I used to start each new year by listing the ten or fifteen posts that got the most views, but in 2024 I only posted thirteen times. That makes the ranking easier, at least. Let's go with the top five.
5. Now You See It...., 69 views. On the death and resurrection of this blog.
4. One Wants One's World-Class Cafeteria Trays, 81 views. The novelist Edmund White thinks that the Russians beat America into space because of the progressive school he attended as a kid. Nonsense, of course. White's older contemporary Noam Chomsky went to a progressive school too, and it didn't dumb him down:
But up until 8th grade I was in an experimental school run by Temple University. Progressive school, and that was great. But then high school I had to go to an actual high school. There was one academic high school were I was, one for boys, one for girls, and it was very rigid. For the teachers it was a dream because the kids there wanted to go to college, so the teachers could sit back and relax. But it was very rigid, you know, tests, grades. I had never had grades before, never knew I was good student, nothing. And it was a bore. It was a black hole.
3. What Did You Do in the Woke Wars, Grampa?, 82 views. See also the followup, And I, A Woke, Found Me Here, with 33 views so far.
2. Forbidden Desire and Blameless Friendships, 128 views. I still haven't read Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe, a review of which sparked this post, but I did buy a copy. I'll get to it this year. Admittedly the review didn't make it sound terribly attractive.
1. The Golden Meanie, 203 views. On the fantasy that Americans have gotten meaner than they used to be. This one probably should have been a little longer, with more details of political vitriol from US history. I was influenced by Larry Tagg's The Battles that Made Abraham Lincoln, which was originally published in 2009 as The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: The Story of American's Most Reviled President.
Not a bad resumption, I think. We'll see if I keep it up.
