Meet the man behind @NeinQuarterly and its 85K followers

Eric Jarosinski was a frustrated academic who found his (despairing, irreverent) voice on Twitter. Eighty-five thousand people are listening.

“Yes, I believe in happiness. The sad kind,” the former Penn professor tweeted recently.

He’s been the subject of a New Yorker piece and most recently, a Philadelphia Inquirer profile, both of which explain how, when his passion for academia soured, he turned to Twitter.

From the New Yorker piece:

Adopting the Twitter persona was “extremely liberating,” he said, because it helped him to remember what had attracted him to the Frankfurt School philosophers in the first place: their more literary works, especially their aphorisms.