3!

Well, this blog began three years ago today on a cold winter's day (is there any other kind) in Cambridge, Massachusetts and I think it's served me well up until this much-milder winter's night in Washington, DC. Thanks to everyone for reading. Special thanks to the even-older bloggers who helped promote this site in the early days, and especially to the early-adopting journalist/bloggers who encouraged me to consider going pro. Hopefully, no one has any regrets.

UPDATE: A couple of people have inquired after my blogger origin story, so here it is below the fold. Kind of funny, I think:

In case anyone cares, the story of the blog. As Seth notes in comments, it was reading period at the time in school. Reading period was always my least-favorite time of year. There were no classes and basically nothing to do all day. I'd like to think that in normal places that would lead to a lot of debauchery. But this was Harvard, Land of the Pathetic Dork, so people weren't out having fun. Instead they were mostly shut into their little rooms or Lamont or wherever studying away and writing term papers. I was a philosophy concentrator (or "major" as the normal humans call it) so my workload was always heavily weighted toward writing papers. As people who follow my output here and for the Prospect have probably notices, I write pretty damn quickly. One thing I was fascinated and slightly horrified to learn as a became a more advanced undergraduate and had more substantive contact with grad students and professors was that a lot of people in academia -- a trade that, fundamentally, involves a great deal of writing -- don't actually like the process of writing very much.

They like research. They like thinking about issues. They like forming ideas. But they don't much care for the part where you actually need to write them down. I've been even more fascinated and weirded-out by the realization that many journalists (at least in the magazine realm) feel the same way. It's the reporting, researching, thinking, etc. that they love. Sitting down to bang out a piece, however, strikes them as a chore. I'm not at all like that. I love to write. Perhaps it's in the blood or something. So it always seemed to me that reading period was a very long time relative to the amount of work I needed to do. I would always get bored and antsy.

The January 2002 reading period was especially painful. I'd been seeing this girl since the spring/summer of 1999 or so, and she'd decided to go off and spend her junior spring in Oxford. Since we'd been dating since right before we started college, my non-girlfriend social life was a bit on the stunted side and tended to revolve around The Harvard Independent which was, of course, not publishing during reading period. So I was bored and depressed and had been reading blogs since the summer of '01. Starting with Kausfiles, through which I discovered TPM, Andrew Sullivan, and Virginia Postrel. Through Virginia's site, I became aware of the wonderful world of more amateurish blogging and figured, "hey, I can do that!" So I did. Eventually, the girlfriend dumped me and I broke up. But on the plus side when we were together she used to want to be a political pundit but was pessimistic about a young person's ability to break into the field. So in a sense, the whole enterprise has been driven by loneliness and then, later, the loftier sentiment of spite. But then, of course, there's the talent. The raw, awesome talent. And the connections and generally privileged background. But I like to think of it as mostly a mixture of talent and bitterness.

I do tend to forget, however, another key ingredient: Insomnia. People sometimes ask, "Matt, how do you get so much done?" The story, however, is all there in the time stamps. Here's one from 2:20 AM on January 10. After that, I read the final 20 pages of Stephen King's The Wolves of The Calla (tragically lowbrow) and went to sleep, only to wake up in town to shower, etc., take the Metro to work, buy a coffee, and do a post by 10:20 AM. Except that post followed a 9:52 AM Tapped post. So you see, not much sleep. I'm just that kind of guy.