A year after Hurricane Sandy hit our shores, tragedy strikes New York City again: pioneer blogger Andrew Sullivan is leaving. "I loved New York City with a passion," he writes today, "until I tried to live here."

It’s been over a year and I am horribly home-sick. So we’re going to move back to DC next month. I miss my DC apartment (1500 square feet of a school classroom I got for a steal in 1991); I miss my friends, many of whom I’ve known for decades, and some of whom I bonded deeply with during the plague years of my 20s and 30s; I miss the relative calm; I miss the green; I miss the increasing vibrancy of the city – which somehow doesn’t make it harder to live in. I miss the oases of quiet and the energy of a new emerging city that is both a second Brooklyn and a global hub of media and politics.

We all must wander in the desert before returning to the temple. But few undergo as many trials as Sullivan did in his year here in the third world: The wrong couch was delivered to his apartment. He couldn't find an outlet at Starbucks ("like rush-hour in Calcutta"). He was forced to blog from Dunkin Donuts. He dropped his iPad at the barbershop.

And yet, despite such misfortune, it was also a time for triumph—for himself, and for his frontier gazette, The Daily Dish. "October’s final numbers," he writes in a blog post today, "were 1.2 million unique visitors and 7.7 million page-views." (Sullivan will have missed his self-determined 2013 revenue target by $70,000, something like a year's rent in a Chelsea two-bedroom.)

But a blog seen by 1.2 million people deserves to be run from a city that will appreciate that number. And there, twinkling in the distance, four hours down I-95, is Second Brooklyn: a global hub of media and politics. What more could a blogger ask for? Farewell, Sully. We'll always miss you.