During this time, I wrote many articles that were published in all kinds of newspapers around the world, including The Financial Times, The Toronto Star, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Spiked, etc. Many of these articles were among the top articles of these various publications, in terms of engagement, clicks, etc. and several of them were influential in policy discussions, being cited in other large circulation publications, etc. I credit this to the fact that I spend a long time preparing every article, both in terms of thinking about its originality and in terms of fact-checking.

My aim at that time was primarily to provide people with information that wasn't being covered elsewhere, or, in the case of opinion articles, to represent an argument that wasn't being made elsewhere. This is very different than the kind of 'explanatory' article that dominates publications today. To make an argument or a case implies that you are doing so within the context of a whole array of arguments and counter-arguments. Weird as this may sound, your purpose isn't really to convince the reader, and it certainly isn't to bludgeon them into submission. The purpose is to represent a position well enough that it gets a fair hearing in the court of public opinion. 

I would also like to think that one of my great contributions to humanity at this time was pioneering the use of memes in the middle of articles. Sure everyone does it now. You're welcome, world. 

So why did I stop?

I could say 'ridiculous levels of censorship', but it's something more than that. For one things, most of the editors I worked with were rapidly replaced by a crowd that was about half a century younger and that came with a completely different concept of the function of media.

It was no longer a conversation in which your value as a commentator lay in your ability to articulate (in other words, your technical skill), but rather in your willingness to fight for a particular side, that side being the US Democratic Party. One's loyalty to this side was simply presumed, even if, as in my case, you weren't even American.

Things went from a state where I would write an article entirely of my own volition and it would be on a site within hours to multiple stages of edits where 20-year old English students called things like Sunshine Wind-dancer Mackintosh-Smith attempted to carefully 'craft my message' into a completely different message than the one I was trying to give. One that was in fact, as I pointed out many a time, their message that they were free to get out in their article. But this was in vain.

Things went from a state where I would write an article entirely of my own volition and it would be on a site within hours to multiple stages of edits where 20-year old English students called things like Sunshine Wind-dancer Mackintosh-Smith attempted to carefully 'craft my message' into a completely different message than the one I was trying to give. One that was in fact, as I pointed out many a time, their message that they were free to get out in their article. But this was in vain.