A Reader for The Dispatch

It’s not in my constitution to experience fanhood strongly — I never had strongly held favorite bands, athletes, and the like. I am more of a transient appreciator of whatever I’m reading or listening to in the present era. While that remains largely true, I have not experienced fanhood much more strongly than I do for The Dispatch. I find their pieces to be the pinnacle of opinion journalism.

The publication leans center-right, but I find that on the whole their coverage features strong critiques of the left and the right, generally reasoning from the tenets of liberalism (the liberal of liberal arts college, not left of center) rather than political platforms. Contributing authors typically view current events with a useful (but small) dose of history and political theory, and display a commitment to distinguishing between fact and perspective. Above all, they don’t back away from taking a strong stance, but are as quick to acknowledge areas of reasonable disagreement among rational people, and the magazine invites and aggregates those disagreements. As for personal style, the authors regard themselves with a humorful touch of self-disdain, which is apt for opinion journalists, especially idealistic ones.

My sense is their contributing authors feel similarly. David French laid out his own reasons for joining The Dispatch here, and they resonate. I disagree with French on plenty — most of all his earlier writing on homosexuality, much of which he has since walked back — but he has always treated the law with respect and reasoned openly through changes in his beliefs. He embodies a conservatism rooted in classical liberalism and pluralism, one that refuses to be conscripted into the culture war, so much so that he was attacked from the right for, as far as I can tell, being too bound to procedural norms and not sufficiently populist and combative toward ideological opponents. How dare he.

All that aside, reading their stuff on my phone sucks. So I made them an app. It had all of about 15 daily active users, mostly my friends and a few random people on Reddit who expressed interest.

I sent it to Steve and Jonah, who were big fans. They asked how I was getting access to the content; I let them know their public RSS feed was issuing all their premium content. My good-faith copyright infringement ended thereafter, but I had some calls with their designers to share some thoughts on how they ought to build the official version.

It did not turn me into an overnight millionaire or a syndicated Dispatch columnist, somehow, but it was a good time.