I come to you from the bowels of Deep Dish, where I’m finishing my first ever long-form essay (it’s on Pope Francis and is imminent).
I have to say it’s a strange feeling. I’ve never been on a deadline for a long-form piece that wasn’t someone else’s deadline – with Tina on the phone, or James worried about the latest draft or Adam, coming up with a cover-line. You feel unprecedented freedom – there was a point at which this ghastly stomach flu I’ve been shitting through could have prompted me, the editor, to move the pub date, for me, the writer. “See? I can do that now!” But then there’s professionalism. So, no, I didn’t. I plowed on. As long as I restricted my life to shitting, writing, sleeping, a bowl of soup, shitting, writing and sleeping, then it was doable. There’s still the agony of the first edit and the fact-check and the copy-edit – but when they’re all done by your own colleagues, and you’re really grateful for them, it feels different somehow. Not so much an imposition as a mitzvah.
And when all you have to do to publish is press “publish”, and no printed version of the piece will ever arrive in anyone’s mailbox, it also feels different. Not blogging exactly – it’s a much more considered and lengthy (10,000 words) piece for that. But not quite an article for, say, TNR or the Atlantic or Newsweek, either. I don’t have to punch every card on the “magazine profile” page; I don’t have to make it accessible for millions; I just have to make it as good a piece as I can for the 33,000 of you who are subscribers. And that’s a real difference as well. It feels like I know you; and that you’ve been reading the Dish this year on the new Pope. I can write for the same audience I write for every day, and yet on a larger canvas. It feels like the continuation of a conversation. Which is to say it’s been a great way to wind up this first year at the Dish: an old thing become new again.
Today, we covered the success of the Pentagon in securing a huge budget coup with spending still at the Bush-Cheney mid-2000s level. Eisenhower wept.
The American poor now get tropical diseases; the UN continues to back Prohibition; Atlanta’s commutes make people fat; and Michelangelo’s slaves still mesmerize.
The most popular post of the day was How Anti-Christian Is Fox News? Runner-up was this haunting new poem.
See you in the morning.
The Dish 