Healthy Blogging

This is a very happy day in the blogosphere! I woke up this morning to discover that three of my favorite fellow-bloggers, who had let their pages lapse for quite a while, are back in business with new posts. Petya, Ideas Man,PhD and Professor KGrady… welcome back! You may be interested to read about a study discussed in Scientific American that demonstrates the therapeutic value of blogging. It’s called “Blogging– It’s Good For You.” So, in the interest of your own health, keep it up!

One of the things that I really appreciate about having very good (and very smart) friends who blog is that it gives me a way of keeping up with them– and, what’s more, keeping up with them in a way very similar to how I would if we weren’t living so far apart. Unlike birthday or Christmas cards, my friends’ blogs are never simply about conveying information, but rather they provide a little snapshot into what my friends are thinking and how they’re thinking about it. Funny enough, I find that my friends’ blogs (and the comments) tend to mimic exactly the kinds of conversations that I would expent to have with them over a beer. And even more peculiarly funny is that the “style” of writing on each of their blogs reminds me very much of their style of speaking, of relating, and their style in general.

Kyle’s blog is thoroughly erudite, carefully written (despite his pretentions to the contrary), often bitingly funny and almost always imbued with a warmth and kindness that is, well, exactly like Kyle.

Petya, cosmopolitan cultural critic extraordinairre, writes a blog that’s quirky, sweet, inexhaustably inquisitive and that brilliantly traverses the fine line between politics and proselytizing.

Speaking of proselytizing, Ideas Man, PhD tends to be a regular commenter but only a sporadic poster… but I find that the wait is always worth it. Ideas Man’s blog is verbose (but not boorish), comprehensive (but not reckless), sardonic (but not mean), and edifying (but not preachy).

If you read new blogger Dr. Trott’s stuff, you’ll get a pretty accurate glimpse into the mysterious tour de force that is Dr. Trott. She’s brilliant, blunt, discerning, driven, passionately and conscientiously engaged in The Things That Really Matter. Trott don’t play.

And then there’s the lone literary critic among us, Booga Face, from whom I have learned everything I know about Oromo culture, The Scarlet Letter, and Walleye fish. Booga Face is, as far as I’m concerned, a philosopher-in-exile… that is, he’s got enough theory in his toolbelt to start a fight with the rest of us, and he can basically put us to shame with all his other tools.

Finally, completely unpredictable, irregular and obscurist blogger Chet writes in a style that is almost a perfect mirror of “Chet” (though maybe not a perfect mirror of the man behind “Chet”… but who knows?). I think of Chet’s blog like a desert mirage– your first reaction is to say something like “what the hell is that off in the distance?” You may sit around where you are and try to figure it out, to no avail, but eventually you’ll be forced to draw closer and try to get a better sense. Maybe, when you get there, it will be something completely different and unexpected, and maybe it will be nothing. But, hell, you just gotta go have a look.

It is my hope that the combination of the Scientific American article and my own mini-tributes here is enough to keep all of you blogging regularly. With the blogosphere, it’s a small world after all.