Outside the Beltway

Blog Love

James Joyner · Wednesday, August 20, 2008 · 3 comments

My OTB colleague Alex Knapp quietly relaunched his blog, Heretical Ideas, as a magazine almost a month ago on a soft basis and is now ready for the big public unveiling.

Swimming against the tide of micro-niche blogging, the new Heritical Ideas Magazine will “examine everything from politics to religion to film to cooking to language.”  The current issue What Kind of Experience Makes a Good President?, an examination of the merits of the Hasbro suit against Facebook’s Scrabble game, why scientists and religious people talk past one another, how  too much information makes us miss the big picture, a practical guide on ruining perfectly good movie franchises, and much, much, more.   Give ’em a looksee.

Meanwhile, don’t forget the other co-authors, some of whom also write for their own blogs.    Dave Schuler, our resident Russia guru, writes on pretty much everything but what everyone else is writing about at The Glittering Eye.   He steadfastly avoids blogging about the silly minutia of the presidential campaign; which is to say, he pretty much avoids blogging about the presidential campaign.

After much pleading on my part, he’s doing most of his foreign policy blogging here these days — and has probably logged as many episodes of OTB Radio as I have — but he still tackles such topics as the cost of sprawl, the Chinese economy, Europe’s infuriating indecisiveness, and a wide variety of other issues that aren’t being covered elsewhere.

Steven Taylor, my erstwhile colleague at Troy and a regular vacation fill-in blogger here, has written at PoliBlog since February 2003.   In addition to campaign coverage from an unusual perspective (he’s a social conservative who’s about fed up with the Republican party but is much less angry about it than John Cole) he writes about everything from the US-Poland missile deal to cement nationalization in Venezuela.