Got a very special email this morning from TPM Reader PM. Really kind of made my day. Hope it brightens yours too.
Hi Josh ,
Did you know there’s a whole person who owes his existence to you and TPM? You probably get stories like this all the time, but we thought you might appreciate this one anyway…
My part of this story began with Barack Obama’s keynote address at the 2004 DNC. I was blown away by Obama’s energy, clear speech, and pragmatism and started following his career (and later, his presidential campaign) closely. During the hotly contested 2007 primary season, a friend of mine referred me to TPM, and I was hooked.
Meanwhile, my now-husband Michal was working in Germany but had discovered TPM during a 6-year stint in California. As a Czech living in the United States during the Bush years, he found American politics “fascinating” (in both good and bad ways) and turned to TPM as a reliable source for understanding what was really going on behind the occasional train wreck.
Eventually, we stumbled into each other on TPM and decided to continue our conversation privately. Neither of us actually thought that we were anything more than electronic pen-pals until Michal’s employer sent him on a business trip to, of all places, my home town. It seemed like too good of coincidence to ignore, and we decided to meet in person. That was in August 2008. We were married in 2011, and then last September our son was born.
Although our story is full of lucky timing and coincidence, we would never have met without TPM. I would never have ended up living in Germany…and our son would never have been born.
So there you have it — journalism does change people’s lives… sometimes at least.
P.S. Here’s a picture of our son, a likely future TPM reader!
