… to CT reader and commenter Dr Memory, who has cleaned up our database, eliminating many of the badly rendered quotation marks and similar problems. Those problems reflect the fact that the blog is now more than 20 years old, and has gone through multiple formatting systems.
An unexpected side benefit is that commenters can now use emojis, which weren’t even available in Unicode when CT started out.
I enjoy reading over our old posts and discussions, and will enjoy it more now that they are properly readable.
Thanks again, Dr M.
{ 19 comments }
D. S. Battistoli 07.20.26 at 8:49 am
Thanks, Dr. Memory!
Since I’ve returned as a reader, Michael Bérubé’s contributor tag always displayed wrong due to its accents. And now it doesn’t. So there’s a very concrete positive outcome of this.
Now emojis? I feel about them the way the quote popularly attributed to Zhou Enlai feels about the French Revolution. . . .
dr_memory 07.20.26 at 2:01 pm
Happy to help! It’s not at all exaggerating to say that there are a couple of CT posts (and comments!) that have become core to my political thinking over the last 20 years (even if it’s occasionally by way of negative example, Doctor Graeber, ahem), so it’s frankly a privilege to be able to make sure they’re all well preserved and in good condition for the next 20 years!
Cosma Shalizi 07.20.26 at 4:53 pm
I have a bit of experience with how fussy and confusing, yet tedious and also irritating, such work can be, so let me add some very heartfelt thanks of my own.
D. S. Battistoli 07.21.26 at 7:04 am
dr_memory @2:
Oh, your post just sent me back to David Graeber’s response to the symposium onDebt, which is—sad. I guess it’s illustrative of a trend in online discourse that strengthened in the second decade of this century. As someone who greatly appreciates both Graeber (in book form, at least) and Henry Farrell, I couldn’t even finish it.
I wonder if that post has anything to do with the ideological narrowing of CT’s frame of reference. Back when I first read, it felt like CT sympathetically engaged everyone from China Miéville on the left to Andrew Sullivan on the right. The contemporary range of engagement seems to spread over fewer standard deviations away from the Benn-Corbyn tendency, unfurling just to its right. It’s like the ugly age of online discourse led to a solid rétrécissement that has not yet been counteracted. Here’s looking forward with hope toward the next twenty years.
I also noticed that Graeber’s post, and many of its age, seems to have been written in Markdown. I didn’t know CT had a Markdown phase! Gosh, Markdown renders HTML with ease, but HTML sure does not return the favor.
both sides do it 07.21.26 at 9:17 am
Seekonk 07.21.26 at 12:05 pm
My heartfelt thanks to everyone who makes this site such a treasure.
Lee A. Arnold 07.21.26 at 5:46 pm
Dr. Memory is your nom de plume a nod to the Firesign Theater?
oldster 07.21.26 at 7:37 pm
Allow me to express my gratitude to Dr. Memory for his assistance in keeping this site functional.
Now, allow me to express my hope that no one will ever use emojis on this site.
Gareth Wilson 07.22.26 at 3:43 am
U+1F644
dr_memory 07.23.26 at 12:03 am
Cosma: “fussy and confusing, yet tedious and also irritating” is an extremely accurate summary of the, ah, joys of dealing with crosswise language encoding issues: I think only certain flavors of datetime/timezone conversion issues approach it for annoyance levels.
D. S. Battistoli: my first beautification project here was to try to convert all of the posts written in Textile into proper HTML. Thank you for the reminder: next up should be the Markdown ones.
Lee: got it in one! I think we’re all bozos on this bus!
Oldster: 🤪 (Okay yeah, I admit it doesn’t really feel in keeping with CT’s long-held vibe, but one takes the good with the bad: should the need ever arise, we can now for example post Russian or Chinese-language material directly!)
Steve Casburn 07.23.26 at 1:01 am
It’s a good day when the people who do the glamour-free maintenance work that makes the good things in life even better get the recognition they deserve. They spend so much of their time hidden on…The Other Side. (Hand me the pliers, will you?)
D. S. Battistoli 07.23.26 at 5:12 am
dr_memory @9:
Oh wow, I had not realized this to have been part of an ongoing project—beyond impressive, thank you! May you never take the exit for the Antelope Freeway in 1/64th of a mile.
(I am also left to wonder if it might not be to you to whom I ought to appeal for a comment-preview function—it would be delovely).
Doctor Memory 07.24.26 at 3:28 pm
D.S.Battistoli: re comment previews, uh… maybe? I’m definitely not styling myself as any sort of official administrator here, really more just a volunteer technical consultant without portfolio. But if Mr. Quiggen concurs and approves, I’d be happy to take a shot at it.
John Q 07.25.26 at 6:34 am
Doctor M. if that could be done it would be great
DS Battistoli; I don’t think the problem is that CT has narrowed its range, but that the world has changed. On the left, the issues are a bit different, but our engagement with The Ministry for the Future is much the same as with China Mieville. It’t the right where the big changes have taken place. Most of the people we might have talked to in the past have become Trumpists or neutralists (that includes Sullivan, I think). There’s no meaningful discussion to be had with fascists and their allies.
Those who haven’t gone Trumpist, the liberaltarians for example, have moved a long way to the left. I still follow people like Radley Balko, Jacob Levy and Brink Lindsey for example.
Matt 07.25.26 at 7:03 am
Those who haven’t gone Trumpist, the liberaltarians for example, have moved a long way to the left. I still follow people like Radley Balko, Jacob Levy and Brink Lindsey for example.
It has been interesting to me to see how the old members of the Volokh Conspiracy have shaken out. Some – Levy and Ilya Somin most clearly to me – are clearly and consistently anti-Trump. Others, like Randy Barnett, are full-on Trumpist/fascists. I’m a bit less sure about some others, but not encouraged to spend time finding out their views now from the bits I’ve seen. (I otherwise mostly agree with John Q’s take here.)
Beyond that, yes, a big thanks to Dr. M for the work. It’s appreciated.
D. S. Battistoli 07.25.26 at 3:45 pm
John Q @14
That makes sense. My concern might also be influenced by my priors being updated, in no small part thanks to CT. This was the blog that, for me, blew the door open to the feminist blogosphere two years ago, with links and conversations going on with The Little Professor, Body & Soul, and the whole crowd in that otherwise very masculinist online period. Then there were all the discussions of engaged philosophy and social science that sent me to musty periodicals and the book stacks.
Now, of course, I have integrated all that into my awareness, so coming back, I feel myself mainly being introduced to the prominence of Jonathan Haidt, but, like you say, not because you all have changed, but because the world has done so.
In the immortal words of George Starbuck, “Intricate are the compoundments of despair.”
D. S. Battistoli 07.25.26 at 3:46 pm
. . . . ah, twenty-ish years ago.
nonrenormalizable 07.25.26 at 3:52 pm
Always good to hear that some hidden plumbing has been taken care of, averting some future problem or bringing in some long-needed change, and kudos to Dr Memory and the many others who engage in such work.
I can’t help myself given the subject matter and his presence here, (and apologies to everyone else who reads this) so I will hijack this comment section to reach out (probably in vain) to Cosma @3: I believe there is a problem with the RSS feed for your blog. I’m sure someone’s reached out to you about this, but it doesn’t seem to have worked in about a year — I hope you or some kind soul could fix it before another year has passed!
Chris Bertram 07.26.26 at 8:28 am
Thank you Dr Memory!
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