How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

by Alan Jacobs

To invite people to political collaboration, or dismiss a political figure, with a single hashtag is, as Alice suggests, “a great deal to make one word mean,” and we might be tempted to say that it’s a temptation that social media, especially Twitter, with its 140-character-per-tweet limit, encourage. But in fact we do this kind of thing in conversation all the time—as long as we’re conversing with like-minded people, friends or colleagues or just acquaintances whom we’re confident know the same lingo we do and have the same attitude toward it. “Just another cuckservative” is the kind of thing that might be said to people sitting around a table at a restaurant; or “Come on, people, intersectionality.”