Happy 10th bloggiversary to Althouse

Happy 10th birthday to Althouse, the blog of my mom, Ann Althouse.

She's blogged every day since she started the blog on January 14, 2004. As she's pointed out:

I've written . . . on the hardest work days, on the day I wrecked my car, the day I had surgery, the day I drove 1235 miles in one day, and the day I got married.

The blog was originally called Marginalia, before she quickly changed it to her last name. Her first post explained:

I'm writing from Madison, Wisconsin, and Marginalia is a fictionalized name for Madison that I thought up a long time ago when I seriously believed I would write a fictionalized account of my life in Madison, Wisconsin. There is nothing terribly marginal about Madison, really, but I do like writing in the margins of books, something I once caused a librarian to gasp by saying. Writing in a blog is both less and more permanent than writing in the margin of a book.

She's posted an average of about 10 posts a day, with a total of over 36,000. Out of those tens of thousands, my favorite Althouse post might seem very minor. But to me it shows the essence of her blog. Why? Because if you got 100 bloggers to write a post about that Washington Post editorial, no one else would have written it that way. Most would have been forgettable and abstract, where Althouse was memorable and vivid.

She's blogged about drawing in Amsterdam, things she's never done, the difference between same-sex marriage and polygamy, the problem with "larger meaning," how to teach reading (with follow-ups here and here), gender bias, and her parents meeting in a war.

She's also appeared on video, talking about the Obamas (right before she voted in the 2008 primaries), singlehood, and sexuality.

Her explanation of why she started blogging:

I love writing quickly and openly and . . . I'd spent too much time reading the newspaper passively and without making myself decide what I really thought about various things. I wanted to force myself to take one more step and say something about the stories of the day. I'm not a partisan or an ideologue, so I didn't know automatically. It was only by making myself write a sentence or 2 that I found out what I really thought.

There's a daunting amount of content, about no one clear theme. But is there any theme? I think there is an unstated theme: saying what isn't said. Let's look at what people are saying. Let's stop and think about what they're notably not saying out loud. And let's take it upon ourselves to say it out loud. That's what I call "saying what isn't said," and that's what has always distinguished the Althouse blog from other blogs that are merely effective at saying the right things to please their audience. It's easy to look at what others are saying, pick the statements that appeal to us, and repeat them. We all do that sometimes. But those who do only that are missing something.

(If you want to support Althouse for free, search for stuff on Amazon by using the box at the top of the blog, to the right. Amazon rewards her for the referrals, at no cost to you.)