks earlier when, passing through Heathrow Airport, she wrote a tweet that came out badly.
â
It was December 20, 2013. For the previous two days sheâd been tweeting little acerbic jokes to her 170 followers about her holiday travels. She was like a social media Sally Bowles, decadent and flighty and unaware that serious politics were looming. There was her joke about the German man on the plane from New York:
âWeird German Dude: Youâre in first class. Itâs 2014. Get some deodorant.âInner monolog as I inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.â
Then the layover at Heathrow:
âChiliâcucumber sandwichesâbad teeth. Back in London!â
Then the final leg:
âGoing to Africa. Hope I donât get AIDS. Just kidding. Iâm white!â
She chuckled to herself, pressed send, and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter.
âI got nothing,â she told me. âNo replies.â
I imagined her feeling a bit deflated about thisâthat sad feeling when nobody congratulates you for being funny, that black silence when the Internet doesnât talk back. She boarded the plane. It was an eleven-hour flight. She slept. When the plane landed, she turned on her phone. Straightaway there was a text from someone she hadnât spoken to since high school:
âIâm so sorry to see whatâs happening.â
She looked at it, baffled.
âAnd then my phone started to explode,â she said.
â
We were having this conversation three weeks later atâher choice of locationâthe Cookshop restaurant in New York City. It was the very same restaurant where Michael had recounted to me the tale of Jonahâs destruction. It was becoming for me the Restaurant of Stories of Obliterated Lives. But it was only a half coincidence. It was close to the building where they both worked. Michael had been offered a job at
The Daily Beast
as a result of his great Jonah scoop, and Justine had an office upstairs, running the PR department for the magazineâs publisher, IACâwhich also owned Vimeo and OkCupid and Match.com. The reason why she wanted to meet me here, and why she was wearing her expensive-looking work clothes, was that at six p.m. she was due in there to clean out her desk.
As she sat on the runway at Cape Town Airport, a second text popped up:
âYou need to call me immediately.â
It was from her best friend, Hannah.
âYouâre the number one worldwide trend on Twitter right
Melissa de La Cruz
Miles Burton
Simon R. Green
Mina Carter, J.William Mitchell
Eve Vaughn
John Mantooth
Anne N. Reisser
C.J. Busby
Yolanda Wallace
Lori Wilde