Crooked Timber is a left-of-centre

political blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

run by a group of (mostly) academics from and working in several different nations, including the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, the

Republic of Ireland Ireland ( ga, Éire ), also known as the Republic of Ireland (), is a country in north-western Europe consisting of 26 of the 32 counties of the island of Ireland. The capital and largest city is Dublin, on the eastern side of the island. A ...

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

and

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

. The name alludes to an English translation of a quotation by

Immanuel Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and ...

: from his essay "

Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" or "The Idea of a Universal History on a Cosmopolitical Plan" (german: Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht) is a 1784 essay by Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kan ...

" (1784).

History

Crooked Timber was founded in July 2003 as a merger of several individual blogs, including Junius and Gallowglass, along with some new contributors. Additional members were added over subsequent months until the group reached an agreed optimum of 15 members. Crooked Timber ranked in

Technorati Technorati was a search engine and a publisher advertising platform that served as an advertising solution for the thousands of websites in its network. Technorati launched its ad network in 2008, and at one time was one of the largest ad network ...

's Top 100 blogs between 2003 and 2005 and is still widely linked to in the academic

blogosphere The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community (or as a collection of connected communities) or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can pu ...

. On March 9, 2008, it was listed as number 33 in

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

's list of the world's 50 most important blogs. On April 15, 2011, an article on academic blogs in

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

listed Crooked Timber as one of seven influential examples of the type, describing it as having "built a reputation as an intellectual global powerhouse". The quotation "Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made" (''Aus so krummem Holze, als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden'') is from Kant's ''

''. The liberal philosopher

Isaiah Berlin Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks ...

alluded to the quotation in ''The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas''. Crooked Timber has held several online book events, during which a subset of members (and often also invited guestbloggers) read a book and each write a blog post about it, either a review or a post inspired by the book.

History

Current members

Former members

References

External links