Matthew Yglesias‘ eponymous blog turns three today. The link has the story of the blog’s origin, which involves neither a radioactive spider nor Gamma rays. Surprisingly, it doesn’t even involve mass quantities of alcohol.
Matt offers this interesting observation:
As people who follow my output here and for the Prospect have probably notices, I write pretty damn quickly. One thing I was fascinated and slightly horrified to learn as a became a more advanced undergraduate and had more substantive contact with grad students and professors was that a lot of people in academia — a trade that, fundamentally, involves a great deal of writing — don’t actually like the process of writing very much.
They like research. They like thinking about issues. They like forming ideas. But they don’t much care for the part where you actually need to write them down. I’ve been even more fascinated and weirded-out by the realization that many journalists (at least in the magazine realm) feel the same way. It’s the reporting, researching, thinking, etc. that they love. Sitting down to bang out a piece, however, strikes them as a chore. I’m not at all like that. I love to write. Perhaps it’s in the blood or something. So it always seemed to me that reading period was a very long time relative to the amount of work I needed to do. I would always get bored and antsy.
Indeed. As for myself, I enjoy both the reading and the writing, although I do tend to find long-form writing (books and very long articles) rather tedious.
