From the Josh Archives: Bittersweet Nothing, originally published 4.19.1999

One of the things that happens in the world of digital media is that your published writings are always at your fingertips and can vanish in an instant. Some publications go under entirely and their back catalog disappears. Today I was discussing a new Maureen Dowd column about the “coup”, as she put it, against Joe Biden (good lord…) and I was reminded that the first piece of journalism I ever published in an actual publication was about Dowd. I tried to find it and realized it was no longer online. But I didn’t want to leave it there so I went back to my email archive, found the emails with the person who edited it and got the original URL. With the original URL I was able to track it down on the WayBack Machine. My memory was a bit off. But I was close. It wasn’t the first piece I published. That was two years earlier. I conflated the two because they were both published in the same publication, Feed Magazine, one of the great now-departed publications from the first wave of Internet journalism.

I was excited to find it. It was a piece I was kind of proud of because I was still very early in my journalism career and I was able to hit a number of themes that were important to me. Reading it again I realize that a number of those are ones that have been constants through my writing at TPM. I realized that since I own the copyright and the publication was defunct (for at least twenty years) I should simply republish it here at TPM so it’s resurrected digitally and I can refer back to it whenever needed.

If you’re interested you can read it here too after the jump. It was published on April 19th, 1999 on the occasion of Dowd receiving a Pulitzer for her commentary on the Lewinsky scandal. The original, as published 25 years ago, you can find after the jump.