Dish editor Chris here. Andrew usually writes the BOTD feature, but, as he noted yesterday, he’s been out sick this week with a wicked flu. His message to readers:
Just a note to apologize for my absence from the blog since a little after Christmas. I got the flu pretty bad (yes, like most HIVers, I got the shot) and haven’t been mobile now for ten days. I’m waiting on blood-work results to make sure nothing else is going on, and feel a little better today. So with any luck, I should be back blogging very soon. My deepest thanks, as always, to the Dish team for making my absence so worryingly hard to discern. And my deepest condolences to the people of Paris and France. Nous sommes Charlie aussi.
Andrew was still feeling shitty today with a fever, but hopefully he’ll be back to blogging on Monday. You can email your well-wishes here.
Our three most popular posts this week were the final results of the 2014 Dish Awards, one of the first posts titled Slaughtered For Satire, Ctd, and Andrew’s year-end evaluation of President Obama’s performance (spoiler alert: he still likes him). All of our coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attack and resulting debates over free speech can be found here (to read in chronological order, go here). That round-the-clock coverage was carried out by Chas, Jonah, Patrick and myself. Some props from a reader after an exhausting week:
Just a note to say that your coverage of the events in Paris has, so far, really been at your highest level. We are getting perspectives on every intelligent side of the issues, which is exactly what we need, as opposed to, say, Nicholas Kristof-type pieties. I am thinking of teaching a course sometime in the near future on blasphemy, and your posts are really helping me to appreciate the complexity of the issue.
We also added reader updates to many of our Charlie posts – review all of them here. The most important updates you might have missed: readers provided context here and here to Charlie cartoons that some people believe to be racist caricatures of black people; that didn’t seem to be the cartoonists’ intention at all. Another reader tore apart the false equivalence of an offensive Holocaust-Muhammed cartoon created by the anti-Semitic artist Carlos LaTuff. And another pointed out that, while the WaPo scrubbed some controversial cartoons from its coverage, the paper did in fact republish one of Charlie‘s Muhammed covers, in the opinion section.
Two reader threads kept us sane this week – the one on bathroom graffiti and the other on eggcorns. All of our official mental health breaks can be watched here, capped by a beautiful one from Paris. Alice offered a poetic escape here. We also compiled many of your window views from this week’s cold snap. This new one from Clyde, North Carolina looks a bit phallic:
You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @dishfeed. 22 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our coffee mugs here. One new subscriber writes:
Well, you’ve done it. Months of clicking “Read On” only to not read on has drawn me into your political and cultural vortex. After discussing the high price of $19.99 with my wife, noting it couldn’t come from the budget but from Christmas Cash, I finally signed up … and then a new post confirmed that decision: “Following Jesus in an Age of Violence“. This is the reason I want to click more and ultimately support the work you do: honest engagement with various views, unfearful critique, and the evident value of holding faith, politics, economics, and personal relationships in tension. So, thank you and have a great New Year!
See you in the morning for our weekend coverage, edited and curated by Jessie and Matt, with more poems from Alice. Those three were also responsible for most of the Dish coverage over the holidays, with help from Phoebe and Tracy. A Founding Member noticed:
I’ve been an avid reader for many years and was a charter subscriber. It’s just amazing to me how informative and interesting your site always is. Even this week (between Christmas and New Years), when it’s nearly impossible to find anything decent to read on the web, you have more than your quota of fascinating and stimulating articles. Thank you so much. When I think of my greatest fears, it’s not getting old but that Andrew is getting old and might someday retire. Love you guys.
(Photo: The words “Paris Est Charlie” are projected onto the Arc de Triomphe on January 9, 2015. By Richard Bord/Getty Images)
The Dish 