Unless you live in China, “censorship” is mostly a hys­ter­i­cal trope on the inter­net, & if you delete a post or a com­ment, or ban an obnox­ious fool from post­ing on your blog, you will find your­self accused of it (ask the folks at Har­riet). But having deleted my post on the envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion caused by fac­tory farm­ing & com­mer­cial fish­ing, I prob­a­bly owe read­ers (all three of them) an expla­na­tion (not that I expect it will sat­isfy every­one).

In the Novem­ber Issue of The Atlantic, blog­ging king­pin Andrew Sul­li­van puts to words the inef­fa­ble plea­sure–and embar­rass­ing self-​exposure–of blog­ging. He lands on sev­eral beau­ti­ful for­mu­la­tions of the attrac­tion: the “instantly public” diary form, par­tic­i­pa­tion in the “online con­ver­sa­tion of humankind,” a “superficial medium” that “masked con­sid­er­able depth” via a single con­cep­tu­ally new tech­no­log­i­cal fea­ture, i.e., the hyperlink.

Sul­li­van strikes me as the per­fect blog­ger to con­sider the ontol­ogy of blog­ging, as his own blog, The Daily Dish, offers a per­fect exam­ple of the inevitable back­lash that comes from insta-writing.  His taste of crow was lead­ing a pas­sion­ate and emo­tional drum­beat up to the Iraq War in which he was guilty of nasty charges to war crit­ics and skep­tics, which he has since recanted and from which he con­tin­u­ally repents with an equally pas­sion­ate and emo­tional out­rage at the Bush administration’s tor­ture poli­cies and other crimes of war.