The Revolutionary Classics Scholar Who’s Using Twitter To Advance Knowledge

Emily Wilson’s presence on Twitter is quietly revolutionary, a new kind of experience for readers, poets, translators, and really anyone who likes to watch knowledge take shape in an open format, its seams exposed. Like-minded people sharing their obsessions were the soil in which the larger Internet once grew; those transactions, commercialized and monetized, remade the world, with infinite ramifications downstream, some miraculous, some horrible. But the process of writing—what my kids, when they used to see me at my computer, called “choosing words”—has been mostly non-transactional, contained within the silos of individual imaginations or small communities, like M.F.A. workshops.