Category: Personal moment

This is the second of my three reflections made during this, the last month of RBC’s existence. The first was devoted to Mark Kleiman as a blogger. This one is devoted to my own experience as a blogger. I stipulate at the outset that this reflection may only be of interest to me, but one of the joys of blogging is that you can write posts even if the only person who will benefit is yourself.

How I Got Here and What I Did

I am not sure when I started reading RBC, but it was likely around 2008. Mark already had a strong stable of contributors then (Michael O’Hare, Andy Sabl, Jonathan Zasloff, and Harold Pollack were regulars), in addition to indefatiguably producing his own content. I learned things about public policy regarding crime, drugs, and health from reading RBC that were helpful to me in my work as Senior Drug Policy Advisor in the Obama White House. During my Washington days I also fed Mark some stories and trial balloons that he riffed on in these pages.

When my sabbatical year ended and I moved back to Palo Alto, Mark generously asked me if I wanted to join his crew. He described RBC as a “blogger’s blog” that had a medium sized following — way more than most blogs but way less than the big beasts. But he also said, correctly, that RBC’s work was picked up frequently by national bloggers and traditional media outlets (i.e., in the emerging politics and policy-focused blogosphere, RBC was The New Republic or The Economist rather than Time Magazine or the New York Times). My first post was in August of 2010 and explained my decision to accept Mark’s invitation.

I got into the rhythm of blogging pretty quickly and was active here until Spring of 2014, when I largely moved to Washington Post’s Wonkblog. One thing I worked out over my time at RBC was that more posts = more visitors to the blog. Given that, and the fact that I enjoy writing and even find it relaxing, I wrote a lot during my time here: in one 12 month period, I penned 60% of all RBC posts (to be clear, no one else was skiving off, I just wrote a lot). Despite the fact that some of what I wrote was hot garbage, the expansion of content in that period translated into a significant growth in readership. With I hope pardonable vanity, I am proud to have been a part of the crew that gave this site its biggest audience, not least because that readership growth helped attract Washington Monthly magazine to partner with us in a co-publishing arrangement beginning in 2012 that increased our readership even more (although as I wrote in my reflection on Mark, building an audience from scratch as Mark did is infinitely harder than growing the audience of an existing platform).

Pains and Joys of Blogging Continue reading “Reflections on the End of RBC, Part II: A Personal Perspective on the Pains and Joys of Blogging”

We are back from Israel, where I visited Yad Vashem for the first time. Being me, I have written to the curators with a few thoughts and suggestions. An extract follows.

Dear curators of Yad Vashem:

I was recently privileged to spend a morning at Yad Vashem during a holiday in Israel. Among the many strong emotions aroused by this experience is admiration for the work of the designers and curators of this great memorial. The comments and suggestions below are in no way intended to detract from this admiration. In addition, it is I think psychologically impossible to take in everything during a single short visit; if I have got anything materially wrong in my recollections, I apologise but claim force majeure.

[two pages on other stuff]

Disposable plates

As in the Israel Museum, the cafeteria serves cakes on disposable polystyrene plates. The observation may seem trivial and in the context of Yad Vashem ridiculous. Bear with me: I think it’s important.

First, these two museums are world-class institutions, presenting crucial aspects of Israel’s identity to the rest of humanity. At this level, visitors expect exemplary standards of professionalism, and nearly uniformly get it. Polystyrene plates are a retrograde failure to meet the benchmark. The EU will ban single-use plastic plates and cutlery by 2021, and public opinion in Europe is ahead of it.

Second, the mission of Yad Vashem in particular is memory. You seek to fight off the oblivion of time¹ and ensure the Holocaust is no more forgotten than the Exodus or the destruction of the Temples. The architecture of the museum well reflects this aim of permanence in its solidity. The same should, I suggest, hold for minor details like plates. In my visits to the Struthof concentration camp in Alsace, I was struck by the shoddiness and meanness of the Nazi construction, and the unexceptional, but dignified and solid, stone memorials to the camps put up postwar by the French were a welcome contrast.

A final thought flowing from the above. As I understand it, the inmates in slave labour camps, Jews and others, were issued metal plates and cups for their starvation rations. I assume these remained the property of the camp, and were passed on to from one disposable slave to the next. I imagine that they played an important and ambiguous part in the mental world of the inmates: at the same time part of the machinery of destruction, but also a concession by the oppressors to the necessity of maintaining life among their slaves and a twisted recognition of their humanity. The tin plates were not evil things in themselves.

You might consider a small display cabinet in the cafeteria, with relevant testimonies from survivors. An additional possibility would be a comparison of the daily rations in a typical labour camp with those of a Geneva-convention Stalag for Western Allied POWs and of an American GI in Normandy.

Respectfully, Shalom

1Julian Barnes’ short story “Evermore”, in his collection Crossing the Channel, is a good exploration of this topic, set in the Western Front after WWI.

[/end letter]

Note: I have chosen this part of the letter as the most likely to spark a useful and focussed discussion - a general one on the Holocaust would be shapeless. Commenters are free to call me names, but I’d be grateful if you could avoid using the argument “so that’s the one thing you could find to write about?” because, you know, it wasn’t.