Earlier today, All Takes Matter co-host Jason Whitlock sent a tweet that was genuinely mystifying:
The mystery here isn’t why Whitlock would choose to call attention to an excerpt from an article he wrote back in May. The question that needs to be answered is: How the fuck did Jason Whitlock create that image?
The easiest way to share an excerpt from an article on Twitter is to take a screenshot of the desired passage and then attach it to your tweet. Whitlock seems to have taken another route, which involved him copying the relevant text from his WSJ article, pasting it into an email under the subject line “Test,” sending the email to himself, and then taking a screenshot of that email. But there is yet another mystery to be solved here: How did he manage to make the damn image crooked?
A theory: Whitlock carried out this task on his phone rather than a computer, and the end of his process involved a failed attempt at cropping the image. The iPhone’s image editing software provides cropping capabilities as well as the option to rotate images to varying degrees, and it is conceivable that a clumsy person could accidentally rotate a picture while cropping it. To test this theory, I tried to recreate Whitlock’s image on my own phone:
Of course, there’s no way to know for sure if this is what really happened, which is why I have reached out to Whitlock to ask if he can provide any clarity on the creation of his screenshot and the subsequent tweet. If he replies, I will update this post.