"Also, something of a contentious relationship can develop between bloggers and our readers."

"We�ve invited readers into our lives. But, it�s always been the case that we�re not showing them everything and when that becomes clearer at certain times, they get angry. A lot of readers wanted to know every single detail of my divorce and when I refused to satisfy that desire they got really angry. Just because I�ve made a living telling stories about myself, doesn�t mean I owe you my life... [W]hen I published 'Upward and Ahead,' I got this email from a woman who said, 'This is the hugest betrayal, we�ve invested our time in you when we could have been following other bloggers, you owe it to us to continue,' and then added, 'How dare you take your children away from us!' I just sat there with my mouth open. I�d like to point out that that�s not an isolated instance. I want to say I understand, I mean I got really mad when Breaking Bad ended, I was like, 'Fuck you guys for taking this out of my life,' but at the end of the day of course I realize that Breaking Bad is not mine."

From "Heather �Dooce� Armstrong Talks Life After Mommy-Blogging."

"I don't believe in Twitter."

The post title is a quote from me from that clip. This morning � the day after the dialogue � I'm contemplating the line to the tune of the old John Lennon song: "I don't believe in I-ching/I don't believe in Bible/I don't believe in Tarot..." etc., etc. "The dream is over...."

"The decapitated body of a Brazilian blogger known for denouncing corrupt politicians has been found in a rural zone in south-eastern Minas Gerais state..."

... in Brazil.

Evany Jos� Metzker, 67, was reported missing five days before his body was found... �His hands were tied behind his back and his body showed signs of torture,� a police press officer said, adding that the murder was apparently motivated by Metzker�s recent investigations into child prostitution and drug trafficking.

Hazing Justice Kagan.

In The American Prospect's long article about Justice Kagan, here's how she describes the role of the "Junior Justice" (i.e., the Supreme Court Justice with the least seniority) in the conferences (where only the Justices are present):

"So somebody has to do two things. The first is that somebody has to take notes, so you can then go out and tell people what just happened, and I take notes. That�s the Junior Justice�s job. The other thing is that you have to answer the door when there�s a knock on the door. Literally, if there is a knock on the door and I don�t hear it, there will not be a single other person who will move. They just all stare at me until I figure out, �Oh, I guess somebody knocked on the door.� These two jobs, the note-taking and the door-opening�you can see how they can get in the way of each other, right? You might say, what do people knock on the door for? Why does anybody knock on the door? Knock, knock�I�m not going to name names��Justice X forgot his glasses.� Knock, knock, �Justice Y forgot her coffee.� There I am, hopping up and down. I think that�s a form of hazing, don�t you?"

IN THE COMMENTS: First, some people aren't picking up the good humor in Kagan's storytelling. But more importantly, Michael Arndorfer says: "You blogged this in November. Only also tagging it as bullying." What? This is a new article. Is the new article passing along an old quote of Kagan's? I found the post from last November: "Hazing and hunting on the Supreme Court." It has a very similar, but not exactly similar quote (from People Magazine):

"I take notes as the Junior Justice � and answer the door when there's a knock. Literally, if there's a knock on the door and I don't hear it, there will not be a single other person who will move. They'll all just stare at me. You might ask, Who comes to the door? Well, it's knock, knock, 'Justice X forgot his glasses.' And knock, knock, 'Justice Y forgot her coffee.' There I am hopping up and down. That's a form of hazing, right?"

2 questions: 1. Did The American Prospect lift the quote from People (and change it) or does Kagan keep retelling the story? Answer: The latter, probably. It's a better explanation of all the little differences. 2. Should I be ashamed of myself for not noticing I'd already blogged this or proud of the consistency of my taste in bloggability and method of blogging? Answer: Both!

ADDED: My answer to Question 1 failed to account for the quirks of transcriptions from recorded speech to text. This is a topic about which Janet Malcolm wrote in the important book "The Journalist and the Murderer" (the best book about journalism that I've ever read):
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"I get pity links from Instapundit."

Says Mickey Kaus. (Nice to see him on Bloggingheads again. And here's his blog, where he seems to really care about getting visitors, so, please, go pity-visit him.)

"Hi, Juan. What is 'a knowledgeable road'?"

I respond, at 6:03 a.m., to a commenter who stopped by yesterday at a post I wrote in August 2013 called "The philosophy of travel... the psychology of travel..."

Was this a squandered topic by a terrible thinker and writer? Did this post make any sense with its never ending questions? Did the tone of the writer make you want to jump off a bridge for being so condescending and close-minded? Did you once think "I never want to travel with this person. She has got to be biggest killjoy. She probably likes Olive Garden."? Could I have been better served asking a child, who probably has a better sense of travel and basic writing skills? Does this person think very highly of herself because she asks rather meaningless questions instead of leading her readers down a knowledgeable road? Again, she's probably the worst travel buddy, right?

"The problem with free speech is that it�s hard, and self-censorship is the path of least resistance."

"But, once you learn to keep yourself from voicing unwelcome thoughts, you forget how to think them � how to think freely at all � and ideas perish at conception. Washiqur Rahman and Avijit Roy had more to fear than most of us, but they lived and died as free men."

The last paragraph of George Packer's New Yorker essay titled "Mute Button."

ADDED: I looked at the blog after publishing this post and saw that it sat atop a post about an American law professor who insisted that it was necessary for him to hide his Christianity in the United States.

Here's a Bible verse for timid Christians: "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery."

"Every summer, a beehive would form behind the backboard."

"Shooting the ball from close meant a close call with a swarm of bees. So naturally, I would shoot from far away, let the ball land, then sprint and go grab it and run back to my spot. Every once in a while, a bee would get me, but it never stopped me from shooting."

From Frank Kaminsky's "remarkable blog," quoted in a Washington Post article titled "Frank Kaminsky, Wisconsin basketball�s Napoleon Dynamite, and the triumph of the goofy."

"Here�s my perfect blog post. There�s a story in the news. People are interested. I know something other people don't..."

"... about this general area of law, and I can say it in a few paragraphs that I can just whip out. When a reader says, 'Huh, I hadn�t ever thought about that. I hadn�t seen this precedent. I hadn�t been aware of that legal doctrine. I hadn�t realized how this analogy would fit,' that makes me feel that I�ve done what I became an academic to do, which is to spread ideas."

Says Eugene Volokh, quoted in "Right Side of the Law: Eugene Volokh�s Global Influence/The wunderkind-turned-law professor is that L.A. anomaly: an influential conservative blogger."

The "wunderkind" part includes having his IQ tested at 206 when he was 12 and
� his words �  "socially inept" and "goofy," about which he says: "Kids who fit my profile have a difficult adolescence even in a normal junior high school and high school."

IN THE COMMENTS: Unknown says he thought that quote in the post title was about me, but it's clearly not my idea of the perfect blog post for myself. It's something I do sometimes, but it's not what I like to do or hope to do and it's not at all the energy behind this blog. The classic example of what I'm trying to do with this blog is the 2005 post "Tattoos remind you of death." I don't need a tattoo saying "'Tattoos remind you of death' reminds you how to blog" to remember that.

Andrew Sullivan says blogging � 7 hours a day, day after day � "was killing me."

And that's why he quit.

Quit if you need to, and I appreciate what you gave us over the years, Andrew, but 7 hours of work a day is just not that grueling.

"And inevitably, for those seven hours or more, I was not spending time with any actual human being, with a face and a body and a mind and a soul."

Sullivan said the job resulted in lost friendships and minimal contact with his family. He said his husband, whom Sullivan married in 2007, called himself a "blog widow."

There are 24 hours in a day. Work 7 hours and sleep 7 hours, and there are still 10 hours left. The numbers just don't add up.

Now, I can see how a writer can burn out. The energy needs to come from somewhere to make those words. It's not the same as using manual skills to make something or fix something or doing routine clerical work, which you can bang out for 7 hours a day whether you mind is a blank or a fuzz. You need the spirit, and if the spirit dies and you labor on, maybe you do feel that it's killing you. There might be something about taking on a staff that you need to pay and accepting subscription money that makes it all too obligatory and not intrinsically valuable. But if it is intrinsically valuable, I don't think 7 hours a day, even 7 days a week, is all that hard, and I don't see why it would leave your husband aggrieved. I don't see why it would leave you feeling that you are not spending time with any actual human being.

"The frustrating/strange/down right annoying thing is, I frequently hear things like 'that's not a real job'...:

"... 'you can't possibly make enough money doing that!,' 'that's only a temporary thing, right?' and '"what are you going to do after this?' But what is a 'real job'?.... Is blogging not a real job because you can't go to school for it or because you don't need a resume to do it? Is it not a real job because you don't need an interview to fill the position or because you don't personally know anyone who does it?... Whatever your answer I assure you, blogging is a real job.... I pay all my own bills with the money I make blogging.... It needs to be acknowledged that any way of supporting yourself even if it isn't traditional, so long as you aren't stealing or hurting anyone, is a real job. It seems awfully silly to criticize someone for making a living doing something they love and enjoy, doesn't it?..."

 Writes The Dainty Squid (on a blog I quite like).

I'm all for giving respect to those who can make their living doing free-lance writing (such as blogging), but part of the respect I'd like to give is that you are free lance, you are independent, you have avoided getting a job.

You ask the question "What is a job?" You made that the centerpiece of your thinking, apparently because you're letting people get into your head, demeaning you with the statement that you don't have a job, and that tracks you into arguing for a broader meaning for the word "job" so that what you do gets to be "a job."

But why do you want that? Because it's the word other people use to make you feel bad about your freedom and success?

I'd say: Get the upper hand in these conversations with jerks. You're lucky not to have to work for somebody else in the structured position known as "a job" (to use the narrow definition of the word you'd prefer to stretch). You're an entrepreneur.

When did the job become the standard of a worthy, successful life?

ADDED: I'd say more about the word "job," but it was only a couple months ago that I wrote "5 things about the word 'job.'"

"Welcome to the new, Twitterized kausfiles.com. Tweets and blog items in the same stream."

"Why do this? 1) I spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter. 2) Twitter was and is killing blogging. What used to be the fun short blog items are now tweets, leaving only the duller, long items for blogs � a drift toward dreariness accelerated by the need to attract links by writing Important Posts, and by Google�s apparent decision to favor longer posts in its search results (on the highly questionable theory that short posts are inherently less informative). I always thought readers preferred shorter items. The hell with Google. This new format should, in theory, put the fun items back on the blog...."

I'm glad to see that Mickey Kaus is thinking about format, after his rift with The Daily Caller, which has just about the ugliest format of any website that I visit (or used to visit, when Mickey was there).

I'm sorry I read about Google favoring longer posts. I put effort into making posts short and tend to write posts that are around 300 words or less, and Mickey links to a place that says you get better Google ranking if you go over 500 words and that 1500 words is ideal. In other words, blog posts should look like newspaper op-eds. It's easy to pad things out like that. But machines must be programmed to find what machines can find, and then writers program themselves to do what the machines will value. How dismal!
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Some people have noticed the new subscription button, and they're subscribing to this blog by making a small monthly contribution:

I want you to know that I see this, and it's encouraging to me. What do you get for subscribing? You get the same thing everyone else gets � the blog, the prolific daily writing � plus one more thing: the good feeling of being one of the committed supporters. Will this blog go on forever? It can't! What keeps it going, aside from the simple biological survival of the organism known as Althouse? Even I can't say. But seeing the set of readers who have subscribed is just very encouraging, and I wanted to thank you.

"Today is September 30th, also known as Blasphemy Rights day."

"This day is dedicated to those who are systematically being persecuted, harassed, or killed for their simple expression of Freethought (more precisely, for their �blasphemous� views towards religion)."

Today, we state clearly that considering apostasy to be a criminal offense in state level in fact is an inexcusable offense. If being religious is someone�s right, then being critical to religion is also one�s right. There is nothing wrong to be critical to any idea or ideology, as CFI aptly put on its Blasphemy day banner � �Ideas do not need rights, People do�!

So wrote Avijit Roy on his blog Mukto Mona, on September 30, 2013.

Avijit Roy left his home in Atlanta for a speaking engagement in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Last Thursday:

As he walked back from the book fair, assailants plunged machetes and knives into Roy and his wife, killing him and leaving her bloodied and missing a finger.

Afterward, an Islamist group "Ansar Bangla-7" reportedly tweeted, "Target Down here in Bangladesh."