In yet another sign that Holland Cotter may have been right to debunk “the one-personality blog of yore,” Andrew Sullivan, the widely read and respected creator of The Dish, wrote today that he has “decided to stop blogging in the near future.”
Sullivan has posted almost daily for 15 years, leaving his host publication, the Daily Beast, in 2013 to set out on his own.
Here’s why he’s calling it quits:
I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again….Although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms.
I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.
I came close to killing CultureGrrl, so I have some sense of how Sullivan feels. The Art Writers Grant I received this year to support my blogging habit helped convince me to stay the course, while decreasing the frequency of my posts to make time for mainstream-media assignments (and, of course, for CultureGrandson). And my posts have become more “long-form” than the snippets with which I launched this enterprise.
Having lived so much of my life online for almost nine years, I sometimes wonder if I’ve lost my capacity for the long, quiet meditations that Sullivan says he craves. I’ll be interested to follow his professional progress. But I wonder if he will be able to completely resist the instant gratification of online punditry.
Note that Sullivan plans to stop blogging “in the near future.” As I discovered, it’s hard, if not impossible, to decisively pull the plug. What I don’t like about my current situation is that I still feel twinges of guilt on those days when I don’t post.
I’m my own worst taskmaster.