Our reader writes:
I work long hours in a windowless building in Phoenix, Arizona, 6-7 days a week from August to May. At peak work times, television, music, reading for pleasure, etc. all get sacrificed. But I almost never miss a single post on The Daily Dish. For several years now, you all have provided my window to the world. Thank you, sincerely.
I remember early in 2001 when I stumbled onto Andrew Sullivan's original blog, as well as its amusing graphically rich variant with bubbles and fizz. I'd followed Sullivan since he was the editor of TNR, and his website made me wonder as to the possibilities of the new medium for communication and opinionation. Nearly 10 years on, I guess I have my answer, I'm in the opinion-making "business" myself. Oh, and no more bubbles and fizz.
Read Razib (aka "David Hume) at Secular Right and Gene Expression.
Being a friend Andrew's pre-Dish meant having to explain to people at dinner parties—mostly buttsore homos who hadn't ever read him—that while, yes, Andrew was ferociously argumentative, and sometimes wrong (who isn't sometimes?), he was also a wonderful, charming, hilarious, mellow, and generous person. A wonderful, charming, etc., person who just so happened to be doing more to advance the cause of gay civil equality than anyone else in the country.
Then Andrew started the Dish. Andrew realized years before anyone else that a blog is a much more intimate medium, and the Dish was quickly infused with Andrew's playfulness and compassion, his sense of humor, and and his sense of awe—traits that his friends were familiar with, but not sides of Andrew that his readers, fans, critics, and enemies on the left and the right had ever exposed to.
No longer having to defend Andrew at dinner parties—that's one upside of the Dish for me. Another is everything I've learned reading the Dish over the last 10 years, including how to blog myself.
The only downside of the Dish is this: I live on the West Coast, and whenever I sit down to write a post for Slog, I'm painfully aware that whatever it is I want to write about or link to, Andrew and his crew at the Dish have already covered. It makes me feel like Butters in the "Simpsons Already Did It" episode of South Park. Whatever I want to do, the Dish already did it. And did it better.
Happy birthday, Dish, and all the best to Andrew and Chris and everyone else who makes the Dish happen.
Read Dan at Savage Love and Slog.
For me, the miracle of this blog is the sheer diversity of the posts: Andrew veers from public policy to neuroscience to inane YouTube clip in the span of thirty minutes. He might write 1000 words on Israeli politics and then, a few seconds later, feature a window view from Uzbekistan.
Andrew has pioneered this blogging trope, the idea that a blog need not be constrained by a single subject or theme or tenor. Instead, he has shown us that it's possible to project an individual mind (and all its contradictions, idiosyncrasies, etc.) into cyberspace, to create a public dialogue out of our private thoughts. Like so many others, I feel like I really know the guy. And we've never even met.
Read Jonah at The Frontal Cortex.
Being reminded that one has been reading the Daily Dish for a decade leaves a fellow wondering what happened to his youth. But it has been a mighty fine ten years: sometimes bafflingly perverse, often exasperating, frequently enraging but always stimulating, interesting, amusing, entertaining, trend setting and, above all, worth reading. Congratulations, happy blog-day and here's to the next ten glorious years!
Read Alex at his eponymous Spectator blog.
The Daily Dish is by far the best of the blogs that I often disagree with but still can't help reading regularly, and I think that has to do with an amazing thing that Andrew has achieved: perfect pitch in his blogging voice. He is sometimes combative, but not rude; at times polemical, but not strident; persuasive, but never maudlin; in short, he has a achieved a tone which is very difficult to project on a blog: that of reasonableness and good humor.
Congratulations to Andrew on reaching this milestone and thanks to all whose efforts go into producing as irreplaceable a resource on the web as The Daily Dish. For just his coverage and support of the green movement in Iran in the months following the 2009 Presidential elections there, Andrew deserves some sort of prize, and for that and for much else he certainly has my deep respect. Happy birthday, Daily Dish!
Read Abbas at 3 Quarks Daily.
I think what I continue to value at the Dish is its ability to straddle the personal blog/organizational-blog divide. Over the years, blogging has become increasingly professionalized and massive output quantity has become a priority. That's forced a lot of blogs to lose their impromptu personalistic character. But Andrew still enjoys spouting off in an opinionated or sometimes emotional fashion, and that's what keeps the Dish's intensely felt tone. Half the time I think he's wrong! But I'm glad he's still doing it. And half the time, I think he's right, and right in an impassioned style which more and more of us hesitate to give ourselves over to.
Read Matt at Democracy In America and Accumulating Peripherals.
Austin:
Why I love Sullivan: It's simple. Any fan of evidence-based policy is on the good team. Why I hate Sullivan: That's simple too. He sniffs out so much of interest each day that reading him dramatically lowers my own blogging productivity. I come for the Dish and stay for the full-on, news-you-can-use, feeding frenzy. Keep it flowing, Andrew!
Aaron:
Why I love Sully: he's the blogger's blogger. I trust his opinion, and his take on things, more than any others'. It's not because I always agree with him, but because I know he's always thought through his beliefs. I've seen him change his mind, and not apologize for it. That's far too rare and makes him irreplaceable. Why I hate Sully: he makes it look too easy, he knows too much about too much, and he makes the rest of us look bad.
Read Austin and Aaron at The Incidental Economist.
The Daily Dish has been an important part of my life for a long time. As a less-than-conscientious high school student, I spent a lot of my time reading comic books and The New Republic. The parallels should be obvious. Both featured eccentric, larger-than-life characters waging war against various evildoers, from irradiated mutants to, um, K Street lobbyists.
On reflection, I guess the analogy breaks down. But the short of it is that I came to admire Andrew Sullivan for editing a zany, irreverent magazine, and, in the years that followed, I greatly profited from his contrarian, often incendiary, always thought-provoking contributions to TRB and The New York Times Magazine. When Andrew started blogging, I became a loyal reader.
And Andrew was doing something very new.
For an undergraduate during the fin de siècle, the Internet was a primitive and often frightening place, full of ICQ spam, high-concept ASCII art, and pages and pages of "Yo Mama" jokes. The sites I visited most often at the time were a scarily comprehensive website devoted to the ever-expanding Wu-Tang "Fam" (we hear about the tech bubble — but what about the Wu-bubble?) and, of course, nytimes.com. Because I spent so little time studying, I was able to devote myself almost exclusively to performing Napster searches and playing the M.O.P. song "Ante Up (Robbin Hoodz Theory)" on repeat. You can watch Bert and Ernie performing the song here.
As an early-ish adopter, I had come across various proto-blogs, but Andrew offered a compelling mix of personal observations, bomb-throwing polemics, and sober, or at least semi-sober, analysis that's come to define web opinion. More than most of us, Andrew contains multitudes and his multitudinousness fit the emerging medium exceptionally well.
Because Andrew's tone was so direct and personal, I felt very comfortable engaging him directly. I started emailing tips and criticisms, etc., and to my surprise he'd often write back. This was a tremendous confidence boost given that most of what I wrote at the time were breakfast-themed raps under the name "Hash Brown." I went on to work for Andrew, and he's been a friend and mentor ever since. And that's despite the fact that I couldn't hold a candle to the web-surfing savvy of Patrick Appel, Chris Bodenner, Conor Friedersdorf, and Zoe Pollock.
All this is to say that I blame Andrew for what's become of me. Had Andrew not piqued my interest in the world of ideas, it is possible that I would have fulfilled what had been my lifelong ambition, namely traveling the world on a sleek yacht with an army of foxy raven-haired babes, solving mysteries and fighting crime. But there's still time!
Read Reihan at The Agenda.
Congratulations on ten years off the straight and narrow.
John Micklethwait is the editor of The Economist.
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