Susan Orlean was the one member of the New Yorker staff to respond publicly to my account of my career there. She and I have never met. She launched a series of twit-for-twat responses that ranged from respectful disagreement (“Contrary to @danielsbaum, I don't think The Nw Yrker is a creepy place nor "strained") to borderline personally nasty (“Dissing your boss? Whining abt story credits? Writing stories that aren't good enough to run? Seeming to dislike the mag itself? Hmmm.”)

Media watchers loved this. “New Yorkerers in Scandalous Twitter Brawl!” wrote Gawker, and tweeters spread the word. “Twitter has turned the New Yorker, a mag so private it has no masthead, into a full-blown slap-fight: @susanorlean and @danielsbaum!” “This is awesome. Tweet war between New Yorker writer @susanorlean and fired writer @danielsbaum! Getting popcorn..”

Even Ms. Orlean seemed to think that she and I were locked in battle. “Time to cook dinner & leave the journalistic hair-pulling nude wrestling match, much as I have enjoyed it (especially the nude part),” she wrote. And later, “So exhausted by the @danielsbaum smackdown that I can hardly think.”

Memo to Ms. Orlean and everybody else: There was no smackdown, to say nothing of a hair-pulling nude wrestling match. I told my story, you commented upon it. Near as I can tell, that’s all that happened.

But that wasn’t the worst....