You Lie!

A writer gets under the skin of Julian Assange, and behind the masks we all create online.

- Mirren Gidda

AT THE END of May, the London Review of Books published Andrew O’Hagan’s excoriating takedown of the Daily Mail and its notorious editor, Paul Dacre. The headline read, “Who’s the real cunt?”—a reference to Dacre’s infamous foulmouthed tirades, directed at a long-suffering staff. Opponents of the right-wing tabloid exulted on Twitter, praising O’Hagan’s cutting prose. A week later, some of those same people turned on the writer for a BBC radio interview in which he advocated for internet regulated by “intelligent censors.”

They should have saved their characters: O’Hagan, a Scottish journalist and Booker Prize– nominated novelist, doesn’t use Twitter, which he says causes writers to “give their sentences away for free.” In fact, he’s barely a presence on social media.