Lionel Shriver in Harper’s Magazine:
I have a new fear. And this one’s a doozy.
I write a fortnightly column for the British barely right-of-center magazine (that’s left-of-center, in the United States) The Spectator. Having weathered more than one social-media shit storm, I’m one column away from the round of mob opprobrium that sinks my career for good. As Roseanne Barr and Megyn Kelly can testify, it doesn’t take a thousand words, either. A single unacceptable sentiment, a word usage misconstrued, a sentence taken out of context suffices these days to implode a reputation decades in the making and to trigger McCarthyite blacklisting. When I’ve floated this anxiety past the odd friend and colleague, their universal response has been a sorrowful shake of the head. Repeatedly I hear, “You’re exactly the sort of person this happens to.”
But that isn’t the fear in its entirety.
More here.