Happy Trails to Kevin Drum

Kevin Drum has announced he's leaving his post at Mother Jones for health reasons (Drum has been battling multiple myeloma for several years now). He isn't hanging up the spikes altogether -- he plans on launching his own blog -- but he felt he could not maintain the pace that justified working for a major magazine like Mother Jones.

Drum was one of the first bloggers I read -- I don't think I caught him during his Calpundit days, but I sure read him at the Washington Monthly -- and was a tremendous influence on my own development as a blogger. I'm certainly not alone in that: Drum was a towering figure during the Golden Age of blogging, whose influence on the mainstream liberal side of the commentariat could not be overstated. And while blogging is fading as an artform, Drum remained decidedly old school and has accordingly stayed as one of my favorites. His work on the lead/crime hypothesis was absolutely fascinating and dare-I-say important, and in general I've always respected him for being thoughtful, considerate, and fair-minded without being mushy or wooly. Those are virtues that are perhaps in rare supply these days, and so I'm especially grateful to Drum for modeling them for so many years.

I'll certainly be following Drum at his new gig, wherever it may be, and so I'm glad this isn't goodbye. But it did strike me as a good time to give a brief tribute to one of my favorite members of the blogosphere.