I wrote my first post on January 8, 2003 and have posted almost every weekday since then–the biggest gap being last month. This is post number 1,261. When I started, most of my friends didn’t know what a blog was, and I remember a huge room of people at a national conference scratching their heads when someone (not I) used the word. Now everyone seems to have a blog, and even I realize that hip people have shifted to other formats.<\/p>\n
I began with something like an online diary, recording what I was up to. Gradually, I settled into a habit of writing mini-essays and deliberately trying to rotate my posts among political commentary, news about civic renewal, applications of moral\/political philosophy to current issues, and cultural criticism. I have often used this space as a notebook. Much of my most recent book, The Future of Democracy<\/em>, appeared here, one paragraph at a time. I allow myself to be self-referential about once a year, near the blog’s birthday, when I write about my own blogging.<\/p>\n I keep up with other explicitly civic blogs and I’m delighted to have their company. For the most part, the political blogs I read are now the ones that have been formally incorporated into magazines such as The Atlantic <\/em>and The American Prospect<\/em>. I don’t know whether this short list reflects laziness on my part or an inevitable winnowing-out process that has made the blogosphere more professional.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I wrote my first post on January 8, 2003 and have posted almost every weekday since then–the biggest gap being last month. This is post number 1,261. When I started, most of my friends didn’t know what a blog was, and I remember a huge room of people at a national conference scratching their heads […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5373\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}