If you’re lucky, you know Alexandra Marshall and Dimitry Elias Léger from their bylines. The latter West Coast Sojourn Live guest authored the internationally-acclaimed 2015 novel God Loves Haiti and Alex Marshall is a widely-published journalist who writes the addictive serialized Substack memoir An American Who Fled Paris. Both guests are American expatriates.
I’m lucky enough to know this pair in real life. My most vivid experience of them, however, came through a remarkable email conversation thread called The Threadren. Upon returning to Los Angeles from New York in the early 2000s, that thread was my indispensable lifeline to raw East Coast intelligence.
As bright as Marshall and Léger are, our fellow Threadren were equally incandescent. Among us—then all in our mid-30s and younger—were future Disney Executive Editor Aliya King, The Source magazine editors Chris Wilder and RK Byers, future Time editor John Simons, event planner Naima Brown, eventual Random House Vice President Kierna Mayo, Adam Bradley, gaming critic and consultant N’gai Croal, Tab McDaniels, and Winston Williams.
Talk in these pre-social media conversations was an awesome combination of brutal honesty and absolute factuality. No one dared make an argument without facts backing them up. That the participants were Black—Marshall aside—intellectuals made The Threadren even more of a treasure.
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