A reader writes:
After a whole day of reading the Dish blog about itself, I'm starting to see Christine O'Donnell's point about masturbation.
Another writes:
First, happy 10 years. Second, thanks for the toast/roast event, which has led me to some blogs and bloggers that I never have clicked on before, opening my mind up to some other voices. Which is, in some way, the whole point of the Blogosphere, yes?
Another:
While many think of a blog as a wholly new medium, others compare it to a sort of magazine. I think it is in many ways it is actually a fusion of newspaper, magazine, and TV channel. The latter is in part due to your ability to show video, but it has more to do with how your posts or "segments," if you will, roll out through the day. I can follow the Dish during the day in much the same way I would if I left my favorite channel running in the background while I do my work or chores or cooking. Your posts come to me in time such that there can be a flowing continuity of information, covering many threads, some of which I allow to interrupt my day while I explore them there in the moment.
Except the Dish is better than a TV channel. I don't have to find the segments when they air at a scheduled time, because they are presented in a column style interactive newspaper format. I can catch up on them later and scan in much the way I do a newspaper to see what I've missed that interests me. This exposes me to more topics than I would otherwise take interest in.
And I follow the Dish's conversations over time, and through endless chains of links out into the rest of the world. I'm automatically linked into deeper or different information. Neither magazines nor TV provide that very well. Linking is like the bibliography of the web, and with the web I finally find a bibliography practical and functional in my everyday life.
Another:
I tried to write something profound to mark your 10th anniversary. Although I disagree with you regularly, you have posted a few of my emails and are my favorite blog. Out of all this material, however, the one thing I keep coming back to is your definition of the word “hubris” (= the smell of one's own farts). So I hope you take this as a compliment: I can’t fart without thinking of you.
Another:
It's very odd to wax sentimental about someone I've never actually met, but I'll give it a go.
The most wonderful thing about your blog - by far - is that you just don't give a fuck what other people think. That's exactly how I describe you to friends. When you write something, it's because you believe it. You take on issues and causes that many others refuse to touch (Zionism, male circumcision, pot legalization).
And, even more extraordinarily, you actually post dissenting views and admit when you're wrong. As one of your readers, I feel like the only audience to whom you feel accountable is us. That's probably a bit naive, but I don't think I'm too far off. In a media environment filled with condescension, propaganda, and obfuscation, you actually respect your readers.
In another life, you were the high school teacher that students kept in touch with and asked for advice long after entering adulthood.
Another:
Congratulations on your first decade. Thought you might like to know that I've learned a lot from your work (and the work of your team) about blogging as a medium - what it can do to text and literacy itself - which has helped me become a better English teacher. My students agree: blogging is a cool way to improve one's writing. Many of the tricks I now use to communicate with them, analyze their work, and model my own thinking and writing for them, I picked up from the Dish. Betcha didn't know your work can shape high school pedagogy!
Another:
I'm a college student, and when my communications teacher asked me my primary source of news online, I said the Dish. My teacher seemed a bit surprised, expecting me to say something along the lines of Twitter or HuffPo. But the truth is that anyone can get the story when it's breaking, it takes a true master of journalism to comment only when more context is apparent.
Another:
I'm a medical student and I've dicked away an ungodly number of hours reading your blog in the library rather than studying. I'm happy that I have though, because it's often served as a small window outside of the tiny bubble that this type of specialized schooling can create.
Another:
I started reading you sometime in 2001, before 9/11, when I was a just out-of-college English major laboring away as a reporter for a weekly newspaper. In the near decade since, I've gone through a tremendous number of changes and moves, have seen my entire worldview flipped over several times, and yet somehow the Daily Dish has been with me constantly, whether I was up late at night reading your blog here on the East Coast of the United States or checking in from Africa as a way of staying in touch with "home."
Another:
I'm a Washingtonian, but have lived in Paris for almost the entire time you have been blogging. The Daily Dish is like a daily letter from home (and it makes me a bit homesick, but in a good way). Good luck with getting your green card. I hope our government understands that America has been a great beneficiary of your work.
Another:
You are America's greatest public intellectual, and you're not even an American. (Well, actually, you are. We're just waiting for the paperwork.)
Another:
I want to thank you, actually, for writing The Conservative Soul more than anything else. In school I was very much the party-line College Republican kid, as unthinking in my positions as I claimed my liberal friends were. As I grew up and then joined the Army I started to really consider issues for the first time, foremost among them the effects of my own limited knowledge and experience. And as this veneer of certainty completely melted and so much of my intellectual life changed, it took reading The Conservative Soul to figure out what exactly had happened to me and why and, most importantly, that there was a tradition and philosophy behind what I had come to believe.
All of this led me back to the Dish, which I had read years before in sporadic bursts but have now consumed daily for over two years, including a truly interminable deployment.
Another:
So glad to see you've made it ten years! I've been a reader for some time, but never written. But I wanted to tell you that I really appreciate in particular your columns about your faith, and your ability to document it for us. Reading a writer who is able to do this as it happens rather than addressing his audience with didactic statements designed to present his religious thought as being fully formed, in spite of new information or events, is a rarity. That's really helped me, and I'm sure many others, as we've sorted through the Christianity of our parents and grandparents this past decade, which has many times felt like a similar process.
Another:
The word that comes to mind for the Dish is "catholic," in the best sense of the word: "including a wide variety of things; all-embracing". If the "c" were capitalized, I'm afraid that would categorize, separate and exclude. Many thanks and best wishes for another 10.
Another:
So many of the subjects that you return to over and over have fascinated and informed
me like no other blog or person. As a fellow Catholic struggling with the horror the Church has perpetrated, I cannot tell you how much your posts have meant to me.
And of course, your fondness for beagles speaks to me! I KNOW, one day, my faithful beagle is going to appear in your blog.
Another:
Those reader stories you post (on abortion, cannabis, recession situations, etc) are my favorite feature. Incidentally, I have completely switched my position on gay marriage over the last few years (I was raised by evangelical Christian missionaries, so I had some baggage) and I give your blog most of the credit for that. So thanks also for showing me the light. Rock on.
Another:
I will admit, I will scroll through some of the posts because I just can’t absorb it all. I’m amazed at the pace and, perversely, at my own impatience on the very rare occasions when I hit “refresh” and nothing new pops up. I don’t know how you do it. But I am grateful that you do. The View from Your Window is such an apt metaphor for your blog. So many views, so many windows.
Another:
I'm probably too late to contribute, but I wanted to at least drop a brief line on the Dish's anniversary. The first I heard of your work was that "he's the guy who pushed the Bell Curve." My skin immediately crawled, and surprisingly, still does after typing that (I will go no further, as it is unnecessary after the Dish's comprehensive "Race and Intelligence, Again" thread). So I read your work with a sneer, to be quite honest. And leading up to the Iraq War 2.0, I found my general dismissiveness toward you to be completely warranted.
Then, a funny thing happened. I found myself cocooned circa 2004, the loudest voices on the left making me often question how I was on "the blue team" at all. And there was the Dish, standing out as a voice unafraid to express something less than certainty; a malleable ball, changing not with the wind, but with the weather. All done by ... Andrew Sullivan?
Oh, fuck. Strange bedfellows, indeed. So I read. Then kept reading. Now the Dish has become ingrained in my daily routine so much that it's nearly a sensory enjoyment, like the smell of coffee each morning. You mentioned how readers just call you "Andrew," and I find myself doing the same thing, although we've never met. You've posted a few things I've written to you before (the first was about Buddhism, I think), and responded to an e-mail or two. That's been the extent of our interaction. But now that I'm a jaded, divorced, calloused person, you (and by extension, Patrick, Chris, Conor and Zoe) are as long-running a non-familial relationship as I've had.
I don't know what else to say but "thanks."
Another:
One of my happiest moments on the Internet came when I sent you a link to an article I had stumbled upon, and Chris responded with "thanks! will post." It made me feel like I had contributed in a small way to a truly worthwhile endeavor. Thanks for all you do.
Another:
What I really like about your blog is the detail, the specificity that displays a real singular consciousness (in interaction with other consciousnesses, Patrick, et al.) You, a few work colleagues, and my family are the only people with whom I communicate virtually (in both senses) every single day. Keep up the good work, try to cut out the bad, just like we're all doing in our lives, because in the end the Dish is in its way a life, a living thing. It must be nurtured, it lives in community, it has birthed (or at least inspired) other blogs in this great electronic network of minds and ideas.
And a large part of its beauty is that one day, it will die. I think that this ephemeral nature is one of the things that truly makes the blogosphere free, and separates it from all the news media that has come before. The New York Times (theoretically) can go on forever, but the Dish dies when you stop.
-- C.B.