Happy 20th birthday Crooked Timber!

Crooked Timber is twenty years old today, which is an awfully long time for a website, never mind a blog, never mind one that is strictly non-commercial and run on volunteer labour. So here’s to us, and here’s to all those who have been on board at various times during our journey. To quote the Grateful Dead: what a long, strange trip it’s been.

We started the blog shortly after the Iraq war started and in a world that was still shaped by the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A bunch of people who had blogs of their own came together to form our collective after a period of email back-and-forth. It might have been quite a different blog: Norman Geras a strong supporter of the war, had been involved in the emailing, but it became clear that we couldn’t have both him and Dan Davies, so we settled for Dan, and what a good choice that was. Matt Yglesias was invited, but never replied, and has gone on to a rather successful online career.

The initial crew was Chris Bertram, Harry Brighouse, Daniel Davies, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, Kieran Healy, Jon Mandle and Brian Weatherson. Four out of nine survivors isn’t bad, but I miss the contributions of those who have moved on, who wrote some of the great posts of the early years. Within a few months we had added Ted Barlow, Eszter Hargittai, John Holbo, John Quiggin, Tom Runnacles, Micah Schwartzman and Belle Waring, and then Ingrid Robeyns and Scott McLemee joined us a couple of years later, followed soon after by Michael Bérubé. By 2008, the Guardian was listing us in its top 50 most powerful blogs, but I think we missed the moment to cash in and become tech zillionaires. Niamh Hardiman became a member around 2011, followed later by Tedra Osell, Eric Rauchway and Corey Robin, then Rich Yeselson. In 2018 we were joined by Serene Khader, Miriam Ronzoni, Gina Schouten and Astra Taylor and then this past year by Chris Armstrong, Elizabeth Anderson, Eric Schliesser, Kevin Munger, Macarena Marey, Paul Segal and Speranta Dumitru. Throughout we tried to keep a mix of people of different experiences, backgrounds, genders and locations, though I’m sure we could have done better. One person, who sadly has left us, deserves special thanks: Kieran Healy was not only an intellectual force behind Crooked Timber, but also, long after he ceased posting, kept us on the road with his technical expertise. The site would have long since fallen over without him.

At the time I’m composing this post, there have been 12,513 posts and 574,400 approved comments. Much of that intellectual and literary effort has, inevitably, been lost to human memory even as it remains technically accessible. I certainly didn’t trust my of judgement or powers of recall, so I asked Crooked Timber members and veterans and readers on various social media to tell me about their “greatest hits” (FWIW, the best suggestions came via Mastodon). There was too much and it was too unbalanced to include everything, though “everything by Maria” and “everything by Belle” were popular replies and, in fact, going by what people remember, I almost think that a Belle/Maria/Dan joint blog would have been awesome instead. Many people mentioned Belle’s And a Pony post, though that was actually before she joined. Particular thanks go to Sumana Harihareswara for her suggestions.

Anyway, here’s a selection of greatest hits, though probably not a fair one. Other CTers may be posting with theirs and readers should name their favourite posts in comments.

First of all book events: there have been a few of these, but the main ones people mentioned are: Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty, David Graeber’s Debt, and China Miélville’s Iron Council. Henry often took the lead in these and contributed incisively. The Graeber one was traumatic, but memorable. Personally, I got a lot out of the one on Joseph Carens’s The Ethics of Immigration. Sincere apologies for the suboptimality of some of the links.

Some individual posts, alphabetically by author:

Chris Bertram, Alex Gourevitch and Corey Robin,Let it Bleed: Libertarianism and the Workplace. (2012)

Chris Bertram, Piketty, Rousseau and the Desire for Inequality. (2015)

Michael Bérubé: Mighty Moloch, cure me of my severe allergy to the discourse of the “cure”. (2010)

Harry Brighouse, Teaching’s not exactly brain surgery, is it? (2015)

Harry Brighouse, Adrian Grey-Turner, 1955-1986. (2016)

Dan Davies, Wall Street. (2003)

Dan Davies, The Future is a Shoe Being Thrown at a Human Face Forever. (2008)

Dan Davies, The Christmas Sermon 2012 – “On Not Believing In Canada”. (2012)

Dan Davies, So, what would your plan for Greece be?. (2012) and the follow-up post What would you do: Part 2, the Island of Surpyc. (2013).

Dan Davies, Libor for the Universities? (2015)

Henry Farrell, In Praise of Negativity. (2020)

Maria Farrell, Reader I Married Him. (2011)

Maria Farrell, What they don’t tell you about deployment. (2012)

Maria Farrell, Owning the Peanut Gallery. (2018)

Maria Farrell, Fatherland. (2020)

Maria Farrell, Indefinitely Ill – Post-Covid Fatigue. (2020)

Eszter Hargittai, In Praise of Unconferences. (2016).

Kieran Healy, The Dead of Winter. (2003)

Kieran Healy, The Mornings of Kieran Healy, by Robert Caro. (2020)

John Holbo, When I hear the word culture … aw, hell with it(2007) in which John names the “the two-step of terrific triviality”, a term that John Quiggin, in particular, made much use of in later posts.

John Holbo, Rorty’s Rhetoric of Anticipatory Retrospective (2007)

John Holbo, Lewd and Prude. (2009)

John Quiggin, How Democracies Lose Small Wars. (2004)

John Quiggin, An Ounce of Inefficiency. (2006)

Many of John’s contributions have been series that later turned into published work such as his Zombie Economics. You can find quite a few of those posts here.

Ingrid Robeyns, How to Write a Good Public Philosophy Book. (2022)

Miriam Ronzoni, On Being Radical for Non-Ideal Reasons. (2018)

Gina Schouten, Pregnant Judges. (2021)

Belle Waring, Also, Feminism Is Not Responsible For Girls Gone Wild. (2007)

Belle Waring, Safe Space For Possibly Unpopular Thoughts on Feminism, Leftism. (2015)

Belle Waring, Sorting Hat’s Gotta Sort. (2013)

Finally, comments, or, at lease one comment which turns out to be the most famous and most repeated thing ever written at Crooked Timber.

Wilhoit’s Law, enunciated by Frank Wilhoit in the comments to a post of Henry’s The Travesty of Liberalism:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.