      This means that Twitter, officially a microblogging
platform, in practice has often functioned in a way opposite to
the blog. Of course a tweet is just a tweet, not to be made too
much of. Even so, La Rochefoucauld, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker,
Cyril Connolly, the Kafka of The Blue Octavo Notebooks,
Cioran — they would have been excellent tweeters, and the best
tweets, today, rival their greatest one-liners. (In fact to
encounter their sententiae parcelled out as tweets would have
made for a better experience than reading The Unquiet Grave or
The Trouble with Being Born straight through. Aphorisms are
ideally consumed like nuts or candies, a handful at a time.) So
Twitter doesn’t only have the widely recognized usefulness of
providing updates on news and revolution, and illuminating
links, and many laughs and smirks. It has also brought about a
surprising revival of the epigrammatic impulse in a literary
culture that otherwise values the merely personal and the super-
colloquial as badges of authenticity