You guys are sweet. I’m sure your attention will inspire BG, S, and C to reappear to express their gratitude and name their own thinkingest favorites. (I will be holding my breath in anticipation, asphyxiation be damned!) I think, however, I’ll decline to play the meme’s game in favor of soliciting suggestions¹.

In addition to reading the blogs of friends both real (such as Laura) and imaginary (such as JH) and close acquaintances, my bloggy reading branches from four main trunks:

1. The American Prospect, which has as much as any other political magazine cultivated talented writers and thinkers (if you don’t read Yglesias every day, you’re too apolitical; also, Garance Franke-Ruta, and Chris Hayes who, properly speaking, isn’t a TAP alum, but whose blog I found via a link)
2. Unfogged, which is too hard to explain this morning
3. A passel of literary magazines that also have blogs and/or RSS feeds for their articles, which also includes the personal blogs of writers (Caleb Crain is worth your time especially if, like me, you enjoy thinking about the literary culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and/or literacy in general)
4. Personally historical blogs, which includes most all Campbellite and/or alma-mater blogs who I don’t also count as friends or close acquaintances (Given my ambivalence about maintaining these ties, I flirt every month or so with not reading any of these ever again, Krister being a significant exception)

Who else should I be reading, and why, either from the trunks above or, if you suggest a new trunk, what good representatives can you can point me to?

¹ I wonder whether memes like this are meant to drive down the value of links and thereby render Technorati obsolete, or whether they actually increase the value of Technorati precisely because they proliferate links? The algorithms such aggregators use to value links are, after all, just attempts to value links themselves. However, because hypertext is theoretically infinitely referential, can there ever be such thing as link inflation, and if so, how would we know it when we see it? (Splogs, perhaps?)

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