For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.

I think professional sports, football, to use it as an example, it’s fundamentally a form of entertainment.

It was actually a very nice little book done by a gift book company. They illustrated it with pictures from 1920s football, before there were face guards.

Stereotypes involving Christian identity, Christian persecution is so far back in history now that no one fears it being revived, unless you live in China, I guess.

I behaved poorly by starting this whole thing and I made some mistakes in dealing with it, and they made some mistakes in dealing with me, and taking down all my stuff was probably one of them.

I’m working seven days a week in the fall. I couldn’t possibly keep that up. This is only for the fall. In the last couple of years I’ve tended to do most of my serious writing in the winter, when there’s nothing going on with football.

I didn’t view myself as attacking the boss. I viewed my boss at ESPN as the publisher and president of ESPN.

But by showing us live coverage of every bad thing happening everywhere in the world, cable news makes life seem like it’s just an endless string of disasters – when, for most people in most places today, life is fairly good.

For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.

I’m a smart guy, I know the history of this issue and why people care about it.

But if you could make that mistake and press the send button and the entire world sees it forever.

And then ESPN fired me. I did not think that was a fitting punishment.

Now, for pure bloggers, for individual people who are just posting their own thoughts, they would still run the same risk of saying something wrong or embarrassing, but they wouldn’t harm their institutions by doing so.

Everyone needs a certain amount of money. Beyond that, we pursue money because we know how to obtain it. We don’t necessarily know how to obtain happiness.

I think the thing that I most appreciate now is that stereotypes involving Jewish identity activate fears of persecution that exist in the present day.

I don’t think there are many larger lessons to be found in sports.

Even though Rush is not me and the situations were very different, I think, in the Rush Limbaugh thing, ESPN was criticized for not acting, and you remember that after a couple days of controversy over Rush.

And if there was something, suppose I wanted to write something really damning or embarrassing about one of the owners, that would really be a problem on the NFL’s site.

Torture numbers, and they’ll confess to anything.

It was Orwellian. I completely disappeared, and disappeared the same day. It was by early that evening when the Times story ran. That was an overreaction. All human beings under pressure behave poorly.

Inevitably, these sorts of things are going to come back to blow up in people’s faces.

Heroic people take risks to themselves to help others. There’s nothing heroic about accepting $5 million to go out and run around chasing a ball, although you may show fortitude or those other qualities while you do it.

I think that might have been an element in it, and people have asked me that very thing. Remember, Disney is the majority shareholder, but it is not an operating division of Disney.

Jewish persecution is a historical memory of the present generation and people fear it in the present day, and that’s why those references are so much more powerful. I just understand that better now.

You know, some of the good part of blog theory was that blogs would be like diaries that the world could read. They would be spontaneous, whatever pops into your mind, as a diary would be.