Meet @MayorEmanuel: The Atlantic Outs "Mayor" Creator
By Karl Klockars in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 28, 2011 8:00PM
Whether you wanted to know who the brilliant mind behind the MayorEmanuel twitter feed was or not, now we know, thanks to the Atlantic. And that man is none other former Punk Planet-er, creator of CellStories and the Chicago Mayoral Scorecard, and Columbia College journalism teacher, Dan Sinker. As the Atlantic puts it, Sinker "has a heart made out of Chicago and balls of punk rock." Hard to dispute.
And he's a hell of a secret-keeper, too.
Sinker managed to preside over @MayorEmanuel without ever getting caught. Or at least outed. His secret was known only by his wife, a small circle of friends, and one Chicago Public Schools teacher, Seth Lavin, who figured out Sinker's identity when Sinker used his personal bit.ly account to shorten a link that @MayorEmanuel later tweeted. Lavin kept it mum. Others came close to identifying him, Sinker said. An intern at the Wall Street Journal was onto him early, as was a reporter at Crain's Chicago Business. But no one could muster any proof.
Until now. From Sinker's own site,
As I write this, The Atlantic has just released a story revealing that I was in fact @MayorEmanuel, the profane parody Twitter account that shadowed the Real Rahm Emanuel's campaign for Mayor of Chicago before descending into a Time Vortex the night after the election...Thanks to the many thousands of you that made this so much fucking fun.
Fucking fun, it was. The @MayorEmanuel saga was nothing less than true performance art as well as a redefinition of how narrative and social media could merge, and we're sad to see it go. Doubly sad as now that Sinker's been outed, the prospect of MayorEmanuel's return from the time vortex during the next election cycle is grim. But at least we can now collectively salute the man behind the rampant profanity, and say thank you for providing at least one mayoral candidate who told it like it really is.
Let us know if you get any calls from City Hall, Dan. And you can look forward to people calling you "Mr. Mayor" for a long time to come.