academic blogging

Henry Farrell wrote an interesting post at Crooked Timber, about why he as an academic, took up blogging.

My personal motivation for taking up blogging was to get into arguments about all of the things that I can’t really write about as a political scientist – science fiction, modern literature, curious historical facts – and to express strong and non-scientific opinions on politics. I used to joke that I wanted to be Susan Sontag when I grew up; someone who wrote fiercely argued and dense essays for the New York Review of Books. Blogging isn’t that, but it does give license to write in a freewheeling way, to speculate, to polemicize and to give a bit of free rein to your hobby-horses. All of which is to say that blogging isn’t ever going to be a substitute for academia, but it is a valuable ancillary activity. It allows you to write pieces that may or may not connect to your scholarship, but that never could see the light of day in an academic journal.