have never tried to be popular,” declares Andrew Sullivan in the introduction to his career-spanning new collection, Out on a Limb: Selected Writing, 1989–2021. But Sullivan is a popular writer. In fact, by any reasonable standard, he is and for many years has been a very popular writer. He gained instant notoriety when he—an out, gay conservative—was named editor of the New Republic in 1991 at age twenty-eight. His blog, The Dish, was a powerhouse of political commentary for the first decade and a half of the new millenium; among his dedicated readers was President Obama, who was given a special login to circumnavigate the paywall. And since being forced out of New York Magazine last summer and launching his Substack newsletter, Sullivan has quadrupled his salary and gained somewhere in the vicinity of one hundred thousand subscribers. He is a familiar face on CNN, MSNBC, and Real Time with Bill Maher.
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