How a Tweet Turned My Life Upside Down

Just when life couldn't get any stupider

First I want to apologize for not substacking for a while. I discovered Lucky Dog Sake juice boxes and it all just went to hell from there.

Secondly, I want to tell you a frightening story about this thing that happened to me on Twitter.

I’ll start with a backstory. I love travel writing. It may be my favorite kind of writing. I used to be a contributing editor to Travel as well as Leisure magazine and that was one of the most enjoyable decades of my life. Currently I write for a nice publication called Conde Nast Traveller. Or “The Nasty” as I like to call it.

A year ago I was asked to do a piece on dining in Mexico City. I love city dining pieces because I eat and drink a lot (I stay thin because of a special drug I take). So I ate my way stupid through CDMX, hung out with amazing writers and chefs and wrote it up for The Nasty. So far so good. The article came out later, it was quite a lavish and beautifully photographed spread, and people seemed to like it. Everything was copacetic.

Then a few days ago, I woke up to this tweet.

The poster was a former Mexico City bureau chief for an important fancy newspaper, the New York Times. And she was enjoying her cleverness in posting out an obvious error about Mexico City being in Central instead of North America. Huh, I thought. That’s weird. I would certainly have not made that mistake. In fact, in the article I called Mexico City “one of the two or three quintessential food scenes in North America.”

But that was only the beginning. My twitter feed soon brimmed with people assaulting me verbally in English, Spanish, Pig Latin, ancient Aramaic, what have you. “Look at you, you stupid American idiot, how do you not know your geography?” was the gist of these messages.

Now I’ve been attacked by neo-Nazis like Anne Coulter and Russian trolls on Twitter, and I never respond to these jackasses. But this time something snapped. I began to respond to all of them. I told them the truth that writer’s don’t choose the headlines to their pieces, that I would never make such a mistake.

But at night I began to dream that I HAD made the mistake. Or at least failed to correct it. When we came to America we were poor refugees from the Soviet Union (Refu-Jews, they called us) and my parents did this act where they would sing Yiddish songs at the local synagogue and I would be quizzed on world capitals, and I almost never got them wrong. I was the Geography Genius. There was no way I could make a mistake like that.

But the insulting emails kept coming. I doubled my dosage of sake juice boxes and hit the marijuana hard. Extra sessions were booked with my shrink. I began to doubt the nature of reality. What if CMDX HAD slid into Central America somehow. I looked at the printed version of the article; certainly, it was firmly in North America there.

Finally, I was told what happened. Someone on the UK staff of The Nasty had put the article up on their site and made the cringy geographical error. Well, that made more sense. British people may have less of an idea about how the continents lock into one another over here in the Western Hemisphere.

A final note: when I responded to people yelling at me on Twitter, and pointed out that I had nothing to do with the mistake, no one apologized. I guess it’s the nature of the beast. I rarely attack people on Twitter except for those who deserve it — Putin, the Musk Ox, etc. — but now I will be extra careful. You never know when a clever tweet will rip some poor schmuck’s life asunder.