A few minutes later, he was tweeting again to plug Mission: G-Rok, his new video game pitting an 11-year-old rapper against an evil boss named Smogorex.īut in the background, the attention economy had begun to react. Simmons had no idea his tweet held any special significance. Within hours, the hashtag would explode, mushrooming out through social media, captivating millions and ultimately raising intricate questions over why some causes catch fire and others don’t. He didn’t know it, but his tweet, sent at 9:11 am East Coast time, 2:11 pm in Nigeria, marked the beginning of a celebrity-driven cycle that would catapult #BringBackOurGirls from a distant campaign about a forgotten war to the very pinnacle of American cultural and political power.

The number he cited was inaccurate, but the hashtag was correct. His latest book, Success Through Stillness, published a month earlier in March 2014, advocated silence as the place “from which all creativity springs.” But Simmons’ recent obsession with mindfulness had not stopped him developing an addiction to what had become the most cacophonous corner of the internet. The man who founded the boom-bap hit machine Def Jam Records in a cramped Manhattan dorm room and made it one of the world’s top record labels, with a roster that included Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys, was now an evangelist for what he called “operating from a quiet place,” practicing transcendental meditation or yoga for hours daily. Barts, peacefully unaware that he was about to provoke a tidal wave. Russell Simmons was finishing his morning yoga routine on a yacht floating in the turquoise Caribbean waters off St. This excerpt tells the story of a similar incident in 2014. On Friday, hundreds of schoolgirls were kidnapped from their school in Nigeria. This story is adapted from Bring Back Our Girls, by Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw.

Bring Back Our Girls by Joe Parkinson