Blake Gopnik impersonator on Twitter

Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik emailed yesterday to say he was the victim of a drive-by Twitter post. Somebody’s impersonating him in the department of Tweet Tweet.
I saw the item about his Twitter post on MAN. Note Tyler Green’s question mark, which I ignored:

Look who’s Twittering?
Washington Post art critic Blake Gopnik? Here’s a sample — and one which manages to miss many points at once: “I, for one, won’t miss the Rose Art Museum. It was always a second-rate collection in a city full of first-rate art.”

I responded with this post, unfortunately titled, A Washington Post twit on Twitter, which includes:

A man who tosses off irresponsible one-liners but builds paragraphs into essays with the reliable if unexciting skill of a bricklayer is not best served by Twitter. All his worst faults are on view, his best suppressed.

Gopnik, who says the offending item was not by him, wrote me:

I thought you might like to know that I have never Twittered, and am not even signed onto the service as a user. Someone is impersonating me. I am surprised that you didn’t suspect such a thing. The Twitterer’s voice and opinions are clearly not mine, and many of the issues addressed are not ones that I have ever expressed an interest in. I am even more surprised that, as a professional journalist, you didn’t take the basic step of calling or emailing me to fact-check this.

He’s right. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to set him up. I should have spent a small fraction of that time checking it out before responding.