Jorge Luis Borges' short story "The Garden of Forking Paths" centers around a novel in which, unlike traditional fiction where a character's decision at one point in time forecloses other choices, instead all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously.
Corporate strategist Eric Garland's recent epic twitter thread on the intertwining geopolitical and national events that have led us to the current political crisis has something of a Borgesian quality.
Garland’s long narrative had the effect of a Rorschach test when it was posted on December 11. A representative positive reaction came from Washington Post investigative reporter David Farenthold, who has reported extensively on Trump foundation misdeeds. Farenthold tweeted "Damn, man, this is great writing, using a form that does not lend itself to greatness." Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, who has chronicled Trump’s history of business failures, lies, and possible cognitive disorder called Garland’s thread a "MUST read." On the other end of the spectrum, London writer and self-described "PhD candidate in applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge," writing in Slate called it, with apparently no ironic intent, the "worst piece of political writing in human history." Garland’s tweetstorm even roused the ire of Gizmodo editor Alana Hope Levinson, although not for its content, but for its format, which she seemed to argue suited a blog better than Twitter. Tellingly, Levinson designated Garland’s content, which was arguably something like "the geopolitical origins of the Trump phenomenon" as "not important." (We should perhaps note that Levinson has fewer than 10% the Twitter followers Garland has.)