Andrew Sullivan, Blogger World’S Best Blogger? Andrew Sullivan’S Views Are Predictable in Only One Way: Always Stimulating
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Endangered Species • Comics Czar • Metabolic Scientists may-june 2011 • $4.95 The New Media Andrew Sullivan, Blogger World’s Best Blogger? Andrew Sullivan’s views are predictable in only one way: always stimulating. Andrew Sullivan by Jesse Kornbluth in his “blog cave” 34 May - June 2011 t was noon in washington, d.C., when the shooting be- partner of a website with five million monthly readers. But when gan in Tucson. Across the country, reporters and media ex- the writer in question has a blog that’s more popular than the ecutives rushed to cover the story of the gunman, the Con- websites of many publications, it’s clear that Newsweek/Beast got gresswoman he shot at close range, and the 14 other victims. something equally important in this deal. But the news couldn’t reach one of the Internet’s most impor- “The Dish has twice as many readers as the New Republic and tant writers. For Andrew Sullivan, M.P.A. ’86, Ph.D. ’90, the more than National Review,” Sullivan says. And on the Atlantic site, editor of a blog called TheDish.com, the weekend is a time the Dish also ruled. Some days, according to Alexa.com, which for rest, and having teed up on Friday afternoon a half-dozen measures site traffic on the Internet, the Daily Dish accounted for evergreen posts for Saturday, he had turned off his communi- more than half of the visitors to TheAtlantic.com. In cold num- cation devices and was sleeping in. bers: Andrew Sullivan—one blogger, with a small budget and a Sullivan had been lightly ill that week, so he slept unusually minimal staff—has presented Tina Brown with a gift of about 1.3 Ilate, until almost two in the afternoon. Before he was quite ready million Internet readers. to deal with the world, he checked his mailbox—and woke up fast. Along with the news of the shooting was an urgent ques- Blogging Brahmin tion from readers: Andrew, where are you? AmeriCan media have three Castes. At the top is “The Vil- Sullivan winced. He e-mailed his four young assistants: “We lage,” a term created by a progressive blogger who calls herself have to go cable”—that is, pump out blog posts 24/7. Then he “Digby” to describe a rarefied league of highly paid bold-faced climbed four unpainted wooden steps to what anyone else would names—think David Brooks, Peggy Noonan, Howard Kurtz— call a large windowed closet and he calls “the blog cave.” He who move easily between print columns and television pun- pulled a velvet curtain shut to seal himself off from his husband ditry. In the middle is the working press, a stressed-out group and their beagles, settled into an armchair with his laptop, and of reporters and columnists employed by increasingly desperate began a siege of blogging that would last six days. newspapers and magazines; to their daily tasks has been added Sullivan and his team had worked like this before. During blogging on their publications’ websites. At the bottom are blog- the 2010 protests in Iran, they had scoured Facebook messages, gers. Twitter bleats, Al Jazeera dispatches, and Iranian blog posts. Most of the Internet’s 150 million blogs serve up highly per- The eclectic charm of the Dish (formerly TheDailyDish)—poems, sonal dispatches, the equivalent of those year-end letters that ar- philosophical and religious speculation, photographs from the rive in Christmas cards. Very few of those bloggers post news and windows of readers, the latest Sarah Palin outrage, and videos by views as a primary activity—there’s no money in it. So blogging The Pet Shop Boys—disappeared. The site became all Iran, all the as a professional journalistic activity really involves at most a few time, and the Dish quickly became the Web’s go-to site for news thousand independent writers. and context. In the process, the site’s traffic spiked. These elite bloggers are serious and knowledgeable, but they The Dish’s coverage of the Tucson shootings paralleled its Iran are often described as the untouchables of American media—un- coverage. While other bloggers ascribed blame, Sullivan filtered employed, unemployable pajama-clad slackers who live with their new reports, asked important questions, grieved for the vic- parents and tap out overwrought screeds on basement computers. tims—and avoided partisan speculation. Once again, his audi- That view is not the verdict of critics who have visited the sites of ence grew. elite bloggers; it’s a media god’s throwaway line. (NBC News anchor But this round of blogging was different. Andrew Sullivan is a Brian Williams, for example: “All of my life, developing credentials lifelong asthma sufferer. He has sleep apnea, and at night wears a to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named mask connected to a machine that regulates his breathing. And Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the since 1993, he has been HIV-positive. Although Sullivan isn’t the efficiency apartment in two years.”) Beyond a general disdain for only writer with HIV to have survived for almost two decades, the Internet, the reason is often personal—bloggers don’t just write no other HIV-positive writer publishes anything like 300 blog about politicians, they also attack the media. And because media posts a week, year after year; he needs to monitor his health. potentates don’t welcome criticism, they lash back. Shortly after the week of Tucson, the Internet’s Iron Man Andrew Sullivan also moves easily from blogging and print faltered—exhaustion and an unusually cold winter created so journalism to TV, but his resemblance to the Villagers ends there. much bronchial distress that his doctor ordered him to take to For one thing, his views are ever-changing and all over the map; his bed. During his unprecedented two-week silence, govern- a TV producer can’t count on him to speak for any one constitu- ments toppled in the Middle East. While his assistants did great ency. For another, although he has a résumé that qualifies him as work, friends teased Sullivan: “Andrew, you’re missing an entire a media elitist, he has dramatically redefined his idea of success. revolution.” At 47, his concerns are no longer those of the overachieving won- When Sullivan returned, he had news of his own—he was der boy he used to be. leaving the Atlantic website, his home for the last four years, to Sullivan earned a first-class degree (equivalent to a summa) in join TheDailyBeast.com and Newsweek magazine, both edited by modern history and modern languages at Oxford, where, in his Tina Brown. In the traditional media paradigm, it’s a promotion second year, he was president of the Oxford Union, the debat- for a writer to move from the website of a highbrow monthly ing body that claims to be “the most illustrious student society magazine like the Atlantic (circulation: 400,000) and the occasion- in the world.” He won a Harkness Fellowship to the Kennedy al article for that publication to America’s second-largest weekly School in 1984; back in London, he interned at the think tank of news magazine (circulation: 1.5 million) that has just become the one of his idols, Margaret Thatcher. He returned to Harvard in Photographs by Jim Harrison Harvard Magazine 35 He had made a mistake—“the darkest political misjudgment of my life.” Now he had to pay for it. 1989 to write his doctoral thesis, “Intimations Pursued: The Voice said, ‘Screw it.’ I knew I wanted even more to be happy, have love of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott,” which and sex.” won the government department’s Toppan Prize, for the best He had, by his account, a great deal of sex. In 1996, when he dissertation “upon a subject of Political Science.” In 1991, when revealed he had contracted HIV, a friend asked whom he had he was just 27, he was named editor of the New Republic; under his unprotected sex with. In Love Undetectable, his 1998 book about leadership, the magazine grew impressively in both circulation “friendship, sex, and survival,” Sullivan writes that he admitted and advertising. He left the New Republic five years later, “at the it could have been anyone. His friend was incredulous: “Anyone? tail end of a series of differences,” saysNew Republic owner Martin How many people did you sleep with, for God’s sake?” Peretz, Ph.D. ’66. Sullivan moved on to write books and become a In the book, Sullivan held nothing back. “Too many. God contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a colum- knows. Too many for meaning and dignity to be given to every nist for the Sunday Times (of London). one; too many for love to be present at each; too many for sex to To see such precocity is to be mystified—why would a writer be very often more than a temporary release from debilitating with such impeccable credentials cast his lot more with bloggers fear and loneliness.” than with people of his own kind? That is classic Sullivan: the unsparing candor, the over-sharing, “He’s Catholic and gay and an exile,” says the writer and femi- the spiritual afterthought. Three years later, when he started to nist historian Naomi Wolf. “That’s all very helpful—his back- blog, that kind of writing would become his signature—and, for ground forces him not to be confined in any single identity.” all its outsider status, the first really comfortable identity he’d Sullivan is bald, bearded, and bespectacled; in photographs he known.