Heroes Need Villains
Five years ago, I wrote a thread for Twitter about a young Saudi couple I knew: Loujain was a prominent women’s rights activist, Fahad was a famous comedian. They’d been grabbed off the street in other countries by Saudi state security and brought back to the Kingdom, where she was imprisoned and tortured, and he disappeared. I told their story and sent it to 800 followers. It blew up. By the end of the month the thread had gotten over 47 million impressions, Jamal Khashoggi’s editor (Karen Attiah—find her on Bluesky) had turned it into an op-ed at the Washington Post, and Adam Schiff had reached out to talk with me about how we might pressure the Saudis to release Loujain. What makes something go viral is often just the luck of a retweet, but a conversation with a veteran Times Mideast reporter resonated with me. He said he’d written lots of stories about Loujain over the years and none had gotten traction of my thread. But I didn't have to report the facts; I’d written a love st...