Happy 1000th Post

According to WordPress, which hosts tompepinsky.com, this is my 1000th blog post on a blog that has been maintained—with gaps here and there, across a couple different platforms—since August 2004. It’s hard to imagine that I have had 1000 things to say over the past 19 years, but you can check the archives for the evidence. It’s all there.

When I reach my 20 year anniversary of blogging about 11 months from now, I’ll write a bit more about how academic blogging has changed over the course of my professional career. There is also something very personal and special about re-reading some of my early reflections on politics, research, Southeast Asia, life, and all the rest. If you’ve been reading this blog since its earliest days, you’ve watched me through a good portion of my adult life. That’s pretty cool.

For my 500th blog post, I reflected on all sorts of life changes as well as my favorite posts, which were very much “in the weeds” of my own research in Southeast Asia. Since that post, in 2012, the content has changed quite a bit, and readership has gone up dramatically (WordPress says that I had 174,000 unique visitors in 2017). Numbers have declined since then, most precipitously in 2023 now that I no longer automatically share new posts on X. But that’s fine Seasons change, and so do I.

Some highlights over the years:

1. My most popular blog post since moving to WordPress is “Everyday Authoritarianism is Boring and Tolerable.”
2. My most popular single post in a calendar year is “Weak and Incompetent Leaders act like Strong Leaders.”
3. The post that taught me that there is a lot of interest out there in research-themed blog posts was “OMFG Exogenous Variation! Or, Can You Find Good Nails When You Find an Indonesian Politics Hammer“.
4. This post earned me a lifetime personal ban from Russia.
5. I created a little stir by writing on Singapore’s economic transformation.
6. This post on the MH370 disaster is me dealing with a personal nightmare of mine (I don’t like flying).
7. When I wrote this post, I still thought people wanted to read my opinions on Southeast Asian cuisine.
8. One of my favorite times in Jakarta was the time that “I Went to a Prabowo Rally“.
9. This was my least favorite day in Jakarta. If you know, you know.
10. This post was the beginning of many thoughts on public engagement and political science. This is probably my favorite post on the subject.
11. A substantial fraction of my published articles started off as blog posts. Like this one.
12. Blogging has been really important for working out core ideas that I use in teaching. Like this one.
13. Here, I defended my favorite university in the world against attacks on Asian studies.
14. I have thought a lot about directed acyclic graphs versus the potential outcomes framework. Here’s one good example. Here’s another one with a funny title.
15. I miss the days of wading right in on tricky questions in The Discourse. With greater age comes great responsibility, and more institutions that can suffer from collateral damage from all my takes.
16. And of course, there are all these memories of how fortunate I’ve been that I study the most interesting places in entire world.

I’m awfully lucky, and awfully grateful for everyone who has ready any of this.