Hashing Things Out

You never know what story will draw you in. Could be Israel, could be health care, could be “Entourage.” Or it could be #freeskip.

For some lizard-brained reason, the arrest on July 16 of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor, won’t let me go. The police reports haven’t been enough. The news accounts haven’t been enough. The White House intervention hasn’t been enough. The opinions of dozens of blogger-sages — including Gates himself, as well as writers like Christopher Hitchens and Stanley Fish who like to finish off a subject — haven’t been enough.

This has happened to me before, with O. J. and with episodes involving Hillary Clinton, so I knew what was up: I’d really never be satisfied. My attraction to the Gates-arrest narrative — with its potential for curiosity, surprise, indignation and pedantry on themes from race to police procedure to academia to the history of Boston — struck me as a craving induced by industrial design, like Southwestern egg rolls at Chili’s. Not until the whole of Gatesgate had been unpacked, as people said in graduate school (where, full disclosure, Gates was briefly my adviser), could I move on. Was anyone with me? Or did everyone else healthily revolve with the news cycle?

Enter #freeskip and hashtags. Hashtags are curious words and mashed-together phrases earmarked with a hash symbol (better known, perhaps, as the pound sign). Read the complete article Hashing Things Out.