What Do The Teens Know About This Tweet That We Don’t?

[Gary]

This happened a year ago, and I just happened on it. The current zeitgeist that includes Twitter is one thing, but when it's used to comment on the zeitgeist of another then it has a sort of meta- (to use the nomenclature of the day) quality, and is interesting from a literary POV at the very least. It doesn't explain the lasting impact of TGG by any means, but it does document the book's continuing effect—and it's affect too, I guess we might say.

On the evening of June 22, 21-year-old Karter Machen decided to tweet.

“I’m not a party guy,” he wrote, “but I’d be down if someone threw a real roaring 20’s party for 2020. Like real tuxedos and all. Not shirtless dudes with a bow tie. Like a real Gatsby party with everyone fully dressed like the era.”

Which, OK, sure. It’s a fairly benign tweet as far as tweets go, and it’s easy to imagine scrolling past it in your feed, puzzling for a moment over “shirtless dudes with a bow tie” and then immediately moving on with your life. Except, at the time of publication, this unexceptional tweet has been retweeted over 83,000 times and faved nearly 330,000 times.

I could not even begin to fathom why.

Full article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/teens-...