Things I learned in 2016: Think twice before writing the words “has no reasonable chance of becoming president.” That’s part of a headline from Wired, where Brian Barrett writes:

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz is not going to be president. That much, at least, is clear, despite the outsize coverage of his apparent intentions to run. But in the three days—has it really only been that long?—since Schultz first announced that he was “seriously considering” a 2020 campaign, he has distinguished himself in another way entirely: as a Twitter pariah of unprecedented proportions.

My instinct here is that the “Schultz has no chance” stories — while not obviously untrue — are mostly an attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: By discouraging media coverage of the candidate (“outsize coverage”) that narrative helps to push the candidate into the margins. The argument that being a “Twitter pariah” is somehow disqualifying — o tempora! o mores! — of course serves to encourage artificial Twitter-mob politics by inflating their importance, and to flatter social-media mobs in general.

Also, a little language obsessiveness: Barrett writes that Schultz and Twitter “have T-boned into each other.” I don’t think it’s possible for two things to T-bone into each other; the nature of T-bone collisions is that one thing crashes into the other at a perpendicular.