Happy Birthday to Crooked Timber!
By 
Earlier this week Crooked Timber turned 20 years old. Given our own advanced age and my own personal interest in the history of the Old Blogosphere, we would be remiss in not recognizing this occasion. Many of the main CT contributors offered posts:
Crooked Timber preceded LGM and in some ways inspired it, although even as academic blogs go it was quite different even from the start. LGM was far more US-centric and far more partisan (which is different from saying that it was ideological), and of course LGM had and has a much different ethos with respect to its relationship with the audience. The contributors to Crooked Timber, at least at the beginning, were obviously also in more advanced stages of their academic careers than those of LGM.
Over the years there’s been a great deal of cross-polination, although this has waned as norms and expectations that ruled the Old Blogosphere have evolved. It is no longer the case that a blogger here will offer a thoughtful response to a thoughtful argument at CT, which will then result in a thoughtful counter-response over there. To the extent that kind of interaction exists anymore it happens on twitter, and Elon is doing his very best to make sure it doesn’t happen for very long. On a more personal note, the work of Henry Farrell has proven enormously influential on my mid-career research agenda. The idea of Weaponized Interdependence sits at the foundation of Patents for Power and Waging War with Gold, as well as much of my short-form work at 1945, the National Interest, and the Diplomat.
But they weren’t all Happy Days! To my recollection there have been Three Great Conflicts between LGM and CT. One involved CT’s evaluation of the Drive By Truckers, which in the hands of lesser humans would have resulted in a fundamental and permanent break:
And I’ve enjoyed all of them, with the possible exception of The Drive-By Truckers who struck me as over-loud Skynyrd wannabees…
Well I went to see the DBT really really expecting to like them but I’m afraid I thought they really went for image over music in a big way: passing the Jack Daniels round the band on stage; Mike Cooley brandishing his Les Paul to the faithful like a holy relic at the end. All that stuff really pissed me off…
I mean… there’s a lot to say here (who speaks ill of Cooley and is allowed to live?) but I guess I’ll just limit myself to pointing out that the American South has a high context honor culture that is buried in layers of self-referential irony, and if you don’t get it you’re just not going to get it. The Drive By Truckers were not the first to make this culture, or to act upon it when made; they found it existing before them, and will leave it to exist after them. Also, the band included a number of committed alcoholics at the time and sometimes a bottle of Jack is just a bottle of Jack. Finally, I trust that no one need now spend too much time defending the musical significance of the Isbell-era DBTs. Anyway, look at that first comment by a young, moderate Loomis! Whatever happened to that guy?
The second involved the question of battleships in particular and naval doctrine more generally, in which I mopped the floor with John Quiggin. My greatest irritation from this remains Quiggin’s adamant conviction that saying things about navies and naval doctrine requires not even the faintest degree of self-education about naval affairs. The technical aspects of weapon systems, shipbuilding, and maritime awareness change rapidly and are important. The centuries of naval theory and practice that guide technological development and force employment are also important. There’s certainly a useful conversation to be had (informed to some degree by recent events in the Black Sea) about the utility of surface vessels, submarines, and maritime aircraft, but that discussion needs to take seriously that the details matter. But I digress.
The third (and most serious) regards the puzzling inability of many of the main posters at CT to appreciate the rabid toxicity of the merry band of illiberal “leftists” (personified by Glenn Greenwald) on account of vague anti-system theories of political accountability. The emptiness of this approach was obvious to LGM’s central committee more than a decade ago. We’ve gone over this before, and the Crooked Timber folks are hardly unique among progressives for not paying attention to the abundant evidence that Glenn and his ilk strongly preferred illiberalism to leftism. This dispute was not limited to a single post, and extended well into the twitter era, as well as to interpersonal conversations. To his great credit, Glenn makes little effort to hide who he is; if you fail to listen to what he says the fault, dear sir, is not in your stars but in your selves. Henry came to this conclusion recently and belatedly, but it would have been awfully nice if the folks at CT had paid attention when Glenn and his disciples decided to destroy the careers of people who didn’t happen to be Henry’s friends and colleagues. I appreciate that I can be truculent about this, but I feel rather strongly that if we’d done a better job of calling out this garbage a decade (or more) ago, we’d be in a slightly more pleasant place today, rhetorically speaking.
But again, I digress. The relationship between these two blogs, and their respective communities of commenters, has been immensely productive over the last nineteen years. I for one am dearly glad that Crooked Timber is still with us and still productive, and I’m thankful for the opportunities I’ve had to meet with CT frontpagers.
Some of the other front pagers submitted some favorite Crooked Timber posts:
- To Blog a Mockingbird
- Poetic Justice as Fairness
- On the Upside He Looks Less Like Skeletor than Giuliani Does
- Me and Christopher Hitchens
- A Not So Brief History of Violence
Happy Birthday, Crooked Timber!