A Day of Milestones

Today is a pretty big day.

For starters, it's my blog's birthday! It is a whopping 25 years old today, with over 7,400 posts. That's a lot of writing!

In addition, Nathaniel turns five months old today. You wouldn't know it by looking at him, though -- he's 20 and a half pounds and over 27 inches long! We've already got him in nine-month old clothing, and he stretches some of that.

And of course, related to the above, it is my very first Father's Day as a father. I am so lucky to have the best baby in the world, co-parented by the best wife in the world.

I cannot express how lucky, grateful, and blessed I feel.

The Blogosphere is Dead. Long Live the Blogosphere!

I'm not sure when the last time I updated my blogroll was -- I both didn't remember, and didn't remember how to do it -- but I figured it out in time to add Divided Argument at the recommendation of Paul Horwitz. His selling point was that it "includes some of the finest former Volokh Conspiracy bloggers", and he isn't wrong.

I know everyone says the blogosphere is dead, but a few of us keep chugging along. It's nice to see signs of life in the old girl.

RIP Kevin Drum

Sadly, Kevin Drum, one of the leading lights of the liberal blogosphere, passed away a few days ago.

Kevin had been battling cancer for quite some time now, and had regularly given his readers updates on the ups and downs of his condition. So while this wasn't wholly unexpected, it still hits hard -- we had seen many, many times before where he had bounced back, and I had hoped against hope that this time would be more of the same. Alas.

When Kevin left his last perch at Mother Jones to hang his own shingle, I wrote a little tribute to him which still captures my feelings now:

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.

He will be very sorely missed. RIP, Kevin, and my condolences to his loved ones.

(LGM also has a nice tribute up). 

Comment Moderation is On

Just a quick note that I've turned on comment moderation. Some banned trolls who refuse to accept that they're no longer welcome here aren't taking the hint, and so I've had to temporarily switch to a default where comments must be approved before appearing. Since I'm not used to doing full-scale comment moderation, there may be a delay between when you post and when your comment shows up on the site.

Sorry for the inconvenience (save for those intentionally being inconvenienced).

Conversations with Normies

I enjoy talking to my brother about politics because he is, for lack of a better way of putting it, far more normal than I am. He is not passionate about politics, but he's not ignorant about it either. He pays some measure of attention because he's a good citizen who cares about the world around him, but it's not something he's independently especially interested in. There are, of course, a lot more people like him than there are people like me, even though there are a lot more people like me talking about politics online. So chatting with my brother feels like getting a sense of the pulse of normie America (even though of course he's not necessarily representative).

In terms of ideology, my brother is probably best described as a moderate Democrat. His line for the past several years has been pretty consistent in saying that there is a universe where he could imagine voting Republican, but it is not our universe because he fully recognizes that the Republican Party in America today is fully captured by insane people. 

So there was never any question that he'll be voting blue come November. But we happened to have a chat about his current political outlook on things. I present these not as endorsement or non-endorsement, but simply because what he said may be of interest to a readership who I suspect is (like me, unlike him) very much not of the normie bent.

1. He loves Joe Biden. One of the first things he said was that he's annoyed and frustrated by the notion that Biden is "the lesser of two evils" or a sort of shit sandwich you have to swallow given the alternative. My brother thinks Biden is great! He thinks he's had a tremendously successful presidency! In particular, my brother gave Biden a bunch of credit for lowering political temperatures and trying to pursue actual solutions to problems rather than demagoguing and grandstanding. 

Admittedly, my brother started off as a Biden supporter -- he was his favorite candidate at the outset of the 2020 primary (back when David was deciding between Booker and Warren). But now he wonders if he's really alone in that assessment, because so much of the prevailing narrative is centered around how nobody actually likes Joe Biden, they at best tolerate him. My brother is a loud and proud "I like Biden" guy.

2. He's lost patience with Israel's Gaza campaign. We're both Jewish, and while neither of us is super religious, we've both stayed involved in Jewish life as adults (and unlike me, he's visited Israel). He was obviously repelled by what happened on October 7 and thinks Hamas is a despicable terrorist outfit. Nonetheless, his take on the current status of the conflict in Gaza is that at this stage it feels to him as if it is no longer (if it ever was) about Israel's security, and now is just unconstrained vengeance being taken out upon the Palestinian population. He has no trust in or love for Bibi, and thinks he needs to go.

3. He's interested in Freddie DeBoer. That was, of all the names, the person he said he'd been reading recently whose work had been resonating with him -- didn't agree with all of it, but found him thought-provoking particularly on matters of mental health and "wokeness". I confessed that I hadn't thought about Freddie DeBoer in ages, so I couldn't really react to it. I suggested reading Matt Yglesias' "Slow Boring"; he laughed because Yglesias and DeBoer apparently despise each other even as they (in his mind) didn't seem too far apart when it came to tangible policy beliefs.

4. He's skeptical about the impact of "woke" trends. He doesn't identify with the efforts to destroy trans health care or anything like that (again -- he recognizes the GOP is crazy). But he did express concern about what he described as "wokeness", even though he also said he thought that term was clearly imprecise for what he was speaking of since it also captures plenty of activity he fully approves of. 

At first, I assumed he was talking about certain cringy performative activities that I could imagine being grating to someone of his views. But he emphasized that it wasn't just a matter of performance -- in his space (the non-profit world), he felt as if impactful programs that were doing a lot of good in marginalized communities were getting short-changed as donor priorities redirected towards initiatives that could more easily packaged as messaging DEI values (even if they didn't tangibly improve as many lives in the communities they purported to be uplifting). So his grief was partially an objection to performance, but with a tangible kick. I recommended he read Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò; he said he had heard of it but hadn't had the chance to read it.

Happy Blog Birthday!

Happy blog birthday! The Debate Link turns a ripe old 19 today! And this year is the cross-over year -- as of now, I have been blogging on this site for the majority of my life. What a thought.

Testing a IFTTT Cross-Posting App

Apropos this post, this is a test to see if the IFTTT recipe I just created (with helpful guidance from the Boley Law Library!) works.

This block quote is simply to pad out the text of the post, though it does explain why I'm doing this:

For example: I use IFTTT to autopost links to my blog onto my Twitter account. This is incredibly important for me, as I'm pretty sure at this point virtually my entire readership comes from Twitter links. But as best I can tell, neither Post nor Mastodon has anything (whether via IFTTT or otherwise) that provides similar functionality. At the moment, I'm getting there sideways by an app which autoposts my Tweets to Mastodon (so my blog autoposts to Twitter, which then autoposts to Mastodon). But I've found no equivalent at all for Post. In general, cross-posting functionality is really important especially in the transition period where I want to be using both Twitter and its alternatives.

Wish me luck! 

UPDATE: It didn't work.

The Debate Link Reaches Legal Adulthood

Happy eighteenth birthday to The Debate Link! I started this endeavor in 2004, just after graduating high school. Now it's 18, and I'm 36 -- meaning that I've been blogging for half of my entire life.

There's a sobering thought. Anyway, happy birthday! To many more!

Blogging Queen, Young and Sweet, Only Seventeen

Happy birthday to this blog, which just turned seventeen years old today!

In that time, I have ...

• earned four degrees (B.A., J.D., M.A., Ph.D.)
• lived in eight cities (and ten different apartment buildings, not including dorms)
• taught at three universities (Illinois, Berkeley, and DePaul) in two different departments (law and political science)
• held two non-academic full-time jobs and three non-academic summer jobs
• had one girlfriend/wife (yup -- while I had some high school girlfriends, she's the only person I dated from the time this blog started to present)

And after so much flux and turmoil ... I have just officially begun as an assistant professor at Lewis & Clark Law School! So following a move to one last city, this list should stabilize significantly over (knock on wood) the next seventeen years.

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.

Sweet Sixteen

Happy birthday to this blog, which turns 16 today!

As always, thanks to all the readers, new and old, who've decided to spend a little time on my plot of the internet.

Very Much Alive

Hey guys -- I just want everyone to know I'm not dead or anything like that, I'm just super busy. It's the middle of hiring season, and I, like an idiot, also scheduled two conferences over the next month.

So it's been a bit quiet here, and that might persist for the next few weeks. But I haven't abandoned this blog by any stretch, and with luck I might have some exciting news to announce in the near future!

Happy Birthday Blog!

Once again, I missed the blog's birthday (it's June 15, FYI). It turned fifteen years old this year!

A pretty impressive run, if I do say so myself.

Anyway, I'm off to my 11th year college reunion (it's my wife's 10-year, hence the odd-number appearance). I consider that appropriate, as I started this blog the summer before I entered college. And look at me now!

I'm Taking A Break

I just took my Twitter account private (thread here) and announced that I'm taking a break from that site for an indeterminate period of time.

I do not intend for that break to apply to the blog -- though since virtually everyone who reads my blog nowadays gets to it via Twitter, it may be a bit of a moot point (ironically, since the blog auto-posts to Twitter, anything I write here becomes the exception to the general "Twitter break").

In any event, I wrote a long (like, 3,500 words long) essay explaining exactly why I was departing -- but it's sitting in my draft folder for now. Maybe I'll publish it later. Maybe not. Maybe I'll do it with some deep editing. Depends on how I feel.

I am going on vacation later this week -- a wedding in (far) northern Minnesota (like, way-past-Duluth-northern-Minnesota), followed by Carleton reunion. So even absent this formal break, I might have been quieter anyway.

I mentioned in the thread that I was -- in large part due to how I was relating to Twitter -- feeling sad, and that's true, but I do want to stress that I'm not in any serious emotional crisis or anything like that. So, while I would appreciate any nice thoughts that might be sent my way, I don't want any of y'all to worry on that front.

A Month of Black Jewish History

At the start of February, a Twitter friend of mine -- Shawn Harris -- issued a challenge: for the entire month, write one post a day on some aspect of Black Jewish history. I interpreted that broadly -- to include everything from historical articles, to academic essays, to simply linking to the profiles of Black Jewish writers whose work I've enjoyed or learned from over the years.

My thread begins here. But I also thought it might be worth collecting the month's worth of posts in one spot, on the blog.

A good chunk of the entries were simply promoting Black Jewish figures. That included some prominent academics and writers, like Lewis Gordon, Julius Lester, and Jamaica Kincaid, Rabbi Capers Funnye of Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, as well as personal friends like Jake Grumbach (soon to be an assistant professor of political science at the University of Washington) and Twitter connections like Blewish. My last entry of the whole month was dedicated to Shawn Harris herself, in honor of her inspiring the thread in the first place.

For others, I linked to a particular essay that had spoken to me -- this included Adam Serwer on Tamika Mallory and Louis Farrakhan, Stacey Aviva Flint on the Movement for Black Lives platform, Tema Smith on Ilhan Omar, and an omnibus collection of Black Jewish reflections on MLK Day. My book recommendation, MaNishtana's "Ariel Samson: Freelance Rabbi", and academic article recommendation, Carol Conaway's "Journey to the Promised Land: How I Became an African-American Jew Rather Than a Jewish African American", also fall into this category.

One entry that particularly tickled me was this interview with rapper "Young Gravy" -- mostly because I was the guy who suggested doing such an interview to the Forward's culture editor in the first place. Other musical entries include rapper Nissim Black and the spoken word poetry of Aaron Levy Samuels.

Black Jews are Jews. That is the case inside the Jewish community and outside as well. On the former, consider this profile on Ilana Kaufman, focusing on her work trying to further foster the elevation of JOC voices in American Jewish leadership positions, or Shekhiynah Larks on doing "Birthright while Black". On the latter, here's Michael Twitty saying the Shehecheyanu while accepted the James Beard award, and a list of Black Jews nominated for NAACP image awards.

The Ethiopian Jewish community is by no means the only part of Black Jewish history, but it does matter. My first entry in the whole series was on the efforts of Ethiopian Jews to help serve their European compatriots during the Holocaust. Other entries focused on the Ethiopian Jewish community include this one by Haftam Yitzak-Heathwood on racism against Ethiopians in Israel, and profiles of Pnina Tamano-Shata (the first Ethiopian Israeli women to be elected to Knesset), "Miss Israel" Titi Aynaw. and Mehereta Baruch-Ron (former Deputy Mayor of Tel Aviv). There also is a vibrant Jewish community and history in Africa outside of Ethiopia, as this conference sought to emphasize.

It's important to not overstate "conversion" as an element of the Black Jewish experience, but certainly that is an important of some Black Jewish stories. Here's the conversion arc of former NFLer Calvin (now Yosef) Murray.

And finally, for my birthday, I stretched a bit and plugged my own article: White Jews: An Intersectional Approach, which is forthcoming in the Association for Jewish Studies Review.

I'm That Guy! I'm That "Independent" Artist Guy!

You know the character. In a TV series or a movie, he's a talented artistic sort, but utterly rejects any commercialization of his product if it entails compromise in his work. Using his song for an advertising jingle? No way. Altering his masterpiece to suit the tastes of the wealthy client/benefactor? Absolutely not. He's fiercely independent, and disdains the trappings of popularity or financial reward if it in any way interferes with the sanctity of his art.

I always hated those characters. I found them sanctimonious, self-absorbed, and more than a little ridiculous.

Except I just realized ... I might be that guy, with respect to my writing.

Of course, I'm not a TV or movie character, so I'm a more filed-off version of the sort. I'm willing to publish my opinions in the popular press, and I don't harbor any particularly negative opinions about gaining popularity or exposure or money (I'll let the readers decide whether I'm "talented" or not).

But it is certainly not why I write, and I'm pretty consistent in rejecting opportunities for greater exposure if I have even the slightest concern that the medium will entail a dilution or compromise in my message. Which it usually will, since writing for someone else involves incorporating their editorial judgment and word count restrictions and other formatting strictures. Whereas when I write on this blog, where I can write for as long or as short as I want, on whatever topic I want, for whoever cares to read (or doesn't) -- none of that applies. I'm in control of my own message.

The same applies to other potential communicative mediums I might join in. Interviewed on a TV series? Someone else is the editor of the clip -- that makes me very nervous. Serving as an expert witness? You're supposed to give decisive judgments about whether X or Y did or didn't happen -- but what if I want to equivocate? This is also why I've never had an interest in going into politics: the arguments that win elections or change popular opinion aren't necessarily good arguments, and I don't have the stomach for making claims that rouse popular support even as I know they're not analytically precise.

Of course, these self-imposed limits mean that fewer people will be exposed to the arguments I make, and one might think that -- given all the energy I invest in crafting them -- I'd view that as a sizable loss. But ... I don't. Not really, anyway. I'm always happy when people read what I write and find it compelling or persuasive, but that's never been my primary motivation. I'm a very inwardly-motivated individual; I write because I want to get my thoughts out into the world. If they happen to spark some other person's imagination (or get me some freelance dollars), that's great, but it's just a bonus.

I'd like to think I'm not sanctimonious about the whole deal: I don't think I'm better or purer or more authentic because I've made the choices I've made. But I'm definitely making that style of choice. And the more I think about it, the more the closest archetype I'm falling into is one of those independent artist types. I am, it turns out, That Guy.

Everything Falls Apart

So a different syndication service I use -- NetworkedBlogs -- is shutting down. I'm not happy with dlvr.it (it's utterly inadequate for cross-posting tumblr), and I can't get IFTTT to work consistently.

Yes, this post is really primarily another test attempt.

I was at a wedding and a funeral this week (really -- all in the family, too), and one of my relatives encouragingly told me that I need to get my blog out to more readers. But at this rate, it's going to go out to no readers at all.

Any suggestions on other (free) replacement services would not go unappreciated.

New Website, New Syndicator

I've got a new personal website!

I finally bit the bullet and got myself professional(ish) homepage for my academic life. It felt like it was time, and I wanted to nail down the davidschraub.com URL.

The new site has links to my CV, most of my articles, and all my popular press publications, as well as a nifty "about me" section. Don't worry though -- the blog is staying right here (to the point where I actually went out of my way to delete the "blog" tab from the website template. Tempt me not, Satan!).

This post is also an opportunity to test-run the new syndication service I'm using: dlvr.it. For awhile now, IFTTT has been markedly unreliable, and this past week it seemed to stop working almost entirely. Hopefully, this will result in my feeds being cross-posted more reliably, but there still might be some kinks as I set up my account.

Goodbye, Sitemeter

From almost the beginning of this blog, I had a Sitemeter account to track my visitors.

It was great -- I could see who was coming to my site, and where they were coming from. Often, it was the easiest way of alerting me to somebody linking to my blog. It also gave me a sense of the ebbs and flows of The Debate Link's traffic (it never really recovered from the clerkship hiatus, alas -- though the general slump in the "blog market" didn't help matters). And since I've had it for so long, it provided a steady tick-tick-tick of this blog's progression -- like pencil marks tracking a child's growth.

Sadly, Sitemeter is being permanently shut down July 1st. The tracker was clearly in rough shape -- I couldn't even see the widget on my blog's footer anymore -- but the core of it still did its job until I finally uninstalled it last night. It's being replaced with SiteCounter. We'll see how that goes, but seeing as how I hate all change, I expect to dislike it (Blogger also has an internal stat counter, but I'm also finding it unwieldy. Because again, change).

Even more sadly, there's no way to import the data over to my new tracker. So I'll just put the final tally here for posterity.

Starting from December 13, 2004 (so just six months after The Debate Link launched) through June 27, 2017, The Debate Link has had:

665,042 visitors
961,698 page views

Thanks, Sitemeter. And thanks to all 665,000+ visitors, too.

Blog Bar Mitzvah

The Debate Link turned 13 years old yesterday. It is now, officially, a Jewish adult (in blogosphere years, by contrast, it is a hobbling old man).

As always, thanks to all my loyal readers. Whether you've been around since the beginning or are a new arrival, I appreciate you spending some time in my little corner of the internet.