RIP Calpundit
March 10, 2025 4:51 PM Subscribe
Kevin Drum, one of the earliest left wing political bloggers, has passed away after a long battle with cancer.
Throughout his career, Drum had been a fixture in the left wing "blogosphere", both under his own shingle as well as the auspices of larger outlets with a considerable tenure at Mother Jones. Beyond his blog punditry, he was best known for championing the environmental lead exposure hypothesis as an explanation of several social trends such as crime rates (and thus advocating for lead remediation in impoverished communities), as well as being one of the originators of catblogging.
Throughout his career, Drum had been a fixture in the left wing "blogosphere", both under his own shingle as well as the auspices of larger outlets with a considerable tenure at Mother Jones. Beyond his blog punditry, he was best known for championing the environmental lead exposure hypothesis as an explanation of several social trends such as crime rates (and thus advocating for lead remediation in impoverished communities), as well as being one of the originators of catblogging.
He made it 10.5 years since diagnosis of multiple myeloma, and he had a fucking awesome clear-eyed piece of stoicism in October about it.
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posted by lalochezia at 5:11 PM on March 10 [13 favorites]
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posted by lalochezia at 5:11 PM on March 10 [13 favorites]
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posted by hydropsyche at 5:14 PM on March 10
posted by hydropsyche at 5:14 PM on March 10
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posted by hap_hazard at 5:35 PM on March 10
posted by hap_hazard at 5:35 PM on March 10
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posted by Token Meme at 5:57 PM on March 10
posted by Token Meme at 5:57 PM on March 10
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posted by jim in austin at 6:02 PM on March 10
posted by jim in austin at 6:02 PM on March 10
Back in the days after 9/11, there were hardly any blogs to left of Attila the Hun at all. Drum is from that era & he was definitely part of an embryonic liberal blogosphere. Even if he didn't necessarily keep up with the times, I thank him for his service.
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posted by jonp72 at 6:34 PM on March 10 [8 favorites]
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posted by jonp72 at 6:34 PM on March 10 [8 favorites]
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posted by WhyamIhereagain at 6:51 PM on March 10
posted by WhyamIhereagain at 6:51 PM on March 10
This hit hard.
posted by bigschmoove at 7:39 PM on March 10
posted by bigschmoove at 7:39 PM on March 10
well, fuck you 2025.
he was one of the early political bloggers i followed rabidly post-9/11 to understand wtf was going wrong with our world. pour one out and then another for good measure.
posted by kokaku at 7:52 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]
he was one of the early political bloggers i followed rabidly post-9/11 to understand wtf was going wrong with our world. pour one out and then another for good measure.
posted by kokaku at 7:52 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]
Reading his blog religiously (even though I often disagreed with his interpretation of facts), he had been meticulously chronicling his cancer treatment, down to charting individual variables. Because of that, and because it had been a looong time since he started publishing his health trackers, I really thought he was out of the woods and this latest bout of pneumonia was an irritating speed bump. Even when he was last hospitalized, I was convinced he would pull through again, signing off with a trademark sneer and an inflation chart to boot, or news of his beloved cats.
This news really hurt. Like he had been snatched away.
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My condolences to his loved ones, and to the rest of us, his followers....
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 8:34 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]
This news really hurt. Like he had been snatched away.
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My condolences to his loved ones, and to the rest of us, his followers....
posted by Bigbootay. Tay! Tay! Blam! Aargh... at 8:34 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]
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posted by LobsterMitten at 8:35 PM on March 10
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:35 PM on March 10
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posted by JoeXIII007 at 8:43 PM on March 10
posted by JoeXIII007 at 8:43 PM on March 10
I am so sorry to hear about this. He was one of the good guys.
posted by y2karl at 8:43 PM on March 10
posted by y2karl at 8:43 PM on March 10
Assuming that all historians left of center aren't summarily erased, he'll warrant mention when the story of these benighted times is finally written. And that is far more than most of us can say.
Pour one out for an OG.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 9:37 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]
Pour one out for an OG.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 9:37 PM on March 10 [6 favorites]
About 20 years ago, I was reading Kevin Drum's blog at a time when I was working a customer service job.
Drum pointed out in one of his posts that women, even feminists, often hesitate to ask for raises they deserve. I don't have the post handy, but I remember making the connection that this might apply to my own life.
I had not had even a cost-of-living increase in the two years I'd worked there, I had noticed that my skills would command a substantially larger salary in jobs I saw advertised, and it would be harder for the company to replace me than for me to find a new job.
Drum's post inspired me to ask for a one-third raise, which I got. It was the first time I ever did that kind of salary negotiation.
I read a bunch of liberal blogs in the 2000s - One Good Thing, The Sideshow, D-Squared Digest, Bitch Ph.D., Fugitivus, Making Light, Everything's Ruined, Real Live Preacher, The Poor Man, so many more - and they all informed me, provoked thought, helped me understand aspects of the world I previously hadn't. Drum is one of the writers of that era who had an immediate direct positive impact on my life.
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posted by brainwane at 3:25 AM on March 11 [25 favorites]
Drum pointed out in one of his posts that women, even feminists, often hesitate to ask for raises they deserve. I don't have the post handy, but I remember making the connection that this might apply to my own life.
I had not had even a cost-of-living increase in the two years I'd worked there, I had noticed that my skills would command a substantially larger salary in jobs I saw advertised, and it would be harder for the company to replace me than for me to find a new job.
Drum's post inspired me to ask for a one-third raise, which I got. It was the first time I ever did that kind of salary negotiation.
I read a bunch of liberal blogs in the 2000s - One Good Thing, The Sideshow, D-Squared Digest, Bitch Ph.D., Fugitivus, Making Light, Everything's Ruined, Real Live Preacher, The Poor Man, so many more - and they all informed me, provoked thought, helped me understand aspects of the world I previously hadn't. Drum is one of the writers of that era who had an immediate direct positive impact on my life.
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posted by brainwane at 3:25 AM on March 11 [25 favorites]
RIP. I started reading his blog(s) back a long, long time ago. I still think he's wrong about self driving cars, but mostly, I agreed with his takes. Good writer. Family man.
posted by SoberHighland at 5:25 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
posted by SoberHighland at 5:25 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
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Sad, he was very often a measured voice of calming reason in the middle of contentious debates.
posted by kaymac at 6:23 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
Sad, he was very often a measured voice of calming reason in the middle of contentious debates.
posted by kaymac at 6:23 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
Some more tributes to Drum:
Lawyers, Guns, and Money shares a photo of Drum playing with his cat, calls him "one of the most consistently interesting and intelligent commenters in this medium", and hosts a comment thread with a lot of insights and compliments about Drum's work.
Garance Franke-Ruta: "Kevin Drum was a generous linker. A minor thing to say on his passing but in the early 2000s, the way he sought to be in conversation with younger writers, to elevate their work and take their ideas seriously, made him a mentor and advocate for a whole generation. RIP. The ecosystem will miss you."
Ezra Klein and Alexander Hurst have also noted that he was not only an inspiration as a writer, but also a generous linker, and the pride they felt at him linking their work.
Dave Min (House of Representatives, CA 47): "RIP Kevin Drum. I started following you in law school when you were writing as CalPundit and I always found your writing and logic to be brilliant and persuasive. I was delighted to learn you were a constituent, and I'm sorry I never had the chance to tell you in person how much I appreciated you."
Nicholas H. Wolfinger reminds us that Drum and his commenters coined the phrase "nutpicking" (a conservative practice of "trawling through open comment threads in order to find a few wackjobs who can be held up as evidence that liberals are nuts").
Dan Davies: "what a shame. I always thought he was one of the most interesting stories of the blog period because he had no previous experience in media, someone who would never have been found otherwise.....he was just like a grown up. I didn't agree with him about much, but there was a definite kind of sincerity there, he seemed to have no interest at all in climbing greasy poles which made him interesting to read just for that."
Similarly, Judah Grunstein wrote,
posted by brainwane at 9:10 AM on March 11 [13 favorites]
Lawyers, Guns, and Money shares a photo of Drum playing with his cat, calls him "one of the most consistently interesting and intelligent commenters in this medium", and hosts a comment thread with a lot of insights and compliments about Drum's work.
Kevin tried hard, researched carefully, wrote in good faith with the purpose of helping people and could laugh at himself, not just at others......Jamirepoix: "Kevin Drum kept me alive in 2015 with a timely and substantial donation when I was recovering from chemorad and unemployed. He kept my family and me fed and housed at a moment we despaired of both. RIP, Kevin"
Drum's two besetting flaws, I think, were, the first, that he tended to extend assumptions of good faith past when they were warranted. And he was a normie white guy with a normie white guy's blind spots, against which he struggled, sometimes winning and sometimes losing.
And I tell you, if that's the worst you can say about someone, they did pretty good overall......
...his articles on the lead-crime hypothesis is one of the main reason why my lab studies lead toxicity and brain development today.....
What I particularly admired about his use of data, and what set him apart from Nate Silver, is that he never did it to brand himself a "data guy" whose opinions couldn't be questions. He looked at the data because he wanted to know. He was genuinely curious, and he often looked at the data because arguing over something that wasn't really a problem or arguing over a premise that wasn't accurate was, in his mind, a waste of everyone's time. He used data to convince, not to shut people up.
His analyses weren't always right, but he didn't pretend they were and was pretty open about his methodology and made corrections to obvious mistakes. I guess I'd say when it came to being a "data guy" he generally had the humility of an amateur, which was refreshing. That's not to say he couldn't be stubborn, but he wasn't arrogant......
As I've said before, in a better world he'd be the one with a bestselling book and a high profile podcast. But that wasn't his style. He wasn't flashy. He didn't present his work as a way to show off how much smarter he was than you and how much smarter you are now than the next man. He just put everything together in a way that said, "You can do this, too, when you have the time. You might even reach a different conclusion."
Garance Franke-Ruta: "Kevin Drum was a generous linker. A minor thing to say on his passing but in the early 2000s, the way he sought to be in conversation with younger writers, to elevate their work and take their ideas seriously, made him a mentor and advocate for a whole generation. RIP. The ecosystem will miss you."
Ezra Klein and Alexander Hurst have also noted that he was not only an inspiration as a writer, but also a generous linker, and the pride they felt at him linking their work.
Dave Min (House of Representatives, CA 47): "RIP Kevin Drum. I started following you in law school when you were writing as CalPundit and I always found your writing and logic to be brilliant and persuasive. I was delighted to learn you were a constituent, and I'm sorry I never had the chance to tell you in person how much I appreciated you."
Nicholas H. Wolfinger reminds us that Drum and his commenters coined the phrase "nutpicking" (a conservative practice of "trawling through open comment threads in order to find a few wackjobs who can be held up as evidence that liberals are nuts").
Dan Davies: "what a shame. I always thought he was one of the most interesting stories of the blog period because he had no previous experience in media, someone who would never have been found otherwise.....he was just like a grown up. I didn't agree with him about much, but there was a definite kind of sincerity there, he seemed to have no interest at all in climbing greasy poles which made him interesting to read just for that."
Similarly, Judah Grunstein wrote,
Two things stood out for me about Kevin Drum, which made him one of the only original bloggers I continued to read all these years later.Elizabeth Nolan Brown summarizes a paywalled essay by Ben Dreyfuss as revealing that "his former colleague, Kevin Drum — who has passed away from cancer — repeatedly turned down much-deserved raises so that money could go to Mother Jones' fellows". The editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, Clara Jeffery, also says, as part of a tribute thread, "Though he worked remotely and never met a lot of the staff, Kevin always refused to take a raise, asking that we spend the money on junior staffers. Something he didn't want made public then, but an important thing to share."
First, he never gave in to hysteria, panic or for that matter euphoria. He modeled rational self-discipline, which made him an invaluable reality check.
Second, and relatedly, Kevin Drum could be contrarian. But he backed it up, usually with a homemade chart based on statistical research. And unlike some other contrarian pundits, it wasn't a reflexive gimmick for shock value, meaning it never represented a betrayal of (his) progressive values.
posted by brainwane at 9:10 AM on March 11 [13 favorites]
Sucks....
posted by WatTylerJr at 9:29 AM on March 11
posted by WatTylerJr at 9:29 AM on March 11
Kevin, on what he thinks about dying:
I don’t think anything happens when I die. My best guess is that my consciousness/ego/soul simply ceases to exist.
And how do I feel about this? Well, obviously in some sense I fear death. We all do. I’d have a pretty strong reaction if my doctor told me I had a month to live. But aside from that purely primal response, does it bother me that my consciousness will eventually cease to exist forever? Not really.
I understand that this is a pretty unsatisfying answer. But it’s not glib. It’s just a plain description of what my interior life is like. I don’t go through life like Woody Allen, thinking that human existence is an implacable existential horror. But neither does it bother me that my own existence won’t last forever. It never has, not in childhood and not now. And I’m not sure why. It just doesn’t.
For what it’s worth, my instinct tells me that this is primarily an aspect of temperament you’re born with. Either you have a strong emotional reaction to the idea of eventual nonexistence or you don’t. If you do, religion is the most common way of dealing with it. The particular religion you choose is obviously mostly cultural, passed down from your parents and peers the same way you learn a particular language as a child, but the motivating fear itself probably isn’t.
But either way, does this really reveal something essential about what it means to be human? In one sense, yes: a knowledge that someday we’ll die is unique to humans (though fear of death plainly isn’t), and our response to that knowledge has been a defining feature of human cultures for millennia. Still, there are hundreds of other things that are unique to humans too, and I don’t think there’s any special reason to give this one pride of place.
posted by WestCoaster at 12:03 PM on March 12 [2 favorites]
I don’t think anything happens when I die. My best guess is that my consciousness/ego/soul simply ceases to exist.
And how do I feel about this? Well, obviously in some sense I fear death. We all do. I’d have a pretty strong reaction if my doctor told me I had a month to live. But aside from that purely primal response, does it bother me that my consciousness will eventually cease to exist forever? Not really.
I understand that this is a pretty unsatisfying answer. But it’s not glib. It’s just a plain description of what my interior life is like. I don’t go through life like Woody Allen, thinking that human existence is an implacable existential horror. But neither does it bother me that my own existence won’t last forever. It never has, not in childhood and not now. And I’m not sure why. It just doesn’t.
For what it’s worth, my instinct tells me that this is primarily an aspect of temperament you’re born with. Either you have a strong emotional reaction to the idea of eventual nonexistence or you don’t. If you do, religion is the most common way of dealing with it. The particular religion you choose is obviously mostly cultural, passed down from your parents and peers the same way you learn a particular language as a child, but the motivating fear itself probably isn’t.
But either way, does this really reveal something essential about what it means to be human? In one sense, yes: a knowledge that someday we’ll die is unique to humans (though fear of death plainly isn’t), and our response to that knowledge has been a defining feature of human cultures for millennia. Still, there are hundreds of other things that are unique to humans too, and I don’t think there’s any special reason to give this one pride of place.
posted by WestCoaster at 12:03 PM on March 12 [2 favorites]
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