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• It Is Accomplished

  Posted:Fri, 26 Jun 2015 17:21:21 +0000

  

  As Gandhi never quite said,

  First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win.

  I remember one of the first TV debates I had on the then-strange question of civil marriage for gay couples. It was Crossfire, as I recall, and Gary Bauer’s response to my rather earnest argument after my TNR cover-story on the matter was laughter. “This is the loopiest idea ever to come down the pike,” he joked. “Why are we even discussing it?”

  Those were isolating  days. A young fellow named Evan Wolfson who had written a dissertation on the subject in 1983 got in touch, and the world immediately felt less lonely. Then a breakthrough in Hawaii, where the state supreme court ruled for marriage equality on gender equality grounds. No gay group had agreed to support the case, which was regarded at best as hopeless and at worst, a recipe for a massive backlash. A local straight attorney from the ACLU, Dan Foley, took it up instead, one of many straight men and women who helped make this happen. And when we won, and got our first fact on the ground, we indeed faced exactly that backlash and all the major gay rights groups refused to spend a dime on protecting the breakthrough … and we lost.

  In fact, we lost and lost and lost again. Much of the gay left was deeply suspicious of this conservative-sounding reform; two thirds of the country were opposed; the religious right saw in the issue a unique opportunity for political leverage – and over time, they put state constitutional amendments against marriage equality on the ballot in countless states, and won every time. Our allies deserted us. The Clintons embraced the Defense of Marriage Act, and their Justice Department declared that DOMA was in no way unconstitutional the morning some of us were testifying against it on Capitol Hill. For his part, president George W. Bush subsequently went even further and embraced the Federal Marriage Amendment to permanently ensure second-class citizenship for gay people in America. Those were dark, dark days.

  I recall all this now simply to rebut the entire line of being “on the right side of history.” History does not have such straight lines. Movements do not move relentlessly forward; progress comes and, just as swiftly, goes. For many years, it felt like one step forward, two steps back. History is a miasma of contingency, and courage, and conviction, and chance.

  But some things you know deep in your heart: that all human beings are made in the image of God; that their loves and lives are equally precious; that the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence has no meaning if it does not include the right to marry the person you love; and has no force if it denies that fundamental human freedom to a portion of its citizens. In the words of Hannah Arendt:

  “The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which ‘the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one’s skin or color or race’ are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs.”

  This core truth is what Justice Kennedy affirmed today, for the majority: that gay people are human. I wrote the following in 1996:

  Homosexuality, at its core, is about the emotional connection between two adult human beings. And what public institution is more central—more definitive—of that connection than marriage? The denial of marriage to gay people is therefore not a minor issue. It is the entire issue. It is the most profound statement our society can make that homosexual love is simply not as good as heterosexual love; that gay lives and commitments and hopes are simply worth less. It cuts gay people off not merely from civic respect, but from the rituals and history of their own families and friends. It erases them not merely as citizens, but as human beings.

  We are not disordered or sick or defective or evil – at least no more than our fellow humans in this vale of tears. We are born into family; we love; we marry; we take care of our children; we die. No civil institution is related to these deep human experiences more than civil marriage and the exclusion of gay people from this institution was a statement of our core inferiority not just as citizens but as human beings. It took courage to embrace this fact the way the Supreme Court did today. In that 1996 essay, I analogized to the slow end to the state bans on inter-racial marriage:

  The process of integration—like today’s process of “coming out”—introduced the minority to the majority, and humanized them. Slowly, white people came to look at interracial couples and see love rather than sex, stability rather than breakdown. And black people came to see interracial couples not as a threat to their identity, but as a symbol of their humanity behind the falsifying carapace of race.

  It could happen again. But it is not inevitable; and it won’t happen by itself. And, maybe sooner rather than later, the people who insist upon the centrality of gay marriage to every American’s equality will come to seem less marginal, or troublemaking, or “cultural,” or bent on ghettoizing themselves. They will seem merely like people who have been allowed to see the possibility of a larger human dignity and who cannot wait to achieve it.

  I think of the gay kids in the future who, when they figure out they are different, will never know the deep psychic wound my generation – and every one before mine – lived through: the pain of knowing they could never be fully part of their own family, never be fully a citizen of their own country. I think, more acutely, of the decades and centuries of human shame and darkness and waste and terror that defined gay people’s lives for so long. And I think of all those who supported this movement who never lived to see this day, who died in the ashes from which this phoenix of a movement emerged. This momentous achievement is their victory too – for marriage, as Kennedy argued, endures past death.

  I never believed this would happen in my lifetime when I wrote my first several TNR essays and then my book, Virtually Normal, and then the anthology and the hundreds and hundreds of talks and lectures and talk-shows and call-ins and blog-posts and articles in the 1990s and 2000s. I thought the book, at least, would be something I would have to leave behind me – secure in the knowledge that its arguments were, in fact, logically irrefutable, and would endure past my own death, at least somewhere. I never for a millisecond thought I would live to be married myself. Or that it would be possible for everyone, everyone in America.

  But it has come to pass. All of it. In one fell, final swoop.

  Know hope.

  

  

• The Years Of Writing Dangerously

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 20:00:45 +0000

  Thirteen years ago, as I was starting to experiment with this blogging thing, I wrote the following:

  [T]he speed with which an idea in your head reaches thousands of other people’s eyes has another deflating effect, this time in reverse: It ensures that you will occasionally blurt out things that are offensive, dumb, brilliant, or in tune with the way people actually think and speak in private. That means bloggers put themselves out there in far more ballsy fashion than many officially sanctioned pundits do, and they make fools of themselves more often, too. The only way to correct your mistakes or foolishness is in public, on the blog, in front of your readers. You are far more naked than when clothed in the protective garments of a media entity.

  But, somehow, you’re liberated as well as nude: blogging as a media form of streaking. I notice this when I write my blog, as opposed to when I write for the old media. I take less time, worry less about polish, and care less about the consequences on my blog. That makes for more honest writing. It may not be “serious” in the way, say, a 12-page review of 14th-century Bulgarian poetry in the New Republic is serious. But it’s serious inasmuch as it conveys real ideas and feelings in as unvarnished and honest a form as possible. I think journalism could do with more of that kind of seriousness. It’s democratic in the best sense of the word. It helps expose the wizard behind the media curtain.

  I stand by all those words. There are times when people take this or that post or sentence out of a blog and make it seem as if it is the definitive, fully considered position of the blogger. Or they take two sentences from different moments in time and insist that they are a contradiction. That, it seems to me, misses the essential part of blogging as a genuinely new mode of writing: its provisionality, its conversational essence, its essential errors, its ephemeral core, its nature as the mode in which writing comes as close as it can to speaking extemporaneously.

  Everything is true, so long as it is not taken to be anything more than it is. And I just want to ask that future readers understand this – so they do not mistake one form of writing for another, so they do not engage in an ignoratio elenchi. What I have written here should not be regarded as interchangeable with more considered columns or essays or reviews. Blogging is a different animal. It requires letting go; it demands writing something that you may soon revise or regret or be proud of. It’s more like a performance in a broadcast than a writer in a book or newspaper or magazine (which is why, of course, it can also be so exhausting). I have therefore made mistakes along the way that I may not have made in other, more considered forms of writing; I have hurt the feelings of some people I deeply care about; I have said some things I should never have said, as well as things that gain extra force because they were true in the very moment that they happened. All this is part of life – and blogging comes as close to simply living, with all its errors and joys, misunderstandings and emotions, as writing ever will.

  I tried, above all, to be honest. And you helped me. Being honest means writing things that will make you look foolish tomorrow; it means revealing yourself in ways that are not always flattering; it means occasionally saying things that prompt mass acclamation but in retrospect look like grandstanding. It means losing friends because you have a duty to criticize what they write. It means not pretending you believe something you don’t – like a tall story from a vice-presidential candidate or a war narrative that was increasingly obsolete. It means writing dangerously with the only assurance  – without an editor – that readers will correct you when you’re wrong and encourage you when you are right. It is a terrifying and exhilarating way to write – and also an emotionally, psychologically depleting one. But I loved it nonetheless. I relished it every day. I wouldn’t trade these years for any others.

  And I felt continually blessed to have such a readership and to be surrounded by such amazing people – Patrick and Chris (whose final genius was in creating that final Moments Of Dishness thread until 5 am this morning), Jessie, who wrote some of the first memos and went on, with Matt, to create a weekend section beyond compare, with Chas, our fixer of boundless energy and love, with Alice, our wonderful poetry editor, with Jonah, perhaps the most brilliant and ebullient natural blogger I’ve ever met, and with Zoe, our former frat-boy-girl, whose spirit never left us, and with all the interns who made this place what it became. This was their creation as well as mine, in the end. I grew to love all of them. That almost no one ever left, that Chris and Patrick and Jessie were here in 2007 and still here in 2015, says something about how close we became and how we all made something extremely hard look increasingly effortless.

  But it was effort nonetheless, as the exhaustion in our minds and bodies now proves. And it was the effort to keep honest that matters to me now. I hope that this fifteen-year catalog of insights and errors, new truths and old lies, prejudices and loves, jokes and intimacy, prescience and forgetfulness, will not be taken for anything more than it was, or ever could be. I hope we can all simply look back at the journey, and the laughs we had, and the pain we lived through together and the love that sustained us as a team and as a community, as we struggled together to figure out the truth about the world.

  And yes, this was a labor above all of love. Love for ideas and debate, love for America, love for my colleagues, and love, in the end, for you.

  I sit here not knowing what to write next. And yet, in the end, it is quite simple.

  Know hope.

  

  

• The Miracle Of Francis

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 19:30:03 +0000

  

  One sub-theme of the Dish has long been my passionate, tortured relationship with the Catholic Church. This decade and a half exposed the unspeakable child abuse epidemic in the church, leaving me utterly unmoored and gutted. My faith life during all these years sputtered, lingered, and at times opened onto a dry, bleak wasteland. I quit blogging (at least) once before in 2005 – but the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI ended my premature retirement. I knew Ratzinger’s work intimately, and had wrestled with it for years. I knew instantly that the church I loved would double down on its past, clamp down on any dissent, hide any scandal as well as it could, and risk becoming a narrower and tinier sect of purists. It pained me and enraged me as the church tried to blame its own foul abuse of children with gay priests. For a while, months at one point, I could not go to Mass. Just entering church filled me with an anger that has no place in such a refuge. I went into a spiritual wilderness. The hurt got the better of me.

  The Holy Spirit nonetheless guided me back. Even in those dark days, I couldn’t abandon the legacy of Jesus’ example or an institution that had gone through the darkest times itself and yet gone on to brighter and even triumphant days. I clung to hope, which is absolutely not the same as optimism. And it turned out I was right not to let go. The emergence of Pope Francis – the sheer miraculous grace of it – suddenly eclipsed the despair.

  You know what has happened since. I just wanted to add this coda to the narrative arc of the Dish years. It may not mean as much to you as to me – but Francis may well become a figure more important than merely Pope. That’s what I see and hope for, in any case. A little over a year ago, I sat down and wrote an essay about him that we ran on Deep Dish. It’s called “Untier Of Knots.” It was restricted to subscribers until last week – but it’s here if you’re interested. One quote in that essay from Francis means a lot to me. It is a lesson I learned writing this blog for so long – the letting go of arrogance, of utter certainty, and learning better the art of listening – to you, the readers, to other voices, and to the world. Here’s the passage:

  I would not speak about, not even for those who believe, an “absolute” truth, in the sense that absolute is something detached, something lacking any relationship. Now, the truth is a relationship! This is so true that each of us sees the truth and expresses it, starting from oneself: from one’s history and culture, from the situation in which one lives, etc. This does not mean that the truth is variable and subjective. It means that it is given to us only as a way and a life. Was it not Jesus himself who said: “I am the way, the truth, the life”? In other words, the truth is one with love, it requires humbleness and the willingness to be sought, listened to and expressed.

  The truth is a relationship. For so long, from your profound and sometimes hilarious emails about love and death, suicide and depression, eggcorns and female body hair, late-term abortion and the death of pets, bisexuality and cover songs, I learned to let go and let you guide me to the truths I had never seen or had pushed out of my line of vision or was simply too proud to acknowledge. The truth is a relationship. And we all grew in it together.

  Or as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing once put it:

  The true value of a man is not determined by his possession, supposed or real, of Truth, but rather by his sincere exertion to get to the Truth. It is not possession of the Truth, but rather the pursuit of Truth by which he extends his powers and in which his ever-growing perfectibility is to be found. Possession makes one passive, indifferent, proud.

  If God were to hold all Truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left only the steady and diligent drive for Truth, albeit with the proviso that I would always and forever err in the process, and to offer me the choice, I would with all humility take the left hand, and say: Father, I will take this – the pure Truth is for You alone.

  Amen.

  

  

• A Note To Our Readers, Ctd

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 18:30:42 +0000

  One of countless readers asks:

  OK, no more begging for site to continue, EXCEPT can you please leave the site up for those of us who want to go back to read past weekend posts? These don’t have an expiration date. My weekends are so busy that I often don’t get a chance to explore all the excellent reads. I could probably spend a year going back and reading so much of what I missed. Also, how will we know where to go next if you don’t leave the site up for us to explore the “Blog Love” list? And some of the “Threads” have great significance (suicide, abortion – these have touched lives in so many ways). I insist you leave the site up for at least a year. Please, please, please, tell us you will.

  Yes, we absolutely will. We’re determined to keep the site up in perpetuity for research and just memories. It’s like one huge encyclopedia of early 21st Century videos, arguments, quotes, poems, essays and so on. It will cost a little, but we will do what’s needed. The same with refunds. We’ll be in touch by email, but you can also contact us at support@andrewsullivan.com. In one last gesture of generosity, a few of you even offered to throw some money in a final tip-jar. So we set one up here, with the help of Tinypass. Drop us an email if you do; we are determined to reply to every one in due course. We’re floored and grateful.

  One last thing: If you’d like to find out what we end up doing in the future, just sign up for our mailing list here.

  

  

• As The World Turns

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 18:00:43 +0000

  Yesterday, this news broke:

  U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declined to offer his hopes for litigation seeking marriage rights for same-sex couples before the U.S. Supreme Court, but said he doesn’t expect House Republicans will weigh in on the issue. “I don’t expect that we’re going to weigh in on this,” Boehner said. “The court will make its decision and that’s why they’re there, to be the highest court in the land.”

  The core sign of the entrenchment of social change is that the opposition eventually accepts it or acquiesces to it. When I started campaigning for marriage equality in 1989, and through the 1990s and beyond, I wondered if we would ever see this in my lifetime. Most people thought it was absurd; even many gays thought it was counter-productive; many more thought it was reactionary. I’m not claiming any prescience. I just knew it was the right thing to do, and after I was told I might not live for that many more years, I figured I would spend the rest of my then-truncated life to give it my best shot. The inscription in Virtually Normal is dated to the day I found out I was positive. I wrote under the assumption that it would be the only book I would ever write.

  My best friend died of AIDS the week it came out. My last words to him were “You ruined my book tour.” Even with his mouth crammed with a ventilator, and life draining from him, a small smile creaked out of the side of his face. At least I want to believe so. Today, I just want to remember him – and so many others who died never knowing that such a triumph lay ahead, who never got to see it, and who live in my mind and soul right now.

  This struggle was for the future. It was for those yet born. It was for those who now take it for granted. But it was also because of what my now-absent friends taught me about endurance and love and dignity and relationships. Its victory is a sign and a proof that the deepest darkness can be turned to light. And that reason and love and argument and the truth will win … in the end.

  

  

• How To Read The Entire Internet

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 17:30:47 +0000

  by Patrick Appel

  

  “Send me five links a day” was the original job Andrew gave me. Now, in the more than seven years since then, I have almost certainly read more than a million blog posts. It is entirely possible, during that time, that I have read more posts than anyone else on the planet.

  Andrew liked to call interns his “leaf cutter ants” because they would go out into the blogosphere, locate Dish-worthy content, and send it to him for posting. When I began working for the Dish, discovering the most intelligent voices online was an exhausting but manageable task. Those five-link memos quickly swelled into 50-link ones. In those days, you could keep on top of the major online conversations by tracking a couple hundred blogs. Within a few years, I was tracking more than a thousand.

  As the velocity of the online conversation quickened, my system for digesting it had to become more sophisticated. But, no matter how efficient I got, the torrent was far too great for any one person. And, beyond reading, I needed to find time to write as many as 15 posts a day, schedule others’ drafts, manage the junior staff, edit the occasional Deep Dish piece, and run the business-side of the Dish. Given those realities, a primary project of mine these past years has been figuring out how to collectively read and curate the web.

  So I ditched my personal RSS account and set up a group account for the entire staff. The number of blogs we follow grew to over three thousand. I’d send interns batches of 40 or 50 links to evaluate. They would send me memos back. I’d rip apart and recombine those memos into a master memo we dubbed the “Frankenmemo.” After Jonah joined the Dish, we began reading the internet in shifts (Jessie and Matt constructed their own process for the weekend). Later, Chas and I dreamt up and built Dish Prep, our staff-only website that has served as a clearinghouse for identifying and assigning the stories you see published on the Dish. Our unofficial motto eventually became “we read internet so you don’t have to.”

  Though I’m hugely proud of the reading system we created, we never fully lived up to that slogan. The way we read, however impressive, is only a the barest outline of the vision in my head. The same is true of the Dish as a whole. We had the potential to become the place for intelligent conversation online. But Andrew, Chris, and I burned out before reaching that promised land. My exhaustion is nearly equal to Andrew’s own (reading a million blog posts will do that to you). And, to survive Andrew’s departure, the Dish would have needed years, not days, to adapt. It was too heavy a lift – for right now. But our goals live on.

  And we have demonstrated beyond doubt that our economic model for online journalism is viable. What makes shutting down so difficult is we have done the nearly impossible and created an independent reader-supported media company that was deeply in the black for its two years of existence. Parts of that economic model can and should be applied elsewhere at a grander scale. The same goes for most of our editorial model. My plan going forward is to figure out how to accomplish that end. But my first order of business is to recover from seven years of sleep deprivation. After that, I’ll search for a place where I can apply all of the editorial, business, and managerial skills I’ve honed at the Dish. If you have an idea where that might be, or if you simply want to talk, you can still contact me at patrick@andrewsullivan.com.

  The Dish may be dying, but the mission of the Dish will continue in the future work of this brilliant team. If you want to contact any of them, please email staff@andrewsullivan.com. It has been my great honor to have worked with them, and for you, for the better part of a decade.

  Until we meet again …

  (Photo: How Keely, my chihuahua-terrier mix, tells me it’s time to stop blogging for the day.)

  

  

• Your Moments Of Dishness

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 16:00:15 +0000

  Yesterday we made one final bleg requesting “your favorite moment of Dishness” – and you delivered in spades, as you always do. It’s hard to disagree with this reader’s pick:

  Your wedding, plain and simple. The photos, the setting, the dogs, the look in your faces:

  

  I’ve been reading you for 10+ years and you kept me looking forward and to know hope. As native Texan gays, we hope our day comes for true marriage, not just a ceremony.

  Another reader:

  My favorite moment of Dishness? No question: Dusty. We miss you. RIP to Dusty and the Dish.

  Another looks to the future:

  For me it’s “Falling In Love Again“, about bonding with Bowie after the loss of Dusty. It gets to me every time I read it – the peculiarities that define us all (pets too), the process of moving on (but not forgetting), and everything that comes with sharing your life with another being.

  Another reader gets close to home:

  My mind immediately jumped to the moment you got your green card. You explained exactly just what and how much the symbolic welcoming to the country meant to you. I’m proud to consider you a brother and hope you one day get your citizenship. Thanks for everything.

  Another simply sends this video, which any true Dishhead will recognize by its date – June 19, 2009:

  Another elaborates:

  So many moments with the Dish brought me joy, tears, enlightenment and shared frustration, but what stands out the most was the Green Revolution coverage.  Unlike anything I’ve ever seen elsewhere in this life, coverage aggregation / best news reporting available with such honesty and intensity. I can’t say thank you enough to the whole Dish team who made it happen.

  It was the moment when Patrick and Chris and I first truly bonded as a team. Speaking of which, one of our best teammates was intern Doug, who sends a screenshot from his July 2012 interview:

  

  (Yeah, I set up a script to take screenshots at intervals throughout the interview process. Super creepy, but I had to memorialize the event because it was a huge fucking deal to me. And honestly, I’d say it’s not a bad pic.)

  The chance to work with the three of you was amazing, but this is my moment of Dishness for so many more reasons. Because this was the moment I began to fully understand that the Dish, in so many ways, was exactly what it presented itself as. It was not just Andrew; it was a fascinating and bizarre entity all of its own (by the time I joined), in which you could see the individual personalities at work, but that was simultaneously so much more than any of you individually. It was the first time I’ve ever been really excited for an interview, rather than just dreading it. And it was the beginning of one of the most interesting adventures in my life.

  Likewise, to say the least. Another reader sensed the mind meld of the whole Dish staff:

  That time Andrew went on vacation and I couldn’t tell for days. The padawans had supplanted their master.

  This reader would probably agree:

  An “esoteric” moment of Dishness? How about a YouTube video you posted showing in time-lapse a map of Bruce Springsteen’s concert appearances over 40 years, set to a Springsteen song. The video had like 200 views before being featured at the Dish.

  Sure, I have loved (and hated) the Dish’s commentary, been charmed by the window views, changed my mind after reading through the eloquent responses of your readers. But the ability of you and your staff to curate these obscure bits that speak to the quirky passions of your readers – that’s true Dishness. No other site comes close in casting such a wide net for the oddities that speak to what we love in our culture.

  Speaking of oddities:

  My favorite moment of Dishness was the Wedding Dress Guy. To me, this is when the Dish transcended an author’s personal/political blog and moved toward something broader, quirkier, and increasingly indefinable. I mean, one minute there’s a critique of John Kerry, the next, a tattooed guy wearing his ex-fiance’s wedding dress in an eBay ad. It’s everything I love about the free-for-all that is the Internet.

  All kinds of Internet in this one:

  The Christmas Hathos contest, especially the finalist I submitted (naturally).

  Another reader gives us props:

  My favorite moment? When you talked about paying your interns. (And when you quoted me praising you for it!) Seriously, how did working for free become OK? (I blame Reagan firing the air traffic controllers.) So thanks for paying the interns.

  Thanks for your countless emails over the years – emails that were often more compelling than anything we wrote:

  I’ll go with your “It’s So Personal” series on late-term abortions. I was raised Catholic, was fiercely pro-life at one point but gradually came to the pro-choice perspective. Still, there was some residue from my upbringing, and I couldn’t understand why people would opt for the procedure so late in pregnancy. When I read those searing stories of choices no parent could face, I finally understood.

  Another quintessential Dish thread:

  The Cannabis Closet. You’re not just my favorite political voice on the web; you’re my favorite voice on the web. And that thread goes so far beyond politics. I picked this because you were so unafraid to tackle it, and your readers followed your lead.

  Another pivots to politics:

  As a 14-year-long reader (I started following you when I was 22 – sigh, we’ve grown old together, Andrew), my favorite moment of Dishness was during the 2012 POTUS election. You had an absolute MELTDOWN after the first debate and outwardly lost all faith in our president.

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  If I’ve learned anything about the man since ’04, it’s to have faith in his abilities and talent, you clearly lost that faith for a brief period after a lackluster performance. You got spun up by the spin, overly dramatic and as you’ve been known to do over the past decade, shrill. You calmed down eventually, and as predicted, we got another four years. Take care during this next stage Andrew :)

  One thing to say: I wasn’t spun by the spin. I freaked out in real time before any spin occurred. Another reader saw that debate differently:

  You took a lot of flak for over-reacting, but Obama fucking up so flagrantly, with so much at stake, warranted the strongest possible reaction. You expressed my sentiments to a T, essentially saying “how dare you” to the president.  At a time when many observers made a point of showing restraint, you understood (viscerally) that the situation called for something else.

  Another goes back to the very early days of Dish:

  Reading the Melville poem you posted on September 13th, 2001 sent a chill through my spine that day. How foreboding it seemed then, and how prescient it turned out to be. Looking back on that post now, I can’t think of anything else that more clearly foreshadows the events of the years that followed – in particular how we the weeping, blinded by grief and hungry for revenge, launched the most misguided war in our history. Perhaps it isn’t always the enemy who should be warned of those baring the iron hand. Perhaps it should be a warning to the very people baring it.

  Another jumps ahead:

  One moment of Dishness that makes me grin is this post from October 2004, when you linked to your endorsement of John Kerry for president:

  The endorsement I once never thought I’d write… I’m now headed to an undisclosed location.

  With Barack Obama having taken the mantle of the elixir to the Bush/Cheney years, I think back to that post on occasion and consider it the early draft of “Know Hope.”

  Another reader:

  My favorite moment was the time you finally realized and admitted how wrong you were about the Iraq War.  Those of us who had been against the war from the beginning were being told, by you, and others, how wrong, stupid, etc. etc. we were.  I was never prouder of you than I was at that moment.  I downloaded the I Was Wrong e-book you put together that traced your thinking from the beginning and I understood how difficult it was for you to admit your error.  If all of us could be so open to change.

  The Iraq e-book was a huge editing job tackled masterfully by Chris and Patrick, with a ton of technical help from Chas. It’s now outside our Deep Dish paywall for anyone to read. Back to Dishness:

  I have a clear favorite. I worked on the Obama campaign at this office in Virginia during the 2008 general election. Seeing our own tiny corner of the campaign documented amidst your reporting of important events from all over the country on that historic day provided a sense of validation and connection with the larger campaign that I still savor to this day.

  The other side of that campaign:

  This entry has to be one of my all-time favorites in Dishness:

  

  “An image from Sarah Palin’s id.”

  I read it as I was in the middle of drinking my morning caffeine.  I literally spat out my drink and started choking because I was laughing so hard.

  Another gets serious about the former half-term governor:

  Okay. In the end, it has to be the subject that brought me here in the first place: Trig. Despite the ridicule, dismissal and disinterest, you never wavered in your insistence that the story mattered. Just as a candidate who uses his war record (McCain et al) or near death of a child (Al Gore) as a central part of his political identity and appeal, VP candidate Sarah Palin’s endlessly repeated, fantastical birth story was a valid area of inquiry. And you were the only one in the quasi mainstream who wouldn’t let it drop.

  So I nominate “Why Does Trig Matter?“:

  In the end, this story is not about Palin. It’s about the collapse of the press and the corrupt cynicism of a political system that foisted this farce upon us without performing any minimal due diligence.

  Another reflects on the most recent election:

  

  My favorite moment was “The American President.” In 2012, I was an Obama organizer in Seattle, where I worked 20-hour, high-stress days. On election night, I was too busy (and too drunk) to read blogs, so I read this post hung-over on November 7, going to the campaign office to pack my things. It was a beautiful winter morning, cold and clear and sunny. It read as a summation of all I’d worked for, and no moment online has since carried so much promise.

  Another:

  November 6, 2012: Karl Rove impotently raging against the forces of reality while trying to figure out how he could have spent so much money for so little gain.

  Another had trouble picking a moment:

  Oh, so many. But one I think deserves attention is the whole Obama/Road Runner thing. It’s so fitting. How many times have this guy’s political opponents been certain that they have him, right up until the second they look up and see the anvil? I honestly hope that the President has used the line. Maybe when the networks called the 2012 election he was never supposed to win. Meep, meep.

  Another reader:

  So I’m at a military conference, sitting in the audience, waiting for the next speaker. I pull out my phone to catch up on The Dish and start scrolling down. Without warning, before the jump, is a full-screen picture of a scrotum. A Colonel next to me barks, “Boy, what are you looking at?”

  Heh. Another prefers the flip-side:

  The Post-Scrotum Compromise.  The debate ultimately drove the “Naughty Saturday” and “Churchy Sunday” format, right?  Man, I’m gonna miss Saturdays.

  The NSFW Saturday format – posts about sex, dating, booze and drugs, and other fun things typically done on a Saturday night – was already in place by then, conceived by Chris and kept prurient by weekend editors Zoe and then Jessie. Another reader looks back to the navy-blue days:

  

  Oh the places you’ve gone …

  Like here:

  That time when you and Goldblog got into a pissing contest – not about settlements, not about Netanyahu, not about your marks on the Anne Frank attic test, not about Iran … but about that shitty Atlantic redesign.  Then, before going on vacation, you unleashed Dish Nation on HIS inbox. It took almost a week for him to crawl out of his smoldering in-tray, white flag in hand. Though hardly anyone noticed.

  A far less petty battle:

  For a Moment of Dishness, I nominate your coverage when the Senate torture report came out. During those days, I remember telling people, very happily and repeating myself as I often do, that Andrew was “on a roll”. I couldn’t believe how much high-quality commentary was appearing in The Dish, often minute-by-minute.

  But another reader finds that “my moment of Dishness has to be negative”:

  In your reactions to Sally Ride’s choice to stand as a universal icon for women, you could only see cowardice as a lesbian. Iraq should have taught me your capacity for tunnel-vision, but it took Sally Ride to really cement it for me. But it’s quintessential “Dish”: there you are – personal, flawed, passionate, revealing – and still trying for honesty and decency even when you’re bloody wrong and nasty about it. I consider you a “good man” for trying to see past your own blind spots. Even when you fail. Maybe especially then.

  More readers let me have it:

  OK, you asked for “embarrassing” – now this was EMBARRASSING, from October 5, 2004:

  Well, I could easily be wrong, but I have a feeling Cheney will crush Edwards tonight. The format is God’s gift to Daddy. They’ll both be seated at a table, immediately allowing Cheney to do his assured, paternal, man-of-the-world schtick that makes me roll on my back and ask to have my tummy scratched. (Yes, I do think that Cheney is way sexier than Edwards. Not that you asked or anything.)

  A more mortifying moment:

  The butt-scratch mea culpa. Happy trails!

  Another:

  That time you pissed off Ryan Lizza is worthy of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

  And perhaps most embarrassing of all:

  When you referred to Scott Tenorman as “Stan Tenorman“, prompting all of us Dishhead South Park fans to go apeshit on you. I must have emailed 10 seconds after that post hit the blog, and you actually responded directly to me. I don’t remember exactly what you said though about 40% of the words were F-bombs. You knew the kind of trouble you were in.

  Speaking of the Tenorman episode, Cartman should be given a chance to say goodbye as well:

  Another reader gives me props for a principle I care about deeply:

  Your piece defending Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, “The Quality of Mercy“, changed me. As someone who is young, queer, liberal, and growing up in San Francisco, this piece was the first one to push me to shed my dogmatic approach to those who disagreed with me. A movement won through understanding is such a testament to human empathy and I’ve since taken on the challenge of become a more open person. Since then, I’ve been able to learn so much because I’ve made myself an active yet vulnerable participant in a conversation instead of a bully. This was such an important lesson for me to learn at the time I did (I was 17 and incredibly self centered, as 17 year olds are want to do).

  Another reader has Kenny’s back:

  During the clusterfuck known as gamergate, you took the time to try to understand the perspective of the nerds who felt their culture was being co-opted.  You didn’t excuse the horrible things some of them had done, but you humanized them.  I don’t think feminists realize how their open contempt of nerd culture is inextricably linked to the schoolyard dynamic of preying on unattractive and low status kids to advance one’s own social standing. Male nerds are afraid of women, and for good reason. Thanks for trying to understand this. I’ll miss you.

  A female reader turns to a very Dish theme:

  In response to your last “bleg,” I have to tell you: this beard-of-the-week guy turns my crank. Yowza.

  A male reader:

  This post of dudes with beards eating cupcakes. As a product of conservative evangelicalism, it was a growing-up moment for me. “Wait. He totally posted that because he thinks it’s sexy! Hmmmmm.” Hard to explain, but my eyes were opened to orientation versus sex with cocks in a new way.

  Your Dish changed my life, Andrew. Or maybe I should say “Our Dish.“

  Right the second time. Another reader’s moment of Dish:

  It was almost a throwaway line from several years ago. But it went something like this: “The real difference is not between gays and straights but those who have children and those who are childless.”

  That, more than any other post, changed my thinking. I had already begun to respect gays more – including coming around on gay marriage – thanks to you. But this was a new perspective: It completely sidestepped the issue of sexuality (or race, or religion, to be honest). And it’s so true: People who have kids lead profoundly different lives that childless adults, regardless of their sexual orientation. And vice versa.

  Several readers take us to a fount of Dishness – the window contest:

  I’ve been reading your blog for more than a decade. My favorite moments have been when you’ve posted links to work by people I know personally and when you posted a contest entry from my hometown of Winooski, Vermont:

  Your enthusiasm for the ‘Noosk seemed sincere. I hope you’ll come up here someday to visit now that you have all of this free time! There’s a direct flight to Burlington from DC.

  The sincerity in that case belonged to Chris, who made the contest what it is today with the help of Chas, who took the baton last year. Another great VFYWC moment:

  Two years ago on my 40th birthday I made a list of 40 feats I wanted to accomplish that year. One of them was to guess the city correctly in a VFYW contest. That week, the same week I signed up to be a subscriber, by pure fluke, I won the contest. (I didn’t actually guess the city correctly – but no one else did either, so proximity won out.) I was so happy I screamed and jumped around the room.

  And another:

  I am sure for countless readers, a special moment of Dishness was when they instantly recognized a VFYW that was not their own. In my case it was because I recognized a tree I have never seen, growing in a place I have never been. I knew that tree because I dwell in the overlooked world of garden bloggers and followed the blog of the person who submitted the window view from her Airstream Land Yacht. Politics are taboo in the garden blogging world, so that view told me a fellow garden blogger was also a Dish reader.

  I then whined on my own garden blog that the Dish never published my window view. Urban views tend to get favored over nature views. I submitted another one just in case. Five days later there it was. It felt good.

  I got two more window views in this winter. Chris called the last one phallic:

  

  How many phallic window views did you get? I call it Creation. From the destruction of two colliding spirals something new is born. Something new is being born right now for all of you with the end of the Dish. Thank you, Andrew and team.

  One more window moment:

  I was stunned that the VFYW was taken in Chetek, Wisconsin, 2.38 pm.  Not my window, but my hometown.  Although I no longer live there, I felt a connection to someone in Podunk Chetek that we share an even larger, virtual community. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

  For more serendipity along those lines, go here. Another reader switches gears:

  My favorite moment of the Dish was your review of the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, and your comparison to the Beijing ceremony.  It perfectly encapsulated what was so great about you and the Dish: a real-time introspective review of real world events.  While most media outlets worried that the smaller-in-scale London ceremony proved that the West was falling behind China, you were one of the only ones that took a contrary position, arguing that London’s ability to laugh at itself is the bedrock of a free and democratic society.

  Another takes this post to a whole new level:

  Ask. Dina Martina. Anything:

  

  Peep her vids here. Another reader:

  Favorite may not be the right word, but for me the most memorable moment of pure Dishness is this video takedown of Joe Solmonese (when he was the head of the Human Rights Campaign) that you did at an AIDS vigil on the National Mall at the beginning of the Obama administration. It combines everything I love about the Dish: you passionately stating what you believe without care for politics or niceties; your empathy and understanding and care for others; your abhorrence for the stuffed-shirt cravenness that too often passes for “leadership” in Washington; and the clarity with which you speak about gay rights. I remember very clearly watching the video and wondering why I wasn’t hearing more people saying publicly what you were saying, which is we’re not waiting anymore for full equal rights for all gay Americans. And now look how far we’ve come.

  Another takes me down a notch:

  My favorite moment of Dishness: when Andrew had his beard dyed and instead of a subtle grecian formula type of deal, it came out a deep brownish hue. His freakout made me laugh out loud. Exposing himself and poking fun of his own foibles and vanity made the Dish much more fun.

  Another sets a different tone:

  Favorite moment of Dishness?  Probably hard to call such a sad video a favorite moment, but years later it stays with me:

  It touches on many Dish themes: dogs, faith, addiction, love, redemption, city living.  And it just breaks my heart.  I felt a fraction of this sadness upon reading about the end of the Dish.

  Something much sadder:

  I’d nominate almost any moment in which you took on elements of the American Israel lobby over Israel’s conduct and America’s role in enabling it or submitting to it, but I’ll pick the time Leon Wieseltier tried to insinuate your Israel posts were anti-Semitic. I chose this because I know from my own experience how hard it is for any gentile to write about this topic truly and honestly, neither flinching from the points that need to be made forcefully, or saying something that can be construed as, or actually is, anti-Semitic. This issue is so important, so tied up to the major questions of war and peace – now of course with Iran.

  Now for something completely different:

  I never forgot this nugget in “The Meaning Of Girls“​ from Jan 22, 2013:

  Have you never fantasized about fucking a carpenter with sawdust under his fingernails just after he fixed your creaking door? (#SullyTMI: I pulled that one off in real life in 1989.)

  I sure as hell did after reading that.

  More TMI:

  You had me falling out of my chair at work laughing as you described your time at Burning Man “in the bowels of a throbbing, mobile homosexual sheep.”

  Something a bit more civilized:

  Your review of the State Dinner at the White House in 2012 was a great moment of Dishness, especially the image: you and Aaron holding hands (he, in an immaculate tuxedo, you … well, less immaculately turned out). And then the symbols: you and Aaron as a married couple attending an Obama-hosted diplomatic function, guested by a prime minister (a fellow Oxonian) who was fully supportive of gay rights in the UK. You posted pictures and gave us a review of the soiree, including the decorations, because we asked and you couldn’t help yourself.  A totally exclusive event that you made totally inclusive.

  But the Dish has always mixed the high with the low:

  Sully’s Confession here:

  [T]he founder of Popeye’s Chicken, Al Copeland, just passed away. In my humble opinion, no fried chicken comes close to Popeye’s and I have also eaten there a couple times a month for as long as I have lived in the US. May his eternal repose be both spicy and mild.

  I eat fried chicken regularly, but you should know that Bojangles is way better than Popeye’s. Unfortunately Bojangles only exists in the southeast, so you Yankees have the mistaken idea that Popeye’s is the best there is.

  Or this option:

  When you were snapped by a Dishhead blogging from Subway – that was a great moment of Dishness:

  

  Another reader:

  “The Psychology of Pooping” is, without a doubt, total Dishness. This particular part of the thread just had me laughing as hard as I did the first time. One reader wrote:

  Not sure how this is going to make it through your spam filter, but: For my money nothing beats a “potato gun”. You know, a nice compact poop that shoots out cleanly and doesn’t even require a wipe (of course, I do a couple safety wipes anyway). Shits of this nature will often be accompanied by a mid-level whooshing sound which is the reason for the name.

  Is this thread an all-time low or all-time high for The Dish? I can’t decide.

  And Andrew responded:

  My secret: Yerba Prima Daily Fiber Caps. Seriously changed my life. They come out like large, clean, perfectly formed rabbit poops, leaving nothing but white on your toilet paper. Heaven.

  I’m dying. The Dish is the only place where I feel it’s actually ok to read about this shit.

  Speaking of shitty:

  As a New Yorker living in DC for a long time, I loved your posts on living in New York City for a year. One of the lesser hats you wear is defender of Washington, D.C., for which I am always grateful. You are able to pinpoint why DC is good and why NYC is overinflated.

  And don’t forget Satan’s Sangria. Another fave moment:

  When Sam Harris kicked your ass in the God debate. It demonstrated that even one of the great independent thinkers of our time (that would be you) can’t escape the early inculcation of religion. Thanks for that, and for everything else I learned in the many, many hours I spent reading your blog. I’ll miss you!

  Kicked my ass my ass. A religious reader:

  My huge and everlasting thanks for introducing me to the term “Christianist”. The proud and grateful recipient of 16 years of stellar Catholic education, I was beginning to be embarrassed to be associated – even remotely – with what was called “Christian” in this country. Using your term gave me an alternative that made conversations about politics easier and clearer, especially amongst my primarily Jewish and atheist colleagues.  After I started using the term in conversation, a friend (with a similar 16-year Catholic background) offered her profound thanks to me – so I pass those along to you as well.

  Another:

  My favorite moment of Dishness, hands down, is from November 30, 2006 as part of your “Best ‘80s Video Contest” re: Bronski Beat’s “Smalltown Boy”:

  If you were gay and young in the 1980s, the pop music was a form of emancipation and revelation. Early PSBs, Erasure and Bronski Beat captured the breakthrough. Many of us as teens lived in small towns and yearned for the big city. And no music video spoke to our lives as powerfully as “Smalltown Boy.” Even now, it chokes me up. The video is a record of the beginnings of a revolution. You can feel it coming.

  So true, so true. And so simply stated.

  Another reader’s source of Dishness:

  In a word: Hitch.

  Another is also at a loss for words:

  Your post immediately after Christopher Hitchens died: “I cannot write anything worthy of him now.” That’s as far as I get with the Dish too – I cannot write anything worthy. Ridiculous comparison of course, but with both Dish and Hitch I felt as though I communed a little with each.

  Another sends “some screen captures of Dishness that I’m pretty sure were due to my email suggestions,” which we’ve compiled:

  

  Another reader’s moment:

  Gah so many.  I know that part of my love for your blog is the sense that I’m being listened to. I’ve sent you many emails and some percentage of them have actually been posted.  Many of them have been very long, the kind of email that starts at 1000 words and then I whittle it back as far as I can. This one was not:

  Andrew!  Wake up!  Wake up wake up wake up!

  Another sends something surely to wake you up – in the middle of the night:

  The favorite Dish moment for every Dishhead is the day you post one of their emails, like my “Dish themes in one photo”, submitted 5/6/11 and posted shortly thereafter:

  

  Another’s Dishiest moment:

  Yesterday! In a spasm of Dishness, you outdid yourselves: sex, drugs – no Rock & Roll, but you can be forgiven – historical view from your window, chart of the day … even Gitmo. Only a Sarah Palin reference is missing. Thanks for a huge fix before utter withdrawal.

  One final hit of poetry:

  I took great satisfaction when I took up the cause to have the Dish feature the poetry of William Stafford. 2014 was the 100th anniversary of Stafford’s birth, and I was a great admirer of the man and remain a champion of his work. I took it upon myself to implore (umm, more like pester) Alice Quinn and the Dish staff to highlight a few of Stafford’s poems on the centenary occasion. And you came through, posting several fine examples from Stafford’s canon. I was especially delighted that Andrew took a moment to write to me that one of the poems “stopped me in my tracks the way all great poems should” (“An Archival Print,” posted here).

  So here’s one more from Stafford, which I find very appropriate to the occasion. It’s called “The Way It Is”:

  There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
  things that change. But it doesn’t change.
  People wonder about what you are pursuing.
  You have to explain about the thread.
  But it is hard for others to see.
  While you hold it you can’t get lost.
  Tragedies happen; people get hurt
  or die; and you suffer and get old.
  Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
  You don’t ever let go of the thread.

  Andrew, whatever lies ahead in your journey, don’t ever let go of the thread.

  Another joins just in time:

  As a ten-year reader (and proud subscriber), I CANNOT believe I waited this long to email you. My favorite moment of Dishness? Last night. Specifically, me realizing that an online community of which I’ve never interacted outside my own mind has meant so much to me that I spend 45 minutes having my fiance take 57 terrible pictures so I can have a photo to send in my first and only email. Wearing the shirt. Balancing the mug between my legs. Forgetting that I’m wearing PJ pants. The dogs not cooperating. Saying *Fuck It* I’ll just send some photos anyway:

  

  You guys aren’t making this easy at all. Another verklempt moment:

  I was with my mother in the hospital before her second open heart surgery in as many years and shared with her your “Prayer for Sunday,” which was amazingly appropriate. Brought tears to all of our eyes (my father and two of my three sisters, included), along with a silent and calm reflection on the world to come.

  That prayer was selected by Matt, the heart of Dish Sundays. One more reader:

  There are so many moments to choose from, Andrew, but you know what the best one is? This one right here. Because I’m really, really fucking sad right now – which means that I care about the Dish, and you, and your incredible staff, in a way that words really can’t describe. I cannot tell you how much your blog has meant to me. Thank you for all those moments – and thank you for this one. See you down the road.

  So long, and thanks for all the Dish.

  

  

• Living The Dishhead Dream

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 15:30:40 +0000

  by Chas Danner

  I’m a reader. That’s how this ride started for me. Seven years ago there was, and still is, no better place on the Internet for keeping abreast of news, arguments, ideas, and the penetrating thoughts and experiences of complete strangers – the Dish’s readers. Finding the Dish was a revelation. I was hooked.

  In the spring of 2009, I knew the Iranian elections were ramping up because I read the Dish, and it was a story that captured my attention like nothing else previously or since. When their election day came and went wrong, I devoured all the news I could find, living the story in real-time from afar. I started hammering the Dish inbox with scraps of news, videos, and tweets, reloading constantly to see if and when my contributions made it on the blog. I also began volunteering my efforts for HuffPo’s live-blog on the story, and started collecting those chilling videos of Iranians chanting Allah-o Akbar from their rooftops. When that project got a plug on the Dish, from “blogger Chas Danner”, I was floored. It was during those few summer months that I first caught the journalism bug, mostly because I found myself doing the job I had been watching the Dish do for years.

  In 2012, when I applied for and somehow got a Dishternship, I suddenly found myself under the hood, revamping our Facebook feed, helping the Dish cover a presidential election, getting chastised by Patrick for not “feeding the beast” enough, and eating mini-cupcakes in the green room at Colbert.

  When my internship ended, right as the Dish was about to go independent, I refused to stop working until they hired me back on. When they finally relented and I was asked what I wanted my new title to be, I suggested “Special Teams”, a football term for a collection of players with specific skills used for special situations. It was an apt title, as my job often required some self-taught skill the rest of the team lacked, and there ended up being virtually no part of producing the Dish, or keeping our company going, that I didn’t get to play some role in.

  When we needed a new website, I designed it and managed its launch. I found our technology partners Tinypass, 10up, and WordPress VIP and managed those relationships. When we needed to shoot and edit videos, or produce podcasts, or find meeting spaces we could rent, I figured it out. When some gear inside the Dish broke, I was the one who got the call. And I edited others’ drafts, became a headline specialist, wove together contest entries, and found most of the Dish’s Mental Health Breaks and Faces Of The Day these past few years. But, for me, nothing was more exhilarating or more challenging than parachuting into some breaking news event and connecting the dots, tweets, images, and posts, staying up late and waking up early to squeeze some extra ounce of understanding out of the confusion and chaos.

  Now, at the end, I’m the Dish’s Managing Editor, and so proudly so. For while I’ve loved being a jack of all trades, what I’ve loved even more is helping maintain and improve the overall system of human and technological resources that make the Dish possible. The Dish is a super-organism. Each individual part – our staff, Andrew, the readers, and the blogosphere – making up the essential whole. It is a complex and magical machine, and I for these past few years I have felt like its faithful mechanic.

  For me, the ultimate special project has been the entire thing itself, making sure Andrew’s spirited campaign against sponsored content left no outrage unturned, helping Patrick try to reimagine our company’s future, or version after updated version of his brilliant RSS processing system, having passionate arguments with Chris about the nature and future of Dishness, working with Jessie to relaunch our Twitter feed so that the hundreds of other writers we depend on for our content would know we’ve featured their work, relaying tweets and posts to Jonah so he can be the best damn foreign-policy blogger on the planet, and the countless, marvelous conversations with Matt about what journalism is, should, and can be. These incredible people, these co-workers who have become my best friends, have inspired me in ways I could have never imagined. Anything I ever do, everything I ever accomplish, will be because of them.

  And then there are all of you, our readers. For those of you who have written in with your votes of confidence in our staff continuing on, please know how much that has meant to us. We have read all of them. And if you saw some tall guy sobbing on the F train last Friday, that was me after reading how one Dishhead was willing to up his subscription to $5,000 to save the Dish. Please know how badly we wanted the Dish to live on somehow, and how hard we fought for that possibility. Working for all of you has been the greatest thing I have ever done in my life. I would have done it all for free, or paid to keep it alive myself, as so many of you have done. I know how important the Dish is to all of you, because I’m one of you too. And I don’t know what I’m going to read tomorrow when I wake up either.

  This was real. Even more than the success of our business or editorial models, what the Dish proved is that you, our readers, exist. There are at least thirty, maybe fifty or a hundred thousand of you out there who get it. That’s enough. You have all proved that the future of media, of reading and thinking, doesn’t have to be constrained by the bullshit of clickbait, faux-inspiration, take-pieces, regurgitated Times articles, listicles, and advertising masquerading as journalism. You have proved that the homepage lives. You have proved that editors matter. The Dish existed because of you. Now we dream forward.

  The Dish may be dead, but I will always be a Dishhead. I still believe, even now at the very end. And I always will.

  

  

• How I Met Andrew Sullivan

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 15:00:33 +0000

  by Matthew Sitman

  One of the first questions I get when a person finds out I work at the Dish, and that Andrew is not just my boss but my friend, is about how we met.

  Unlike most of my generation, and probably most readers of this blog, I first encountered Andrew’s writing in his books. I read Virtually Normal with the thrill of genuine intellectual discovery when, as a young doctoral student at Georgetown University, I pulled it off the shelf during an afternoon haphazardly exploring the stacks. I turned to Love Undetectable and The Conservative Soul in quick succession, with the former, in my estimation, being Andrew’s best and most beautiful book. But perhaps most importantly, in early 2008, Andrew’s dissertation on Michael Oakeshott finally was published. During my graduate studies, Oakeshott had become an intellectual hero of mine, a thinker whose writing genuinely changed my life. So I scraped together the money to buy Intimations Pursued, read it slowly and deeply, and then sent Andrew an email asking if we could get coffee to discuss it.

  I was a nobody – a poor graduate student in a city in which proximity to power or money is what gets people’s attention. I had nothing to offer Andrew in that regard. What I now realize, however, is that that was a good thing.

  I wasn’t asking for anything other than an earnest conversation about a somewhat obscure English philosopher. I wasn’t seeking an internship, I wasn’t trying to secure a “connection,” I didn’t want Andrew to introduce me to anyone. I certainly never believed I’d work at the Dish. Andrew was just a writer who fascinated me, not a celebrity blogger. I wanted to ask him questions. That was all. And that’s why, I now feel certain, he wrote back to me suggesting we skip the coffee and just get dinner at the Duplex Diner.

  That evening we shared what would be the first of many long meals together, with me awkwardly asking questions about his dissertation and trying not to seem as nervous as I really was. (Confession: I downed a beer on my way to dinner to help me relax.) I met Aaron that first night, too, and we all ended up going to listen to jazz at Blues Alley. We promised to do it again soon, and in short order we became friends – a title that he and I both revere.

  Working together these last two years necessarily impinged on our friendship, with discussions of “business” always threatening to intervene. So while I will miss Andrew’s blogging, and now find myself considering what comes next in my own career, I am relieved that Andrew and I simply can be friends again. Because, after all, true friendship is entirely non-instrumental, and fits uneasily amidst the demands for productivity and performance. As Oakeshott puts it in “On Being Conservative” (pdf):

  Friends are not concerned with what might be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of this enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or to improve. A friend is not somebody one trusts to behave in a certain manner, who supplies certain wants, who has certain useful abilities, who possesses certain merely agreeable qualities, or who holds certain acceptable opinions…The relationship of friend to friend is dramatic, not utilitarian; the tie is one of familiarity, not usefulness; the disposition engaged is conservative, not ‘progressive.’

  Andrew, to borrow Oakeshott’s phrasing, certainly does not always have acceptable opinions, nor is he always agreeable. Far from it, as readers of this blog certainly know. But Andrew, more than anyone else, has taught me that any genuine form of love, especially friendship, does not seek to change or improve the other person. Friendship is marked most of all by simple delight, by finding the world a slightly less lonely place because of another person’s proximity. It exists for no purpose beyond itself; it is “useless” in the very best sense of what that might mean. And so, it turns out, entering into an abiding friendship actually is the beginning of a more general wisdom: that striving must give way to acceptance, that present laughter should be valued over future reward, that life is not a series of “problems” to be “solved” but a mystery to enjoyed. I’m not sure I’d really understand these things, to the extent I do or in the same way, if Andrew hadn’t decided to answer my email that day.

  I can’t help but feel joy that my friend is leaving blogging behind. His deepest interests are not political, as my own story of meeting and getting to know Andrew should indicate. The daily jousting on the web, however brilliantly he executed it, does not reveal the core of the Andrew I know. Instead, if asked to describe the man, what comes to mind is the time we talked about God hour after hour one sunny Spring day, or the eagerness with which he showed me Provincetown my first visit there. I look forward to the day, soon arriving, when reciting our favorite Philip Larkin poems supplants discussion of web traffic, and when, after going to Mass together, we can converse about Jesus without worrying over Monday morning’s blogging.

  

  

• Quote For The Day

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 14:32:16 +0000

  

  By Maurice Sendak:

  “But the wild things cried, “Oh please don’t go – we’ll eat you up – we love you so!”

  And Max said, “No!”

  The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye.”

  

  

• A Poem For Andrew

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 14:00:19 +0000

  by Alice Quinn

  For Andrew, essential defender of parity in the sphere of love:

  That Love is all there is,
  Is all we know of Love;
  It is enough, the freight should be
  Proportioned to the groove.

  –Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

  

  

• The War

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 13:00:35 +0000

  That’s what changed me – and this blog. That’s what changed America. And that’s why Obama is president.

  When I look back on the stumbling, reversed, jagged path I found myself taking with you over the past decade, it is the war that looms largest. It showed me the callowness of neoconservative certainty – a certainty I drank as solace in the lost shadow of the two towers, the falling of which propelled this blog into a very public space. It showed me the wisdom of a deeper conservatism that should have recognized the utopianism of the Iraq folly from the get-go. It showed me the depth of human evil in the dark recesses of al Qaeda and Zarqawi and now ISIS. And it showed me that merely dramatically opposing this evil is not enough to stop it – and may even unwittingly embolden and strengthen it.

  It robbed me of illusions – the first being that the United States never tortures prisoners.

  It denied me any intellectual safe haven, as my delusions fell from my eyes in slow motion.

  It revealed an ugly side to me, in the aftermath of 9/11, that I now see with revulsion and embarrassment.

  It shook me out of moral complacency and shallow absolutes.

  Maybe every generation has to learn some of these lessons anew – and I should hasten to add that the war has not left me a pacifist. I still believe in the necessity of military force in confronting evil in the world that threatens us. I am merely far, far more convinced than I used to be about war’s capacity to make things worse, its propensity to upend the precious legacy of security and gradual change from which all true progress is made. Tens of thousands of human beings died in Iraq because many of us forgot that. Many more still will be. You can treat that as an abstraction – but the new media made so much of it so much more immediate, and revealed such vistas of pain and grief and brutality that abstractions were overwhelmed with reality.

  And yet we move on. Accounts of the war that obscure that complex reality are emerging again. And we will be tempted to walk briskly by what the war did to the meaning of America, in its relations with the world. Which is why, in this last week of Dishing, I was glad to see an early cut of Michael Ware’s new documentary about the war as he experienced it – on both sides, in real darkness, without any attempt at protecting us from what Michael did not protect himself from. It’s called “Only The Dead.” Look out for it.

  It’s only by confronting this past fully, by not flinching from it, or air-brushing it that we will emerge again into what Churchill called broad sunlit uplands. The light is still crepuscular. I just want to believe it is the light of dawn and not of dusk, and that this global struggle can lead somehow to something better, truer and more humane.

  (Photo: Seen through splintered bullet-proof glass, US soldiers from 2-12 Infantry Battalion examine their damaged Humvee after an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) detonated on the vehicle, following a patrol in the predominantly Sunni al-Dora neighborhood of southern Baghdad 19 March 2007. On the fourth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq US soldiers still faced daily attacks on the streets of the war-torn capital. By David Furst/AFP/Getty Images.)

  

  

• The View From My Window

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 12:32:12 +0000

  

  Washington, DC, 5.25 pm

  

  

• Quote For The Day II

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 01:30:05 +0000

  “The world cannot be a problem to anyone who sees that ultimately Christ, the world, his brother and his own inmost ground are made one and the same in grace and redemptive love. If all the current talk about the world helps people to discover this, then it is fine. But if it produces nothing but a whole new divisive gamut of obligatory positions and ‘contemporary answers’ we might as well forget it. The world itself is no problem, but we are a problem to ourselves because we are alienated from ourselves, and this alienation is due precisely to an inveterate habit of division by which we break reality into pieces and then wonder why, after we have manipulated the pieces until they fall apart, we find ourselves out of touch with life, with reality, with the world and most of all with ourselves,” – Thomas Merton, “Is the World a Problem?” (1966)

  Check out last Sunday’s celebration of Merton’s 100th birthday here.

  

  

• Know Scope

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 01:00:13 +0000

  

  Marcelo Gleiser reminds us that, even though science has not yet detected gravitational waves from the Big Bang, “we should take note of what we do know about the early universe, which is nothing short of spectacular”:

  We know that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old (a number that, updated from 13.7, has given us pause about the name of this very blog). We know its composition, or at least the relative contribution of the ingredients — if not the ingredients themselves (dark matter and dark energy remain a mystery). We have a firm grasp of the cosmic history from 400,000 years after the Big Bang to now — and we can even push it earlier, to a minute or so after the event, when the first atomic nuclei were synthesized. We also understand how galaxies form and how they are distributed across space, even if we still don’t know where the seeds that leapfrogged their emergence came from. …

  We share with our ancestors the urge to understand our origins, to unveil the mystery of creation. The fact that science opens a window for us to peer into our deep past should be a cause for celebration, irrespective of what we find when we are finally able to look.

  (Image from Hubble Space Telescope via NASA/ESA/UCSC/Leiden Univ.)

  

  

• Face Of The Day

  Posted:Fri, 06 Feb 2015 00:27:11 +0000

  From a reader saying goodbye:

  

  

  

• A Short Story For Thursday

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 23:15:04 +0000

  This selection is one of Ernest Hemingway’s most brilliant and enduring, “Big Two-Hearted River.” The story deserves a patient, close reading; perhaps no better example of Hemingway’s distinctive prose style exists. Here’s how it begins:

  The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.

  Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

  Read the rest here. The story also can be found in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. For helpful commentary on the story, check out this Dish-featured essay. Peruse revious SSFSs here.

  (Photo of Hemingway fishing in Michigan in 1916, via Wikimedia Commons)

  

  

• Exiting The Anxiety Closet

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 22:14:23 +0000

  Maria Bamford, a Dish fave, exited through comedy:

  Scott Stossel reflects on his decision to open up about his chronic anxiety:

  I revealed my anxiety and … the world didn’t end. Did friends and colleagues talk about me behind my back? Maybe. Probably. (O.K., definitely.) But for the most part people didn’t seem to treat me any differently — and to the extent that they did, it was to express sympathy or empathy and even admiration for my “bravery” in revealing my vulnerability. (This always struck me as odd because I was being brave only in revealing my lack of bravery, which is a cheap sort of bravery indeed.)

  Many people — friends, colleagues, strangers — came forward to share their own stories of anxiety, and to say that my publicly revealing my anxiety somehow made them feel more hopeful, or less alone, and sometimes less anxious. This made me feel good, though I found it ironic that my writing about my anxiety seemed to reduce other people’s anxiety more than it did my own.

  I’m still anxious. I still have bad episodes. I remain (lightly, for the most part) medicated. But Dr. W. was right: Coming out as anxious has helped. It has been a relief not always to have to do “impression management,” as Dr. W. calls it. I don’t — or don’t always, anyway — feel a desperate compulsion to hide the anxiety that sometimes overtakes me.

  

  

• Dudes On Diets, Ctd

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 21:52:20 +0000

  A reader brings a personal touch to this topic:

  This subject is near-and-dear to my heart. I was a college athlete who never had to even think about what I ate to maintain low bodyfat. Then my workouts dropped to, say, 20% of what I had been doing when I stopped playing college bball and started working a full-time job. Typical story, I guess. The pounds crept on slowly, 5-10 a year, until, at 29, I was 50 pounds overweight. The weight came slowly but the realization came suddenly. I remember the first time I went to the beach and felt hesitation about taking my shirt off. Within a month, I was cringing every time I looked at myself shirtless in the mirror. I wasn’t obese, but I was fat, and I just didn’t like it, at all.

  So I started doing actual research into what makes people fat, and it turns out, it’s not actually lack of exercise.

  A sedentary lifestyle makes you very unhealthy, but it doesn’t really make you fat. The composition of your body is ~80% diet, ~10% exercise, and ~10% genetics. Upon realizing this, I started getting my diet under control. As a part of that, I started counting calories, and which macronutrients (protein, carbs, and fats) I was getting those calories from.

  Two years later, I am down 60 lbs, ~11% body fat, and I will count calories every single day for the rest of my life. Far from a marker of female vanity, knowing what you are putting in your body should be one of the basic life skills that every single person possesses. The idea that people are shoving food into their mouths without even thinking about what’s in it or how much they’re eating is, when you think about it, insane.

  Would people do that with their cars? Would they just start throwing into the tank different kinds of gas and oil and anything that looks like gas or someone told them was gas, without even keeping track of what they were putting in or how much? Of course not! That would be a crazy way to treat a valuable thing like a car. And it’s even crazier to treat your body that way. I’m not judging people who do; I did for a long time. But, when you think about it, it’s wild that people do that so blithely.

  We have a food problem in this country. It’s destroying our health. It’s making people depressed. It’s going to cost us billions in health care over the coming decades. In order to solve this problem, we’re going to have to confront some basic realities that are currently being ignored. Such as: 1) The fast food joints and related businesses that litter out neighborhoods are actually selling poison. It seems strange, because they’re everywhere and advertise on TV, but that’s literally true. It’s a slow-acting poison, but if you keep putting it in your body, it makes you fat, unhappy, sick, and eventually dead.  2) Regular soda is the worst offender of all.  And 3) It is crazy to go through life without tracking the fuel that you’re putting in your body.

  Thanks as always for airing frank discussion.

  Update from a reader:

  I’d like to echo from a different perspective the former college athlete on the junk we put in our bodies. Eight years ago, when I was 54, I was told at my annual physical that I was diabetic. I didn’t fit the typical criteria for Type 2; in fact, I had just mysteriously dropped about 12 pounds. I went home from that appointment thinking, “What the hell do I eat now?”

  Fewer carbs, of course, and just less. I put less on my plate to begin with, and found that I’d be fine without going back for seconds. No more “finishing off the last bits so there are no leftovers”. No desserts. (This from someone who definitely had a sweet tooth.) It sounds grim, but it wasn’t. We’re good cooks, and we make most things from scratch anyway. It gradually dawned on me that most carbs are just filler, and knowing that I was poisoning my body by eating them reduced their appeal significantly. (Potatoes and New Haven-style pizza excepted.)

  It turned out I was Type 1, with my insulin production gradually declining. By the time I finally had to start taking insulin, four years later, I had lost another 25 pounds. Everyone thought I was too thin. I gained back about 15 pounds once I started on insulin, and it’s been steady for the last three years.

  I believe everyone should eat like a diabetic.

  

  

• Mental Health Break

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 21:20:52 +0000

  Words to live by:

  

  

• Will Vaccination Become Partisan?

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 20:44:34 +0000

  Sarah Despres hopes not. She notes that, currently, “support for immunizations is largely bipartisan”:

  According to a recently released survey from the Pew Research Center, the public opinion on vaccine requirements, for example, divides much more by age than by political affiliation. This may be a function of the fact that younger people are less likely to have seen the diseases the vaccines are designed to protect against. (In other words, vaccines are victims of their own success.) However, the poll was worrying in one political respect: In 2009, there was no partisan difference in attitudes toward these requirements. The latest study did find some small differences along party lines. According to Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political science professor who has done research on effective communication around vaccines, injecting partisan politics into individual decisions about whether to vaccinate could have unintended consequences. He argued in the New York Times recently that making the decision to vaccinate one of partisan allegiance could potentially push some individuals who might otherwise have vaccinated their children to forgo the process.

  Seth Masket warns that “if enough Republican leaders or conservative cultural figures publicly question the importance of immunizations, and if such messages go unchallenged or even embraced by commentators on Fox and other conservative media outlets, that message could soon be adopted by conservative parents with only modest attachments to politics”:

  And in some ways, this argument meshes very well with the American conservative world view. The idea that I can make better judgments about my kids than the government can, that I should be concerned about me and my own rather than the larger social network, that I shouldn’t have to make sacrifices or face risks on behalf of strangers — it wouldn’t take much to fold that into the definition of modern conservatism. Resistance to vaccinations doesn’t have to mean embracing organic food or breastfeeding toddlers; that’s simply a liberal interpretation of it.

  But we’re not quite there yet. The main cultural elites advocating avoiding or at least questioning vaccinations, from doctors with celebrity pretensions to celebrities with medical pretensions, are mostly on the left right now. Chris Christie has limited appeal, and Rand Paul has not quite yet demonstrated an ability to reach those outside his libertarian circles. But if we’re going to see the anti-vaxxer belief system mutate and spread to the right, this will be how it happens.

  

  

• Should Even Heroin Be Legal? Ctd

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 20:20:43 +0000

  A reader writes:

  I am enjoying Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream very much. For the most part I find that the author backs up his views with solid evidence and logic.

  However, the suggestion in Chapter 13 that a chaotic, abusive home and the parents’ failure to bond (attach) with the child is what causes addiction proves too much. Recent NIMH studies by Bridget Grant show that personality disorders persistently and robustly predict the persistence of substance abuse disorders. Grant’s work shows that roughly 50% of substance abusers meet the criteria for borderline personality disorder.  There is good reason to believe that these individuals are quite resistant to treatment as usual.

  It is fair to say that people with personality disorders feel isolated and alone. So, to that extent, Hari’s thesis has validity. And while early literature connected personality disorders to a chaotic home, abuse and a failure of attachment, the more current view is that these individuals may be so sensitive that they perceive chaos and abuse where others would not. And the failure to attach may be due to something inherent in the child rather the parent.

  The point is that it is unfair, as Hari does in his book, to assume that because an addict feels isolated and reports an abusive or chaotic home, that this report is accurate. Sometimes, it is just the way the disordered person has misperceived the world.

  Another reader:

  I’ve gotten a little more than halfway through Hari‘s book, looking forward to actually being able to take part in the coming Book Club discussion, now never to happen. But the reading itself is worthwhile: What a marvelous book so far.

  That it is. And don’t miss Johann on Real Time tomorrow night.

  

  

• The View From Your Window

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 20:00:44 +0000

  

  Oxford, England, 11.15 am. And my old classmate from Oxford who sent this photo yesterday follows up with three more, all from ’81:

  

  

  

  

  

• The Genetics Of Fucking Around

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 19:31:11 +0000

  The Economist unpacks new research suggesting that humans are not born equally promiscuous:

  As with many biological phenomena—height, for example—propensity for promiscuity in either sex might be expected to be normally distributed; that is, to follow what are known colloquially as “bell curves”. The peaks of these curves would have different values between the sexes, just as they do in the case of height. But the curves’ shapes would be similar.

  Rafael Wlodarski of Oxford University wondered whether things are a little more complicated than that. Perhaps, he and his colleagues posit in a study just published in Biology Letters, rather than cads, dads and their female equivalents simply being at the extremes of a continuous distribution, individual people are specialised for these roles. If so, the curve for each sex would look less like the cross-section of a bell, and more like that of a Bactrian camel, with two humps instead of one.

  They found some evidence to back that theory up:

  These results suggest that—probably for men and possibly for women—caddishness, daddishness and so on are indeed discrete behavioural strategies, perhaps underpinned by genetic differences, rather than being extremes of a continuum in the way that tall and short people are. Although there is some overlap between the two strategies, they are, if Dr Wlodarski and his colleagues are correct, what biologists call phenotypes. These are outward manifestations of underlying genes that give natural selection something to get hold of and adapt down the generations.

  Intriguingly, the difference in phenotypic mix between the sexes is not huge. Dr Wlodarski and his colleagues calculate that cads outnumber dads by a ratio of 57:43. Loose women, by contrast, are outnumbered by their more constant sisters, but by only 53:47. Each of these ratios tends in the direction of received wisdom. Both, though, are close enough to 50:50 for that fact to need an explanation.

  So much more to find out about us as a species. And now, finally, some time …

  

  

• The Fight For Independent Journalism

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 19:00:11 +0000

  A CBC camera crew led by the wonderful Michelle Gagnon visited the Dish “offices” recently:

  The CBC’s Neil Macdonald takes on native advertizing sponsored content branded content ads disguised as journalism. Money quote:

  Sullivan’s case against native advertisement is powerful and succinct. “It is advertising that is portraying itself as journalism, simple as that,” he told me recently. “It is an act of deception of the readers and consumers of media who believe they’re reading the work of an independent journalist.”

  Advertisers, he says, want to buy the integrity built up over decades by journalists and which, in the past, was kept at arm’s length. Now they will happily pay to imitate it: “The whole goal is you not being able to tell the difference.” Sullivan’s argument is so doctrinaire, so principled, that it makes bourgeois practitioners of the craft, like me, squirm.

  Well, we never compromised on this. Of that I am deeply proud.

  

  

• A Final Bleg

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 18:20:40 +0000

  

  What was your favorite moment of Dishness over the years?

  Email your reply under the subject heading “Moment of Dishness” to dish@andrewsullivan.com and we’ll post some for tomorrow morning. Please keep your response under 100 words (about twice the length of this post) so we can read as many as we can. Points for esoteric or embarrassing moments.

  (Photo mashup of this post and this thing sent by a reader this morning, because Dishness.)

  

  

• The Latest On Those Gitmo “Suicides”

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 17:50:34 +0000

  It’s a story we have long covered, even as many MSM outlets pooh-poohed the idea of accidental-homicide-through-torture. So we’re glad to be able to the recent Newsweek piece as the definitive latest word on the affair. It contains the following key paragraph:

  A highly placed source in the Department of Defense who deals with detainees’ affairs, and who asked to remain anonymous because he is not permitted to speak to the media without receiving prior clearance, wrote to me in an email: “After reviewing the information concerning the three deaths at Camp Delta on June 9, 2006, it is painfully apparent the personnel involved in fact created an illusion of an investigation. When you consider the missing documents, the lack of key interviews, and the questionable evidence found on the bodies, it is blatantly obvious there was something that occurred that night that is not documented.”

  It may take time but if more people refuse to believe the official line on this, the truth may eventually win out.

  (Photo: Google Earth picture of a facility, allegedly known as “Camp No”, outside the perimeter of the main detention camp, where Gitmo guards say they saw prisoners being taken to on a regular basis.)

  

  

• Quote For The Day

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 17:45:50 +0000

  GENIUS: 'I think we just recognized gay marriage,' lawmaker says after amendment to gun permit bill in #Nebraska omaha.com/news/legislatu…

  —
  Brian Ellner (@brianellner) February 04, 2015

  

  

• The Long Game Of Barack Obama

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 17:02:39 +0000

  

  Perhaps the prevailing theme of this blog these past seven years has been the hope and promise of the Obama presidency. I’ve long insisted that his record will only be fully understood after eight years, that his role as the liberal Reagan of our time could not be glimpsed fully in real time – the only time a blog can function in – but needed some perspective. I’m sure in the future I will write an essay on all this, but I owe you my current state of mind before I bid farewell tomorrow.

  First up: notice how his approval ratings have rallied since the Republicans trounced the Democrats in the mid-terms. He isn’t headed into Bush territory any time soon:

  

  Obama’s average approval in the last quarter was ten points higher than Bush’s at this point. Obama’s ratings are now a smidgen higher than Ronald Reagan’s at this point in their time in office. Reagan came crashing down to earth in his second term after Iran-Contra:

  

  The Republican Congress, as one might expect from a brain-dead party, has staggered or meandered out of the gate in 2015. It awaits a message and a platform from a presidential candidate. And look a little at what they’re saying. Romney wanted to run on tackling poverty. Jeb Bush is running on economic mobility. There is, in fact, a budding consensus that social and economic inequality is a real problem – and that the right should have some sort of answer. This is the moment for the reformocons to make their move, and I’m glad this blog has championed (and even employed) them over the years as well. But as growth has returned, the Democrats have the advantage: “middle-class economics” may well only work by raising some taxes on the extremely wealthy, in order to de-rig the system, and the Democrats may be the only party prepared to do this. The last six years, moreover, have vindicated the Democratic strategy of using a stimulus to get out of recession, rather than the Republican one of following Angela Merkel toward deflation.

  The wars? They’ve become minimalist. The economy? It’s growing faster than anywhere else in the world. The deficit? Plummeting. Unemployment? Lower than before the recession. Gay rights? A revolution. Climate change? A decisive shift in government spending and regulations. Healthcare? A new guarantee of security for millions (including me) that will become very hard to take away – unless the Supreme Court decides to politicize itself more profoundly than it has since Roe vs Wade. Iran? Still very hard to tell if the negotiations can work – but we seem to have avoided premature Congressional meddling. Legal weed? He got well out of the way. Iraq? So far, the ISIS containment strategy seems to be holding. Israel? The final showdown with Netanyahu is imminent – but again, Bibi may have over-reached in the last few weeks. If he is not re-elected, it will be a huge triumph for the president. Torture? Ended with at least some formal, public accounting. There is much more work to be done. But we have made a start.

  Knowing Obama – and history – some of these assumptions will shift in the next two years.

  He’s always worked our nerves – and so can events unknown. But the case for this unlikely president as a pivotal figure in American history – ridiculed by so many for so long – is mounting. I have mixed feelings, of course. Obama challenged my own free market, small government principles in ways no previous politician had – and the evidence of history did the rest. But an Oakeshottian conservative knows better than to stick to dogma in the face of data, and I can see this presidency as a critical balancing out of the excesses of the Bush-Cheney years – and the Reagan legacy – in order to keep the ship of state on an even keel. What happens next I may find less congenial – a more liberal and expansive role for government. But the Clintons have to make that case on new foundations in a new world.

  I’m known for changing my mind, when the facts change. But on this, I remain convinced that we were more than right to elect Obama twice. His even temperament, his endurance of so many slings and arrows, his integrity and his patriotism loom large at this moment, but will seem, in my view, even larger from the rear-view mirror. We will miss this man when he is gone; and I am deeply proud of having played some small part in framing the case for him, and in seeing it through.

  Ah yes. One last time with feeling.

  Meep meep, motherfuckers. Meep Meep.

  

  

• The Blogger Uniform Exposed

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 16:43:40 +0000

  This is a disgusting picture, but an actual one we took today of my blogger poitrine every morning. It’s so foul it’s going after the jump:

  

  The brown Jackson Pollock is created from little droplets of coffee that migrate from my beard and moustache to adorn my bathrobe and, yes, laptop, as I blog through the morning. Hey, we’re all about transparency here. But, yes, I really do need to put it in the laundry, before it is able to do so all by itself. But for the record …

  

  

• Why Do We Read?

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 16:27:47 +0000

  Joshua Rothman searches for an answer in Deidre Shauna Lynch’s Loving Literature: A Cultural History. How reading has changed:

  For a long time, people didn’t love literature. They read with their heads, not their hearts (or at least they thought they did), and they were unnerved by the idea of readers becoming emotionally attached to books and writers. It was only over time, Lynch writes—over the century roughly between 1750 and 1850—that reading became a “private and passional” activity, as opposed to a “rational, civic-minded” one.

  To grasp this “rational” approach to reading, Lynch asks you to transport yourself back to a time when, in place of today’s literary culture, what scholars call “rhetorical” culture reigned. In the mid-seventeen-hundreds, a typical anthology of poetry—for example, “The British Muse,” published in 1738—was more like Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” than the Norton Anthology. The poems were organized by topic (“Absence,” “Adversity,” “Adultery”); the point wasn’t to appreciate and cherish them but to harness their eloquence in order to impress people.

  According to Lynch, the “invention that disrupted this rhetorical world was the canon”:

  Some readers read because they want to know about the here and now. But, when a young person’s favorite book is “The Great Gatsby” or “Jane Eyre,” something else is going on. That sort of reader is, as Lynch puts it, “striving to bridge the distance between self and other and now and then.” And, from that sense of striving, a whole set of values flows. In rhetorical culture, the most important writing was au courant, and the “best” readers made use of it to enhance their own eloquence. But in an appreciative, literary age, the most important books are the ones that have outlasted their eras, and the “best” readers are people who are especially susceptible to emanations from other times and places. Being a reader becomes an identity unto itself.

  

  

• The Promise Of Psilocybin

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 15:48:57 +0000

  Michael Pollan’s New Yorker piece on the medical benefits of psychedelics is well worth a read:

  As I chatted with Tony Bossis and Stephen Ross in the treatment room at N.Y.U., their excitement about the results was evident. According to Ross, cancer patients receiving just a single dose of psilocybin experienced immediate and dramatic reductions in anxiety and depression, improvements that were sustained for at least six months. The data are still being analyzed and have not yet been submitted to a journal for peer review, but the researchers expect to publish later this year.

  “I thought the first ten or twenty people were plants—that they must be faking it,” Ross told me. “They were saying things like ‘I understand love is the most powerful force on the planet,’ or ‘I had an encounter with my cancer, this black cloud of smoke.’ People who had been palpably scared of death—they lost their fear. The fact that a drug given once can have such an effect for so long is an unprecedented finding. We have never had anything like it in the psychiatric field.”

  Kleiman calls Pollan’s article “as good an introduction to the field as one could ask for”:

  The central idea is that the mystiform experiences that psilocybin and other drugs can trigger under the right circumstances can be beneficial, not only in treating specific problems – end-of-life anxiety, for example, or nicotine dependence – but by enriching lives: making some people “better than well.” So far the studies are small, but the results are impressive.

  It’s encouraging to see the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health taking a scientific attitude: cautious but interested. It’s discouraging, though – alas! – not at all surprising to see the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse responding to exciting research results by worrying about what might happen if someone tells the children.

  The Dish has covered this subject extensively over the years. Update from a reader who contributed much of that coverage, especially on ibogaine:

  The New Yorker‘s recent piece on psilocybin has been on my mind a lot lately.  I had a lot of reactions to the piece, but the most lasting feeling was a deep sadness.  I felt sad because I hoped this article would convince my 70-year-old parents to take psychedelics before they start seriously declining.  The author, unfortunately, bends over backwards to make readers frightened of psychedelics.

  It depresses me to accept that the cutting edge of psychedelic research is generations away from acknowledging an obvious truth: that psychedelics are an incredible gift to humanity that could help billions of people deal with the overwhelming intensity of life.  We don’t need more expensive, intricate, double-blind experiments to know this. If we just approach what we already know without fear, then this is the only possible conclusion.

  I have no doubt that psychedelics will one day be a completely normal part of a person’s life journey.  It is just a shame that billions of people will suffer before we get there: and the people who suffer will be our family, our friends, and ourselves.

  PS  I am really going to miss you guys.

  (Photo of Psilocybe Cubensis by Flickr user afgooey74)

  

  

• Letters From Gitmo

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 14:42:14 +0000

  Christian Lorentzen reviews Guantánamo Diary, the recently unclassified (and heavily redacted) 2005 memoir by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a former detainee still in US custody:

  Guantánamo Diary is no masterpiece: inevitably, it’s repetitive (Slahi likens his interrogations to Groundhog Day), and often banal when what it recounts isn’t revolting. But Slahi is an intelligent and sensitive writer whose sense of irony somehow survived along with his sanity. He’s not quite Holden Caulfield but his personality consistently comes through. His efforts at characterisation – of his interrogators, guards and fellow detainees – are thwarted by the military censors’ redactions, which turn a wide cast of villains, friends and villain-friends into so many undifferentiated black marks. But his collective observations of his jailers – especially the prison’s racial dynamics, with white guards dominating their black colleagues, and a Puerto Rican contingent showing the most sympathy to the jailed – are some of the book’s most striking details.

  

  

• A Book Cover That Judges You

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 13:44:08 +0000

  

  Alison Flood explains:

  Thijs Biersteker of digital entrepreneurs Moore has created a book jacket that will open only when a reader shows no judgment. An integrated camera and facial recognition system scans the reader’s face, only unlocking the book – in the prototype, filled with creative work for the Art Directors Club Netherlands annual – when their expression is neutral.

  “My aim was to create a book cover that is human and approachable hi-tech. If you approach the book, if you’re overexcited or your face shows a sceptical expression, the book will stay locked,” explains Biersteker on his website. “But if your expression is neutral (no judgment) the system will send an audio pulse and the book will unlock itself. I often worry about my scepticism and judgement getting in the way of my amazement. Judgment should never hinder the relentless enthusiasm of seeing things for the first time.”

  Below, watch a video of how the cover works:

  

  

• Why Can’t Vaccination Be Voluntary?

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 12:41:43 +0000

  Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig observes that, in “a variety of European countries, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, The Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, high vaccination coverage (up to 99 percent in Finland, for example) has been achieved without the use of mandates.” But this won’t work in America:

  Insofar as we detest mandates because they are an affront to our self-sovereignty, it seems unlikely that removing mandates and encouraging vaccination through voluntary means would do much to improve the willingness of fiercely individualistic Americans to risk their health or comfort for the good of the whole society. As Michael Gerson once wrote of capitalism, a mandate-free vaccination regime enacted strictly out of American disdain for obligation would rely on virtues it would not create.

  But there’s another hitch. As researchers from a number of European universities wrote in the scientific journal Eurosurveillance, “a national healthcare system should promote and actively offer those vaccines that have been proven to be safe, effective, and with a positive public health impact. In a world where people trust health authorities, more compliance with national recommendations can be established.” In other words, the creation of a healthcare system that is both accessible and trustworthy is a key factor in ensuring widespread voluntary vaccination.

  

  

• Email Of The Day

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 01:25:54 +0000

  Mostly for the bottom part:

  Hi Andrew, I know you’ll be receiving hundreds, likely thousands, of tributes and thank-yous this week, notes of appreciation long and short from your readers around the world. I hope you find time in your transition to read and absorb these messages of love and support. I hope too that you find pleasure and satisfaction in knowing that your readers appreciate you for who you are, not just what you do. You deserve all the good things you’re going to read about yourself, including (hopefully) this big chunk from me.

  You surely know this already, but you’ve worked yourself into your readers’ daily lives in a way that cannot entirely be explained by your intellect and skill as a writer, prodigious as your talents may be. The internet is full of smart and talented writers. But their readers don’t know their favorite bands, their favorite shows, their favorite comedians, their favorite drag queens, where they vacation, what turns them on, what turns them off, the names of their partners, and, of course (because most people keep these thing private), deeply intimate details about their personal health. I haven’t seen these writers at their best and their worst. I was not brought to tears when their dogs died. I don’t even know if they have dogs. But you, Andrew, are unique. We have come to know you. You have come to be our friend, and we will miss you. I will miss you.

  I’m finding it difficult to tell you how important your voice has been to me personally, and I think more broadly, to the political discourse, since I began reading the Dish eight years ago (I’ve read it nearly every day since). Back then, I was finishing law school in South Carolina. Raised in a very liberal, very Christian southern family, I had never felt quite at home in the red state of my birth or in the academy of conventional liberal thought.

  In your voice I recognized a fellow-traveler, and – more importantly – an honest voice in what felt to me like an increasingly dishonest world. Between you and another fellow-traveler – Barack Obama – I felt a renewed sense of hope that there was space for honesty and integrity in public debate, or at least a worthy counterpoint to the toxic truthiness fed to us for eight years by the Bush Administration-Fox News noise machine.

  You and Obama were certainly not Bush’s only critics. But you were his most important critics, because you recognized rightly that Bush’s biggest failures were not failures of policy (though his policies were failures); they were failures of process. They were failures, on some level, of judgment and character – the result of rash and reckless decision making that prioritized emotion and ideology over conservative, rational consideration based on ascertainable facts.

  This always struck me as a moral critique as much as it was a political critique, and I always believed it was the most compelling reason for Obama’s candidacy. When I told my friends – Democrats and Republicans – in 2008 that the first reason I was voting for Obama because he was the “conservative” candidate (“small-c conservative,” I’d add), and the second reason was that he was the liberal candidate, everyone scratched their heads. No one knew what I was talking about.

  But you know what I’m talking about. I think you learned these lessons yourself, the hard way. And I learned them – at least in part – from you. The lessons ground into me in those years inform my thinking as a practicing attorney – and indeed, just a normal person – every day.

  I now live in D.C., and I don’t write on the internet much. But I do make arguments for a living. And I know how hard it is to work in an adversarial business while maintaining your integrity, to make winning arguments without giving in to the forces of ego and insecurity that will make bad facts disappear and turn nuanced arguments into grade-A cable news bullshit. Your open, daily struggle to examine and re-examine your own views is an act of moral virtue and courage, and I know of no other writer who is as vigilant in this regard. You should be very proud of that. It’s your character, not your intelligence, that makes you special. And to have built the credibility you have in this town – where a premium is placed on smarts, and too little value placed on character – is a colossal achievement.

  I don’t mean to make this overly sentimental. We have obviously never met, and I cannot look into your heart. Like everyone – as I’m sure you would be the first to acknowledge – you have your share of faults and failures. But you (and your fantastic team, I should not fail to mention) have done something great here, something of which you should be very proud, and something that has been very meaningful to me. It’s not every day I write ridiculously long, laudatory emails to strangers. But there is so much that I will miss about the Dish – your faith; your skepticism; your humor; your humanity; your appreciation for the subversive and the absurd; your deep reverence for the rich complexities of the American experience; all the inside jokes. I am sad to see you guys move on, but I know you have much more to give. I look forward to seeing what that is, as I know you do too.

  So, all that said, I’m closing with a parting gift. I’ll call it “The 10 Pet Shop Boys Songs Most Likely to Double As the Dish’s Final Post.”  Here goes:

  10.  This Must Be the Place I’ve Waited Years to Leave

  9.  A New Life

  8.  Happiness Is An Option

  7.  Leaving [embedded above]

  6.  No Time For Tears

  5.  The End of the World

  4.  To Step Aside

  3.  I Made My Excuses and Left

  2.  I Don’t Know What You Want But I Can’t Give It Anymore

  1.  I’d Rather Leave While I’m in Love

  Best of luck to you, Andrew, and all the Dish staff. Get some rest!

  

  

• Face Of The Day

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 01:00:20 +0000

  

  Yep, this is me, at Oxford, in 1981. Sent in by an old classmate and Dishhead as a parting gift. As the world turns …

  

  

• Quote For The Day

  Posted:Thu, 05 Feb 2015 00:35:10 +0000

  “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
  And next year’s words await another voice.
  And to make an end is to make a beginning.”

  – T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding.

  

  

• The Generation Gap On MGM

  Posted:Wed, 04 Feb 2015 23:39:16 +0000

  It’s significant:

  

  You know we couldn’t end the blog without at least one more post defending foreskin. Previous Dish on male genital mutilation here. Update from a reader:

  Since it’s my last chance, I just wanted to thank you for your posts on circumcision (and all the others over the years). I hadn’t thought to question the practice, and as a secular Jew, always just assumed any sons I had would be circumcised. But my son is due any day now, and it only took a 30-second conversation with my (circumcised) husband to decide not to do it.

  Another reader:

  “You know we couldn’t end the blog without at least one more post defending foreskin.”

  Yes, you wouldn’t want to cut it off short, now would you? :)

  

  

• A Note To Our Readers, Ctd

  Posted:Wed, 04 Feb 2015 22:20:57 +0000

  In response to our Dish RIP post, a reader titles her email “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, Ctd”:

  Ugh. I had a sliver of hope and now it’s gone.  I understand, but man, this sucks bad.  I knew there was a chance you’d go through with leaving, so I’ve been looking around at other places to look for this great balance between current events, news, opinion – and nothing.  The Atlantic maybe comes the closest (which by the way, I only heard about because of the Dish), but it’s not the same. Will definitely miss you guys. This is such a bummer.  Starting to hit me now.  Uggggh.

  It’s going to be painful for us too. The withdrawal signs are already setting in. Another reader:

  I’ve been reading you since the very beginning. I’ve emailed a couple of times, but really nothing worth publishing. I’m going to miss The Dish immeasurably; it’s my #1 blog!  And I suggest that there’s one more angle to the thread on suicide, i.e. Is Killing The Dish Selfish? (I ask this with tongue only partially embedded in cheek.)

  Another reader on our “impending demise”:

  Well, all I can say is I think you’re a bunch of pussies.

  More like scrotums, as Dan would say. Another asks regarding this quick post, “The real mother of Trig is Rick Astley?” Another fell for it too:

  Goddammit Sullivan. I was just about to write a nice email to wish you all the best and thank you for everything the blog has given me over the years. And then you Rickrolled me with this post. Fuck you and good riddance.

  Or how another puts it:

  ....................../´¯/) 
  ....................,/¯../ 
  .................../..../ 
  ............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸ 
  ........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\ 
  ........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...') 
  .........\.................'...../ 
  ..........''...\.......... _.·´ 
  ............\..............( 
  ..............\.............\...

  Heh. Another:

  I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!!!

  (I love you I love you I love you please don’t go please don’t go!)

  Another confesses, “What I hate the most is what it says about me that I clicked on that Trig click-bait.” Another:

  I should have known I was about to be Rick rolled. Captain Ahab was not after gold. The poor mixing of metaphors should have been a clue. Well done though. I totally fell for it.

  Another asks, “Is this end of blogging just a set up for the mother of all rick rolls?!?”  Maybe if it were closer to April 1. One more reader for now:

  Rick-rolled in the end. You suck. But I have to admit, I danced, and cried a little too. Really. It’s starting to sink in that Friday is the end of it all. I feel like I’m losing a brother, my online family, my home page, and one-stop shopping for almost everything that mattered. I just spent an hour visiting almost every sight on your blog reference list for a possible replacement. Nothing compares to The Dish. Damn it.

  Best wishes to you all. Y’all really have no idea how much you mattered and the difference you made in my life. Please do use the list of emails you have and keep us updated. I would love to know where everyone ends up, what everyone writes, and that you are all thriving. My days will never be the same, but I’m smarter now, and glad to have been along for the ride.

  You and 30,256 subscribers carried us.

  

  

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