In Honor of Kevin Drum: TNR Friday Cat Blogging
The New Republic (nprofile…6kn7)
//images.newrepublic.com/a27658b92b08b5d967b9dbf33ae331dbb5460a6b.jpeg?w=1400
The very sad news arrived this week that Kevin Drum, a liberal blogger who was one of the very first and best practitioners of the form, passed away March 7 at age 66 after a long battle with cancer. Kevin was a true pioneer, in two senses. First, when blogging became a thing in the early 2000s, he was one of the first to take up the form as an independent writer, starting the self-published CalPundit blog in 2001. Second, he was a pioneer in the sense that before that, he hadn’t even been a journalist—he’d worked at Radio Shack and in the software business.But he built a massive following, and he did so quickly. His voice was usually calm and measured, but his outrage—at the Iraq War, at growing inequality, at the rise of right-wing echo chamber—was clear. Kevin’s success, wrote Paul Glastris this week at The Washington Monthly, which picked up Kevin’s blog in 2004, represented “a kind of victory of democracy over snobbery. It proved that you can write incisively about national affairs without being in Washington, New York, or San Francisco. You can be an ordinary person living an everyday middle-class suburban life where you don’t rub elbows with influential journalists, academics, or financiers, yet write journalism that those sophisticates—and plenty of other ordinary Americans—read and respect.” He later joined Mother Jones, and then in 2021 returned to working independently.Kevin also made sure that his blog had its lighthearted moments, and the best-known of those was “Friday Cat Blogging”—a pretty much weekly feature of his entire blogging career when he posted pictures of his cats. It added a nice light touch that made his readers feel more personally connected to him and spawned many imitators. Today, The New Republic and other progressive outlets are doing our own Friday Cat Blogging, with photos below of staffers’ cats (and ex-cats), in Kevin’s honor.—Michael TomaskyOtis Tomasky (1990-2009), circa mid-2000s. Entered my life through the window of my fifth-floor walk-up apartment on the Upper West Side during the Persian Gulf War. Turned out he’d apparently sauntered down from the Bronx!—Michael TomaskyHer name is Jinjoo or Pearl and she is approximately 11 months old. I scooped her up as a stray from an abandoned mechanic shop in rural Georgia. Both the Georgia vet and the Brooklyn vet thought she was pregnant, but it turns out she just holds a lot of poop and has a weird-shaped body. She chewed through 2 of her pet medical suits after the spay, this was her 3rd one.—Joan YangThis is Chloe—much loved and much missed.—Kirsten DenkerThis is Finn and Clara. They are two-year-old littermates and extremely chaotic. You can tell that they are about to do something bad by the way they’re looking at me.—Jason LinkinsSadie is sadly no longer with us but I’m certain she would be David’s favorite of my many cats.—Alex ShephardHarry and I moved to New York together in the mid-’90s. He weighed 18 pounds! And whenever I came home from work, he would run over to me and vigorously polish my shoes with his paws for about 10 seconds.—Andy OmelThis is Werther, a melodramatic 2-year-old brown tabby named after Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (we usually call him Bobo), and his despotic little sister Pravda (named after the Russian newspaper; nickname, Little Girl) sleeping in on one late January morning. With Spring finally here, they spend most of their waking hours together watching for pigeons out the window.—Sam Russek
https://newrepublic.com/article/192710/kevin-drum-obituary-friday-cat-blogging
//images.newrepublic.com/a27658b92b08b5d967b9dbf33ae331dbb5460a6b.jpeg?w=1400
The very sad news arrived this week that Kevin Drum, a liberal blogger who was one of the very first and best practitioners of the form, passed away March 7 at age 66 after a long battle with cancer. Kevin was a true pioneer, in two senses. First, when blogging became a thing in the early 2000s, he was one of the first to take up the form as an independent writer, starting the self-published CalPundit blog in 2001. Second, he was a pioneer in the sense that before that, he hadn’t even been a journalist—he’d worked at Radio Shack and in the software business.But he built a massive following, and he did so quickly. His voice was usually calm and measured, but his outrage—at the Iraq War, at growing inequality, at the rise of right-wing echo chamber—was clear. Kevin’s success, wrote Paul Glastris this week at The Washington Monthly, which picked up Kevin’s blog in 2004, represented “a kind of victory of democracy over snobbery. It proved that you can write incisively about national affairs without being in Washington, New York, or San Francisco. You can be an ordinary person living an everyday middle-class suburban life where you don’t rub elbows with influential journalists, academics, or financiers, yet write journalism that those sophisticates—and plenty of other ordinary Americans—read and respect.” He later joined Mother Jones, and then in 2021 returned to working independently.Kevin also made sure that his blog had its lighthearted moments, and the best-known of those was “Friday Cat Blogging”—a pretty much weekly feature of his entire blogging career when he posted pictures of his cats. It added a nice light touch that made his readers feel more personally connected to him and spawned many imitators. Today, The New Republic and other progressive outlets are doing our own Friday Cat Blogging, with photos below of staffers’ cats (and ex-cats), in Kevin’s honor.—Michael TomaskyOtis Tomasky (1990-2009), circa mid-2000s. Entered my life through the window of my fifth-floor walk-up apartment on the Upper West Side during the Persian Gulf War. Turned out he’d apparently sauntered down from the Bronx!—Michael TomaskyHer name is Jinjoo or Pearl and she is approximately 11 months old. I scooped her up as a stray from an abandoned mechanic shop in rural Georgia. Both the Georgia vet and the Brooklyn vet thought she was pregnant, but it turns out she just holds a lot of poop and has a weird-shaped body. She chewed through 2 of her pet medical suits after the spay, this was her 3rd one.—Joan YangThis is Chloe—much loved and much missed.—Kirsten DenkerThis is Finn and Clara. They are two-year-old littermates and extremely chaotic. You can tell that they are about to do something bad by the way they’re looking at me.—Jason LinkinsSadie is sadly no longer with us but I’m certain she would be David’s favorite of my many cats.—Alex ShephardHarry and I moved to New York together in the mid-’90s. He weighed 18 pounds! And whenever I came home from work, he would run over to me and vigorously polish my shoes with his paws for about 10 seconds.—Andy OmelThis is Werther, a melodramatic 2-year-old brown tabby named after Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (we usually call him Bobo), and his despotic little sister Pravda (named after the Russian newspaper; nickname, Little Girl) sleeping in on one late January morning. With Spring finally here, they spend most of their waking hours together watching for pigeons out the window.—Sam Russek
https://newrepublic.com/article/192710/kevin-drum-obituary-friday-cat-blogging