Kevin Drum, pioneer of an entirely new communication medium called blogging, was in my life for more than 20 years. I wouldn’t exactly call him a friend, more of a colleague, but I knew more about him than some of my friends. I knew precisely how he thought about the world, spooled out in literally thousands of posts, every day, for two decades. I knew his mind, and while I didn’t always agree with him, I always understood his thought process, which provoked and challenged me and forced me to be a better thinker. I knew how he arrived at his determinations because he usually punctuated them with charts, leading to an entire genre of data-driven political and policy analysis. I knew about his multiple myeloma diagnosis when he acquired it in 2014, and I knew the process by which he was kept alive for the next 11 years. And in the times I did interact with him—a lot on email and a few times in person, including at his home once—I knew him to be an incredibly generous, fair, and decent man.
Kevin died this week at the age of 66, finally succumbing to that myeloma cancer. And part of an era of blogging, the medium that led me to my career today, ended with him. I searched my brain to try to figure out how to mark the moment, and I came up with something. Kevin elevated a lot of important ideas, most notably the relationship between lead in the environment and crime. But he also kind of invented what is now a multibillion-dollar industry of showing your pets doing odd things on the internet. He inaugurated Friday Catblogging, where he would post pictures of his cats as a stress reliever to enter the weekend.
So we’re going to do some Friday Catblogging today, and I think we all need it anyway. I’ve asked members of the Prospect team for pictures of their cats, and we’ve got some good-looking felines to show you. I believe several other of your daily reads on the left will be participating in this as well, as a small token of tribute to someone who contributed to really revolutionizing the way politics are discussed in this country, at least for some of us. I’m going to miss Kevin, and miss seeing his cats. Here are a few other kitties to tide you over. —David Dayen
Trixie is no longer domiciled with me (she’s with a daughter in Fairfax), but my wife and I still foot the food and litter bill, so it sort of counts. —Jandos Rothstein, art director
Here is my cat, whose full name is Herschel Blueberry Haas-Janssen. —Emma Janssen, writing fellow
No cats in the house at the moment, but this was a nice occasion to look back at some of my best feline friends. Here’s Ladybird and Marzipan being best buds. —Max Horten, associate publisher
I introduce you to Taco Cat, my sister’s cat. —Mitchell Grummon, publisher
Here’s Sienna (left) and her daughter Zephyr. —Gabrielle Gurley, senior editor
The black-and-white one is Ellie (named after Eleanor Roosevelt), and the tortie is Mayor Pete. She is evil. —Ryan Cooper, managing editor
The question for me is not whether to submit cat pictures, but how to cull the thousands of cat pictures in my phone into a small representative sample of cuteness … Presenting my nephew, Remy, whose voluminous floof thoroughly disguises his lack of actual body mass. —Lauren Pfeil, administrative coordinator
