I am in the process of writing a post about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog that I was going to share with some friends who don’t read it. I started thinking about points he’d made that I wanted to include, and tried to find the posts where he made those points by way of Google. Then I started going through his old posts page by page, and I realized that the whole is far more than the sum of the parts. He’s written some great sentences, and great paragraphs, and great posts, but the blog is a body of work that reinforces, illuminates, and colors the parts that one might want to pick out and share. This may be the first time I’ve had a real sense that blogs really are a new form of writing, different than even a regular column. People may appreciate the posts I select, but they won’t have the same relationship I have with the writing, having read it as it was published over a number of years.