And the World Shrinks Again

But this time it's not due to the cancer.

For the past ten years or so, much of the information that enters my brain has come through the filter of Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Dish. I started reading Sullivan around the time of the second Bush administration, and never really stopped. 

A conservative, gay, Catholic, pot-smoking, Bush supporter who subsequently supported Obama, Sullivan was something of a unique breed. His blog was incredibly smart and, most unusually, you could actually see him thinking his way through things in real time. It wasn't unusual for him to post some argument, spend a few days posting response from readers explaining why his argument was stupid, and then post a correction to his original thinking. This habit reached its pinnacle with Sullivan's book, I Was Wrong, an extended mea culpa for his support of the Iraq War.

And I have to admit: it was somewhat gratifying to see a public intellectual move from supporting George W. Bush to realizing that, by and large, the current Republican party is, at best, a bunch of loons, and, at worst, Dick Cheney.

But the political thinking was only part of Sullivan's repertoire. There were Views From My Window (a daily photo taken by some reader somewhere in the world), Mental Health Breaks (selections of weird videos posted each afternoon at 4:20), Saturday content that tended toward the prurient, Sundays spent wrestling with arguments about God and religion, and a million other things that struck Sullivan's -- and eventually his staff's -- fancy.

And on Friday, they shut it all down. After fifteen years, the pace grew too much and they decided they'd done all they set out to do. So the blog now exists as nothing but an archive. 

And when they announced the impending closure, all I could think was, It figures. 

I'm not sure I have the energy to seek out a replacement, and I'm not sure I could find one if I tried. So the world gets smaller again.