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Jian Ghomeshi was trending on Twitter again on Friday.

Do people and things trend there for happy reasons? Maybe, sometimes. This wasn’t such an occasion.

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Ghomeshi, the former CBC star who was charged with sexual assault and then acquitted, had dared to write, more than two years after he was found not guilty, an essay about his experience. The New York Review of Books had dared to publish it online and will publish it Sept. 27 in print.

Twitter was outraged; before the piece was even available online, before anyone could read it, the mob was denouncing it. People were enraged that a) he had been given such a platform; and b) that he had availed himself of it.

It reminded me of a line in The House of the Far and Lost, a short story by the American novelist Thomas Wolfe.

He was writing about a ruined family called the Coulsons. His character never knew what the source of their ruination was, he said, because no one would speak about it.