For reasons both mundane

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For reasons both mundane and deeply personal, I want to get back to the discussion of current events which is the normal subject matter of this site. First, though, I want to thank everyone who wrote in in response to my post about my father’s death. Your thoughts and sentiments strengthened me and helped me put my grief and my father and my life into a deeper context. And as much as that I want to thank everyone who took the time to read about him and who he was.

Writing, if you do enough of it, can become a way of living. And writing about my dad’s passing has helped me to begin to make some sense of it. But I mainly spent the time explaining what had happened because I wanted people who didn’t know him to know who he was. So thank you for letting me tell you about him.

Second, let me thank the people I work with. After the phone call I described in yesterday’s post, I sat at my desk for a bit, then looked out the window at the back of our office. Then I called Paul Kiel over to my desk, asked him to sit down and then told him, matter-of-factly because I couldn’t think of any other way to say it, that my dad had just died, that I was going to have to be away for a while and that I needed him to run things in my absence. I mentioned a few things he’d need to keep an eye on. And then I left and basically disappeared for two weeks.

To give you a sense of my state of mind, one of the things I didn’t mention or that didn’t occur to me was who would fill in for me at TPM. He suggested that maybe he should try to find a substitute. And I told him that would probably be a good idea.

Over the last year or two I’ve been trying to make TPM into more than just this site. And it was a source of pride to me that it continued chugging along and even making news in my absence. Equally, it was a great gift not to have to worry about this enterprise while I was away and to have confidence and trust in the people in whose hands I’d left it. It was a gift to be able to forget.

So let me thank Paul and Justin Rood and Greg Sargent and also the interns, who are a critical part of our operation, who helped run things over the last two weeks: Ben Craw, Rachel Weiner, Jeff Hughes, Eric Kleefeld and Will Menaker.

Finally, of course, to my wife, Millet, who held me together in my grief, as no one else could have.

I think I’ll write more about this. Because I don’t think I’m the same person I was on the 22nd. And I will try to reply personally to as many of your beautiful notes and letters as I am able to. (But please know that I have read every last one.) But for now, back to the usual fare.

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