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" It&amp;#039;s a mystery that 41,147 people and counting have been dying to know: Who is Mayor Emanuel? Not Rahm, but rather, the fake Twitter account that was a screamingly funny, profane, and eventually poignant take on the outsized personality of the former White House Chief-of-Staff turned Chicago&amp;#039;s mayor-in-waiting, tweeting out about that day&amp;#039;s news in Chicago and the election as it happened. Even Emanuel himself has been asking around, going so far as to repeatedly offer a bounty (in the form of a charitable donation) for his or her identity. And a little over a week after actual Rahm Emanuel won his election, on Monday, The Atlantic solved it, and put truth to light: The scribe was Dan Sinker, the founder of infamous punk mag Punk Planet and a professor of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago. ESQUIRE: So: You&amp;#039;re kinda famous, now. How&amp;#039;s that going? DAN SINKER: Uh, every fking TV station in town just showed up at my house. I&amp;#039;m going to have to call you back. [The next day.] ESQ: How was that?  DS: They kept ringing the bell and knocking, and I answered, in a well-meaning way, because they didn&amp;#039;t mean harm, though they basically said: You can do this the easy way, or the hard way. It wasn&amp;#039;t pleasant, but it was what it was. ESQ: Yesterday, it was you and Charlie Sheen. Burning up the Internet. DS: Yeah. Neither of which should have made the news. But one of the truly incredible things of yesterday was that Punk Planet was actually a trending topic on Twitter! ESQ: We were excited for that, too. This would&amp;#039;ve been a great opportunity to re-launch Punk Planet! So: Why The Atlantic? We contacted you, everyone contacted you, they all wanted to know who you were!  DS: You know what? Honestly, I wouldn&amp;#039;t have thought of The Atlantic. Alexis Madrigal, who wrote the story, &amp;quot;@&amp;quot; replied MayorEmanuel the day before the end of the account, and as with every other media person who asked for an interview over the months, @MayorEmanuel told him to fk off, and he wrote back with a pretty funny reply, and then included his e-mail address. I thought about it for a while. I knew that I really needed the hunt for me to be over, and so I set up an anonymous e-mail account and started fking with him for a day basically. ESQ: You have to post those e-mails.  DS: I think they&amp;#039;re between me and Alexis. The subject line just said &amp;quot;Okay, Asshole&amp;quot; and it went from there. ESQ: Still, for a tech journalist, that&amp;#039;s kind of a Powerball number. Again: Why not us?! DS: You guys hit too early. But you were one of the few media organizations that @MayorEmanuel did not tell to fk off. ESQ: Speaking of which, there was one instance in which MayorEmanuel told extreme conservative commentator Michelle Malkin what to do with herself after she admitted enjoying you. How&amp;#039;d that feel? DS: It grew out of the fact that about a week before the end of the account, the Democratic Wisconsin senators fled Wisconsin, fled to stymie the passage of a really horrendous piece of legislation, and MayorEmanuel went and partied with them in Rockford, at a water park in Rockford. That was really written in awe of what those guys did. That&amp;#039;s pretty ballsy. That night of stories got picked up by a lot of conservative Twitter people and some conservative press, and they thought it was being written for them, which made me really uncomfortable, because it was like, Oh, god, can this really be this easily co-opted? But I just threw that one out there and then went to bed. That was a surreal moment.  ESQ: But you had to enjoy it, right?  DS: Oh, yeah. It was awesome. And people loved it. People absolutely loved it. ESQ: You&amp;#039;re meeting the actual Rahm Emanuel on Chicago Public Radio in the flesh tomorrow. Is that going to be anything but awkward? DS: I can&amp;#039;t imagine how it&amp;#039;s not awkward. This thing spiraled so far out of anyone&amp;#039;s control, mine or theirs, and when it ended, it got even crazier. ESQ: But you have pretty left-learning politics. Do you have anything to say to him?  DS: As is obvious to anyone that read beyond the profanity in the MayorEmanuel account, I love the city of Chicago. I&amp;#039;m sad at the state the city&amp;#039;s currently in, in terms of the public schools, in terms of the debt load it&amp;#039;s carrying, in terms of many of the decisions that have been made lately, and I hope he can do it, turn things around. I hope Chicago can regain its footing and be as awesome as it is, so, will I tell him that? Yeah. I&amp;#039;d be happy to tell him that. But... You know what? A million people are telling him that. He has a lot of work to do, and I know this has become a bother for them, and that, to me, is a little too bad, because I&amp;#039;d rather they be figuring out how to ride a ship that&amp;#039;s going in the wrong direction.  ESQ: Have you learned anything about the man&amp;#039;s appeal since this all exploded? This is a guy who told famously told a room full of Obama staffers that people in D.C. were &amp;quot;fking retarded.&amp;quot; How is that not lovable, in so many ways? DS: He has this myth, his origin story \u2014 to borrow from comics \u2014 which is totally not what you would expect. He was a dancer. He went to Sarah Lawrence. He lost a finger working at Arby&amp;#039;s. What an amazing character. ESQ: And people became attached to yours, too. The ending was, well, large. Hysterical. A little heartbreaking. It all came to a swell, and then, it was finished. DS: That was very intentional. And it was sad. I was tearing up as I was writing it. Which is silly. I got to work everything in, every character, even the Honda Civic, the radio finally starts working because it hasn&amp;#039;t worked the whole time, then it starts playing this awful Journey song, but the lyrics in that Journey song are all about going somewhere else, and I even got to work an Empire Strikes Back reference in there. And the craziest thing: I had set up an ending, and I knew basically what was going to happen, though I never really knew exactly what details were gong to happen until I sat down to tweet these things. But I was having dinner with my wife and my son, and hail started falling, and I stood up from the table and I said, I have to go finish this right now. That&amp;#039;s why that final sequence starts with me being like, &amp;quot;and the sky opens up and ice starts falling,&amp;quot; because hail had just started coming down in Chicago. ESQ: Behind every good political campaign \u2014 like Rahm&amp;#039;s \u2014 is the family who puts up with it. How&amp;#039;s your house been dealing? DS: My wife is amazing. I met my wife during an exceptionally awful production of Punk Planet where we actually lost the entire issue to a crashed hard drive two days before it was supposed to come out. She&amp;#039;s been along for the ride for a very long time, and she&amp;#039;s just incredible. One night, when I was feeling a lot of pressure, and a little bit paranoid about everything, I turned to her and told her &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so sorry that we don&amp;#039;t lead a boring life.&amp;quot; She said: &amp;quot;Why in the world would I want to lead a boring life?&amp;quot;  ESQ: Could you have seen this ever becoming what it did? What&amp;#039;s next? DS: No! I wish I could be the guy that was like yes, it was planned this way all along: &amp;#039;Welcome to the new world of real-time literature.&amp;#039; The things I love have always been the shit that nobody planned. That&amp;#039;s part of what makes it wonderful. It comes from a sense of being genuine. What&amp;#039;s next? It&amp;#039;s really hard for me to say, because none of this was expected. If this was all a plot to do this, that would be awesome. I&amp;#039;m still just trying to figure out what happened, let alone what&amp;#039;s next.  [Follow @EsquireMag on Twitter. We won&amp;#039;t impersonate you.] "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a9496/fake-rahm-emanuel-twitter-5323163/>