Bora asks a bunch of peo­ple why they blog. Since var­i­ous and sundry oth­er peo­ple have asked me the same ques­tion over the years, I may as well answer and be done with it.

I blog to be part of what Brad Delong calls the Invis­i­ble Col­lege:

I am greedy. I want more. I would like a larg­er col­lege, an invis­i­ble col­lege, of more peo­ple to talk to, point­ing me to more inter­est­ing things. Peo­ple whose views and opin­ions I can react to, and who will react to my rea­soned and well-thought-out opin­ions, and to my unrea­soned and off-the-cuff ones as well. It would be real­ly nice to have Paul Krug­man three doors down, so I could bump into him occa­sion­al­ly and ask, “Hey, Paul, what do you think of .. .” Aggres­sive younger peo­ple inter­est­ed in pub­lic pol­i­cy and pub­lic finance would be excel­lent. Berke­ley is defi­cient in not hav­ing enough right-wingers; a healthy col­lege has a well-diver­si­fied intel­lec­tu­al port­fo­lio. The polit­i­cal sci­en­tists are too far away to run into by acci­dent — some­body like Dan Drezn­er would be nice to have around (even if he does get inci­dence wrong sometimes).

Over the past three years, with the arrival of Web log­ging, I have been able to add such peo­ple to those I bump into — in a vir­tu­al sense — every week. My invis­i­ble col­lege is par­adise squared, for an aca­d­e­m­ic at least.

While KU is great in many ways, but it is not Berke­ley, nor my alma mater, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. All of these uni­ver­si­ties bring in world-class sci­en­tists and thinkers to dis­cuss ideas, to cri­tique, to debate, and by doing so, to improve our state of knowl­edge and increase its dis­sem­i­na­tion. Even the best uni­ver­si­ty has lim­its on what it can offer. 

The invis­i­ble col­lege brings in peo­ple from all over. Just above, I (in Kansas) just helped spread knowl­edge from Berke­ley pro­fes­sor – and Clin­ton eco­nom­ic advi­sor – Brad Delong?And how Bora Zivkovic, a biol­o­gist in North Car­oli­na, is your co-instruc­tor? How you and I just became, briefly, stu­dents in a sem­i­nar they’re lead­ing? Wel­come to the invis­i­ble college.

Through the runup to the asi­nine Iraq war, I read blogs. The Trent Lott/Strom Thur­mond deba­cle showed me the pow­er, and from read­ing Atrios and Talk­ing Points Memo, I got intro­duced to the rest of the blo­gos­phere, espe­cial­ly Delong, Cole, PZ Myers, the Crooked Tim­ber gang, Ygle­sias, the kos crowd. From Dave Nei­w­ert, I learned about the theo­crat­ic move­ment named Chris­t­ian Recon­struc­tion­ism. I read Ter­ry Tea­chout’s cov­er­age of the art scene, music blogs like Said the Gramo­phone or Alex Ross gave me a taste of the cut­ting edge. From the mid­dle of Kansas, I was in the midst of thought­ful debates about crit­i­cal mat­ters of pub­lic pol­i­cy, sci­ence, art, cul­ture and policy. 

With an infi­nite num­ber of class­rooms avail­able, how could I resist prepar­ing my own les­son plan for the Invis­i­ble College.

Of course, it did­n’t stop there. Before long, I was explor­ing Kris Kobach’s ties to those theo­crat­ic forces, and then the same forces showed up behind a cre­ation­ist Board of Edu­ca­tion. There were new sub­jects to talk about, new dis­cov­er­ies to make, and new lessons to learn and to teach. 

That’s why I blog.