Days after Matt Drudge popped up to tell New York magazine about how he doesn't enjoy having sex with men, The New Republic looks into his descent into Howard Hughes-like isolation.

As Gabriel Sherman puts it, Drudge fears the media, which for some reason want to know things about the man who basically decides what will be on cable television every night.

"I don't know what the fuck is going on with him," says an anonymous magazine editor who used to be IM pals with Drudge. "Maybe I've talked to him once in the past six months. Even with e-mails, I don't get a response from the dude." Now Drudge supposedly only talks to Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Andrew Breitbart, which is just an awful, awful life.

A Drudge associate tells Gawker that Sherman's point—that Drudge is less talkative with his electronic contacts lately—is correct, but blames it on post-election burnout and exhaustion as opposed to fear of meddling reporters. As we noted a while back, Breitbart is no longer helping shoulder the burden of keeping the site up to date, so it makes sense that he's starting to wear out a bit."

He moved out of his condo at the Miami Four Seasons, Sherman suggests, in part because a Los Angeles Times reporter tried to reach him there by asking a concierge to slip a note under his door. "Reporters' means have been questionable," a friend of Drudge's told him.

Of course, Drudge has always been a notorious recluse, and the same week that he emerged to give his first on-the-record quote to a reporter in perhaps years seems like a strange time to come forward with a story about how he doesn't talk to anybody anymore. (Though it's not unlikely that Drudge, knowing that Sherman was working on a story premised on his solitary life, decided to undermine it by offering a public quote.)