Villains become heroes when they can amuse you in 140 characters.
Via: Don Ryan / AP
Metta World Peace, the former Ron Artest, is joining the New York Knicks, and Knicks fans have reacted with widespread excitement to his arrival. More broadly, there is a general sense of anticipation around the idea of one of the NBA's oddest characters joining one of its most soap-operatic teams. World Peace became infamous for running into the stands during a 2004 game at Detroit's Palace Of Auburn Hills to attack a fan who he thought had thrown a beer at him (he had the wrong guy, it turned out), but today he is treated as a kind of harmless, soulful goof. If there's one word that would describe his reputation these days, it's "zany." Or, as this piece put it, "wacky." At worst, he's tough:
Whither his reputation as a menace? It's disappeared under a pile of zany, wacky tweets and videos. World Peace has rehabilitated himself with social media. His stream-of-consciousness account has 735,000 followers and is a staple of best-of-Twitter compilations.