This Literary Journal Just Welcomed the CIA to Twitter in the Best Possible Way

Impact

On Friday afternoon, America's top spy agency announced its arrival on Twitter with this pithy tweet:

The Glomar Explorer, as WNYC’s Radiolab explains, was built by the CIA with help from Howard Hughes for the six year (1968-1974) Project Azorian. Project Azorian was a secret, ambitious endeavor to salvage and examine a Soviet Golf-II class submarine — and its three one-megaton nuclear missiles — which had sunk  to the bottom of the ocean floor 1,560 miles northwest of Hawaii. As Project Azorian developed, Seymour Hersh sniffed a story, but the CIA successfully convinced The New York Times to suppress publication

Funny tweets, one of the best ways to get people's attention on the increasingly busy social Web (see: this story you're reading right now), are a content monkey's best friend. Naturally, every digital journalist with a pulse raced to get a story up about this hilarious tweet and how hilarious it is. Awl proprieter Choire Sicha summed up the digital gold rush nicely (and yes, in a tweet):

Gawker's Adam Weinstein had the fastest and most on-the-nose response to this kneejerk fawning, but it's actually the New York Review of Books — a publication not necessarily known for it's Internet savvy — that laid out the perfect welcome for the Central Intelligence Agency: 

Each tweet links to a New York Review of Books article entitled "U.S. Torture: Voices From the Black Sites", a lengthy review of the International Red Cross's 2009 Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody.