When I Get the Shiver

I knew Ta-Nehisi Coates was going to be big when he was still an under-employed freelancer, writing on his own blog, just starting to garner some attention through links and short excerpts on higher profile blogs, in particular Andrew Sullivan’s blog (maybe at The Atlantic by that point?). There was a distinctiveness and electricity to Coates’s writing that jumped out at me (and others, obviously). “He’s going to be important,” I remember saying to a friend.