Most Chronically Online: Brady Connolly
We’re waiting for our drinks at the Dunkin’ Donuts on John F. Kennedy Street when Brady M. Connolly ’25 beckons me over to the mobile orders shelf, which he often studies as he waits. “It’s like an ethnography of Harvard,” he says, though at present only one drink stands on the hot-pink rack: a large iced espresso-shot, vanilla-shot coffee. He points to it and shakes his head. “Too much.”
Brady may be one of the University’s leading ethnographers. From rowers and tourists to Insomnia Cookies and Amorino Gelato, no person or corporation in the Harvard area is below his scrutiny on X — though Brady prefers the classic “Twitter” — where he is a prolific poster.
Brady, a Crimson Arts editor and “45-minutes-outside-of-Boston” native, wasn’t always a campus culture critic. His first Twitter account was a Boston Bruins fan page when he was 11, which he quickly abandoned.
“I probably tweeted twice, and then I gave up on Twitter forever,” he says.
But in his junior year of high school, Brady had a change of heart. “What happened between 11 and 17 — when I joined — was being gay,” he says.
At the time, Brady adds, he was a bit “flamboyant and annoying when it comes to pop stars,” often tweeting about Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus. But in retrospect, his posts were “not very much in my own voice.”
That changed when he got to Harvard. Brady enrolled in Math 1b: “Calculus, Series, and Differential Equations,” an experience he describes as “traumatic” and a “trial by fire.” Brady remembers complaining so vehemently about his three-page problem sets on Twitter that his roommate checked in on him. That’s when he decided he needed to change his approach to the app.
“I am not going to take to Twitter in my darkest moments. I will take to Twitter in my angriest moments,” he recalls thinking. “I will take to Twitter when I’ve really been wrongly used by the systems that be in Cambridge.”
Brady says his “number one example” of that and “proudest moment” was the Queen’s Head Pub trivia debacle. In his sophomore year, Brady and his friends went to the now-closed student-run bar for trivia night on three separate occasions, but every time the manager told them that there would be no trivia. Brady then decided to take matters into his own hands.
“‘You need to get your trivia under control. This is ridiculous. Me and my friends have been wrongly used, like I am angry, #clownshead,’” he recalls tweeting.
Brady pauses and looks me straight in the eye. “#Clownshead takes off in ways I can’t even imagine,” he says. “When you’re rocking with six likes on Twitter, you have tapped into the zeitgeist in a way that other people haven’t.”
The #clownshead drama unfolded over a year. Brady took to Twitter to mock their Canva poster for advertising a nonexistent trivia night, and he included the Queen’s Head on his list of Cambridge’s top ten biggest scams for The Crimson. “And so it really becomes like a grassroots movement,” he says.
It was only while sitting on a bus in Dublin, during his junior spring abroad, that he learned the Queen’s Head was closing. He compares receiving the news to “that moment at the end of ‘Oppenheimer,’ where Oppenheimer is like, ‘What have I done? What have I done?’”
“It was a horrible power,” he adds.
A spokesperson for the College declined to comment.
While Brady acknowledges that his pettiness has increased since joining Twitter, he also says he has learned to check himself thanks to the help of his family and friends. “I think I’ve taken that advice,” he says. “I think I unlearn that advice as soon as I take it, but it's something that has been said to me.”
In fact, Brady passionately defends Twitter outbursts writ large, saying it’s what makes Twitter “our most democratic platform.”
“There is nothing, nothing more beautiful than being online,” he says. “If you have a complaint, you can shout it into the void.”
Ultimately, Brady thinks of himself as an “equal opportunist” in regards to his Twitter takes — he is just as willing to commend as he is to criticize, often praising female pop stars’ latest albums or defending them in the face of public criticism.
“It is a record of the way that I have been here for these girls when no one else has been,” he says.
But Twitter also offers Brady an opportunity to engage in pop culture in an intellectual way. “There’s an element of it that’s an interest in our generation’s humor, our generation’s culture, our generation’s stars, our generation’s media landscape,” he says.
This conversation, combined with the app’s unseriousness, makes Twitter Brady’s favorite platform. “Talking about celebrities is not talking about world peace. Like there’s a silliness to it, there’s a lightness to it,” he says. “Everything is tinged with a little bit of sarcasm or snark or a winking.”
Brady takes pride in honing his humor and writing skills on Twitter, often mulling over drafts for an hour before posting. “As I came to college, I think there’s part of me that, in all seriousness, enjoys Twitter as an outlet for creative writing,” he says. “I’d like to think that my voice is evolving.”
At this point, that creative outlet is a way of life for Brady, and there is nothing that will stand in his way, including X owner Elon Musk’s right-wing politics. “I hope he doesn’t do horrible things, I really hope. And if I had my way, Twitter would be owned by the people. It would be a co-op,” he says.
But Brady knows from experience — a four-minute ban on his account resulting from a “tête-à-tête” with a Verizon representative he mistook for a bot — that he can’t live without the app. “I don’t know what I would do without my outlet. I need my 194 fans. I need them. I need them, and they need me,” he says.
“Without me, I think they’d probably be a little lost, all those bots,” Brady adds. “What are they gonna do? What are they gonna do without me?”
— Magazine Editor-at-Large Jade Lozada can be reached at jade.lozada@thecrimson.com.