Author: Andrew Sullivan

A reader does his best impression of a Dishhead:

That’s how the past week has felt. Tyler Cowen went so far as to call me “the most influential public intellectual of the last 20 years.” Here’s how you make a blogger blush:

I thought long and hard before selecting Andrew for the designation of most influential public intellectual. Perhaps Paul Krugman has changed more minds, but his agenda hasn’t much changed the world; we haven’t, for instance, gone back to do a bigger fiscal stimulus. Peter Singer led large numbers of people into vegetarianism and veganism and gave those practices philosophic respectability; he is second on my list. A generation ago, I would have picked Milton Friedman, for intellectual leadership in the direction of capitalist and pro-market reforms. But that is now long ago, and the Right has produced no natural successor.

TNC penned an appreciation of my being wrong:

Andrew has never been a prophet, so much as a joyous heretic. Andrew taught me that you do not have to pretend to be smarter than you are. And when you have made the error of pretending to be smarter, or when you simply have been wrong, you can say so and you can say it straight–without self-apology, without self-justifying garnish, without “if I have offended.”

And there is a large body of deeply curious readers who accept this, who want this, who do not so much expect you to be right, as they expect you to be honest. When I read Andrew, I generally thought he was dedicated to the work of being honest. I did not think he was always honest. I don’t think anyone can be. But I thought he held “honesty” as a standard–something can’t be said of the large number of charlatans in this business.

Honesty demands not just that you accept your errors, but that your errors are integral to developing a rigorous sense of study. I have found this to be true in, well, just about everything in life. But it was from Andrew that I learned to apply it in this particular form of writing. I am indebted to him. And I will miss him–no matter how much I think he’s wrong, no matter the future of blogging.

Damon Linker agrees that much of the reaction to my decision to stop blogging reads “an awful lot like obituaries.” How his tribute ends:

When critics praise him, they usually point to the sheer volume of prose he produced. It is impressive. But not nearly as remarkable as what the prose conveyed, which was opinions, positions, judgments by the boatload. Always an on-the-spot evaluation at the ready — and far more often than not, an interesting one. One worth sharing. One worth pondering. One provocative and distinctive and irritating and quirky enough to inspire readers to come back the next day. And the next.

It could be exhilarating, but also acutely embarrassing. Sullivan learned early on that in this new medium, glibness had become an intellectual virtue. Just look — and judge. Immediately. Where the academic-scientific ideal seeks to bracket emotions and other non-rational aspects of subjectivity, the blogger-intellectual trusts his emotions, follows them, permitting a gut reaction to events. Sullivan practiced passionate thinking, right before our eyes.

A reader digs up Colbert’s classic take on blogging – from February 2005:

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Chris Christie’s endorsement of parental choice over public health while we have a measles epidemic strikes me as yet another disqualifying aspect of his judgment, character and personality in his bid for the presidency. Here’s some important context for his remarks – Christie:

Michael, what I said was that there has to be a balance and it depends on what the vaccine is, what the disease type is and all the rest. And so I didn’t say I’m leaving people the option. What I’m saying is that you have to have that balance in considering parental concerns because no parent cares about anything more than they care about protecting their own child’s health and so we have to have that conversation, but that has to move and shift in my view from disease type. Not every vaccine is created equal and not every disease type is as great a public health threat as others. So that’s what I mean by that so that I’m not misunderstood.

His office is now qualifying even more:

To be clear: The Governor believes vaccines are an important public health protection and with a disease like measles there is no question kids should be vaccinated. At the same time different states require different degrees of vaccination, which is why he was calling for balance in which ones government should mandate.

That’s a relief. And, of course, parents always have the ultimate say over their children. But a public official should not, in my view, be messing around with basic concepts of public health, and giving any credence to anti-vaxxers. So why the equivocation when we need more public support for childhood vaccination?

My best answer is that any potential GOP candidate has to cater to the Christianist right, and the critical HPV vaccine is not exactly popular with that section of the population. Lo and behold, Carly Fiorina is saying something similar as well:

I think there’s a big difference between — just in terms of the mountains of evidence we have — a vaccination for measles and a vaccination when a girl is 10 or 11 or 12 for cervical cancer just in case she’s sexually active at 11. So, I think it’s hard to make a blanket statement about it. I certainly can understand a mother’s concerns about vaccinating a 10-year-old … I think vaccinating for measles makes a lot of sense. But that’s me. I do think parents have to make those choices. I mean, I got measles as a kid. We used to all get measles … I got chicken pox, I got measles, I got mumps.

An alternative explanation may, of course, be that president Obama has strongly endorsed childhood vaccinations and therefore any GOP candidate has to disagree. I’m not sure which interpretation is accurate, but neither is exactly encouraging.

Changsha, China, 8.13 am. Our reader adds:

I have never been sure if this was your “personal” email or the blanket inbox for the Dish. I got very excited when I saw that the VFYW contest was still happening this week. Any crumb gives me hope things will go on.

“There’s not much money in the me-zine so far. In February, Amazon.com began a voluntary payment system that allows readers to put their money where their mouse is. By early April, Sullivan had taken in nearly $9,000 through the Amazon system and direct contributions. Kaus had just over $1,000 through Amazon; Postrel netted $630 through Amazon and $100 through PayPal, another payment system she uses; Marshall, the last of the group to add the pay feature, had less than $1,000. “Right now we’re a joke from a business standpoint,” says Sullivan. Two days after saying that, though, he met with his partner in New York to discuss “the next phase.” An archive of Sullivan’s book reviews is in the works, and perhaps an interactive book club. His site got 120,000 unique visitors in March. Soon, Sullivan says, he will try to tempt a sponsor,” – Brent Cunningham, Columbia Journalism Review, January 2002.

In the end, we got 30,000 of you.

If you click on the link, it will take you to a PDF file of all the early press on the Dish in the very first year or two. Robert Cameron, who helped me set this up at the turn of the century, found it in his files. It’s a time-capsule in many ways. Here’s a flavor:

Mr Sullivan is a “blogger” (short for web logger): one of the tens of thousands of individuals and small groups who publish such online diaries. The vast majority of web logs are little more than regularly updated letters to friends with rambling accounts of day-to-day life. Many see them as the latest incarnation of the personal website with family photos and holiday greetings that was briefly popular in the late 1990s. But a few dozen bloggers with broader interests, Mr Sullivan among them, have begun to attract much wider audiences.

Another:

Maybe in six months these me-zines will be dead. But maybe not. Maybe big media will scoop up the best ones. Maybe a group of writers will contribute to a single site, theoretically making it easier to sell ads and find sponsors. Maybe some will get popular enough on their own to have sponsors. “It’s a terrific forum,” says [Joanne] Jacobs. “The question is, Can it be sustained?”

I guess some things never change, do they?

(Photos of Dish readers used with their permission)

I asked @dinamartina if she’d had a chance to watch the #Seahawks and she responded, “Oh was their an aviary show? So sad I missed that.”

— stevenblum (@stevenblum) February 2, 2015

If someone had told me when I started this blog after a decade of campaigning for marriage equality in the 1990s, that the above ad would be playing in Alabama in 2015, I would have thought them nuts. And yet here we are.

The long-running thread gets another story:

I just read the psychotherapist’s take on the selfishness of suicide and would like to chime in with my own experience. My daughter was 16, and we had been going through several years of wildly uncontrolled behavior on her part. I came home one evening to find she had taken an overdose of my pain medication (the stuff was too strong for me, so it was left in my medicine chest). I dragged her to the car and was racing to the hospital yelling at her to stay awake.

At first I was soooo angry at her.

I thought this was another wild stupid stunt and how thoughtless she was. She started crying in the car and kept telling me how sorry she was. She didn’t want to hurt me – she just wanted her pain to stop.

At that moment, I realized I wasn’t angry any more – just desperately afraid. I sat with her all night holding her and loving her while she puked up pills. She clung to me like the baby she was.

The hospital staff kept asking her why she wanted to kill herself, and she kept telling them she really didn’t. She just couldn’t continue doing “this.” She was ultimately diagnosed as a rather severe bi-polar and spent three weeks in a mental hospital followed by three months of daily therapy. I also resolved that I would talk about her mental illness as if she had cancer or diabetes. I would not flinch when I related that she had been committed and I would not be ashamed that she was taking five medications to get through her day.

It was very difficult at first, but got easier. My husband and I thought if we “normalized” her condition instead of being ashamed and perpetuating the stigma, then our daughter would be happier in her skin too.

She’s now 20 years old and we have the best relationship ever. We have that shared night in the hospital and all those years of therapy afterward. I’m just so grateful that my daughter survived her “disease” and will continue to count every day with her a blessing.

Another reader, on the other hand, fears the worst:

I have a loved one who contemplates suicide on a daily basis and has been battling depression for years. If he killed himself it would devastate everyone in his family, including me, along with many other people. The last thing I want to do is take away ANY of the arguments that are keeping him alive, and if the idea that suicide is a selfish act is one of them then, right or wrong, the last thing I want anyone to do is to undermine that idea.

I have noticed that, in the time since Robin Williams killed himself, there have been many articles and discussions that portray suicide as the natural, inevitable, and sometimes even appropriate outcome in people who have struggled for many years with severe depression. This may be very helpful thinking regarding those who have lost the fight, but it is incredibly damaging to those of us who are trying to keep our loved ones and ourselves alive.

Depression traps people in the belief that things will never get better. To say that this is in fact a truth that only suicide can end is very harmful. Even if that supposedly only applies to a specific person, many depressed people (like my loved one) feel that surely it applies to them as well. And in those times, the last grasp on survival is often the feeling that suicide is selfish and would harm those left behind.