I’ve had this incarnation of my blog since 2009 when I moved away from Google Sites (I think?), which is long gone. When I first started this blog, it was more about politics than technology, because at the time I was still working in politics. A big part of that was linking to other blog posts and creating the most finely curated blogroll, as this was long before social media sites like Facebook, X, and the like.
The early aughts were the zenith of blogging for several reasons: the aforementioned lack of major social media platforms, the inherent openness of blogs as a medium, and the lack of paywalls pre-enshittification of the web. I feel badly for those people who have only known the internet post 2015 or so: it truly was a better place before.
One of the bloggers I had in my blogroll, and read daily, was Kevin Drum. He started blogging as Calpundit in the early years of the 2000s, then moved to Washington Monthly and Mother Jones before finally ending up back on his own. Kevin died last Friday after living with multiple myeloma for over a decade, about which he blogged continuously.
Kevin was a data-driven blogger, always posting charts and graphs to get his point across. One of his biggest pet peeves was not indexing for inflation, and the lack of such indexing drove many headlines that turned out to be no big deal in the end once you accounted for it. He was also a huge believer in the lead-crime hypothesis and posted countless articles about it. I didn’t always agree with him, but he always had the data to back up what he was saying, unlike most pundits.
The other thing that he was famous for was starting Friday Cat Blogging, where he would share pictures of his cats to end the week. In memory of Kevin, people across the blogosphere are Friday Cat Blogging, and here’s my addition:
This is Vanya (black cat) and Sasha (grey tabby), or Ваня and Саша in their native language. Sasha turned 16 last Friday, and Vanya is almost 5. They are often found cuddled up together with Vanya using Sasha as his pillow.
Below is the late Misha (Миша), who died in 2019:
RIP Kevin, and thanks for all the cats.