Our friend and colleague Kevin Drum passed away on March 7. He was 66 and had been living with multiple myeloma for 11 years, and being the extraordinary journalist he was, he had taken readers along on the journey, sharing health updates on his blog. They were, in trademark style, matter-of-fact, data-driven, and wry; the last one included, like so many of his posts, a chart he’d made (this one to track the status of his C-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation). There were 140 replies, many from readers who had followed him for years and decades. They worried for him, wished him a speedy recovery, and one wrote:
If, however, it is “time” I wish for YOU the same thing that my Dad wished for my Mom. May your journey be pain free, and your memories clear! You have brought more joy to others than you received. Nothing in this life on earth is better than going when it’s your time, with the knowledge that you brought to others joy, and happiness.
This was quite in line with Kevin’s own thinking about death and dying. In 2016, two years after he was first diagnosed, he wrote an in-depth piece about the death with dignity movement. It had in-depth reporting, but he also grappled with the decisions he would have to make. He wasn’t sure how much longer he might have—“Five years? Ten years? Two?”—but he was very clear that when the time came, he wanted the option of going out on his own terms.
It was an extraordinary piece of writing and like any great piece, it was also a gift to the rest of us, helping make sense of something messy, scary, and confusing. That was Kevin’s talent, from the moment he first started posting as Calpundit as a pioneer of the blogosphere, later blogging at Washington Monthly under the sobriquet of Political Animal. His sweet spot was making complicated political and economic topics accessible to the rest of us, and by the time we took the helm of Mother Jones in 2006, he was one of our favorite bloggers. (Who couldn’t love the inventor of Friday cat blogging?) We asked him if he’d write for the magazine, and then whether he would consider bringing his blogging over to MoJo, and, by 2008, he’d agreed to both.
That began a 13-year run during which, it’s no exaggeration to say, Kevin was a big part of turning Mother Jones into a force to be reckoned with. When he went long, he went big: He wrote a groundbreaking piece on the link between lead exposure and crime rates that helped advance the conversation about environmental racism. Long before most people were paying attention, he explained how the destruction of unions was bad for the whole middle class and how AI was going to take all of our jobs. He unpacked the aftermath of the housing crisis and bank bailout. He told his mostly liberal audience that earmarks were good, actually. Meanwhile, producing posts at a breathtaking clip, his blog routinely reached hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes millions, a month. His most loyal readers were a fierce community who debated the finer points of this or that feat of statistical analysis, laughed with him at the antics of the pompous and entitled, and cooed over the cat photos he faithfully posted every Friday.
Like every blogger worth his salt, he sometimes shot from the hip and occasionally missed; unlike some, he had the courage and integrity to take the resulting flack, listen, and change his mind. And true to his menschy self, he turned down every proposed increase to his modest salary, asking that we use the money to help more junior staffers instead.
No matter the topic or format, Kevin loved busting myths, puncturing truisms, and perhaps most of all, helping all of us see that regardless of how bizarre, unnerving, or terrifying things got, the end of the world was not yet nigh. On hearing of Kevin’s passing, our former colleague Dave Gilson, a fellow chart genius who often worked with Kevin, sent us a note that read, “Kevin was passionate and principled, but his default setting was calm in the face of hyperventilation and hyperbole. So when he did get angry, you knew it was bad.”
When Kevin first had to undergo cancer therapy that took him out of commission for a time, he worried about abandoning his readers. Other staffers helped fill in, but we also reached out to the OG blogging community, to see if they had a post to offer in honor of him. A veritable who’s-who—Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Ann Friedman, Ana Marie Cox, Jonathan Chait, David Dyden, Felix Salmon, and many others—signed up. Over the next few years, his health ebbed and flowed but eventually got to a point where he decided he had to blog at his own pace and timing. He eschewed Substack—didn’t like the vibe—and set up his own blog, naming it Jabberwocking. And he spent the next few months working on a long piece for us about how Fox News had made America so angry.
Donald Trump did make Kevin angry, but even in the chaotic weeks of the second Trump administration, he found ways to knock the chaos-mongers down a notch. He had a realist’s idealism—a cautious, but steadfast faith in the ability of democracy to muddle through its darkest hours and come out the other side. In these last ten years, that was unique and sanity-preserving for so many of his readers, us included.
A few weeks ago, when he was in the hospital struggling with pneumonia, Kevin had a low point and posted a brief update that ended with the words “Take care of Donald Trump for me.” It was a little cryptic, but also classic Kevin: He didn’t want us to take ourselves, or Trump, too seriously. He knew that this, too, would pass.
Kevin was a passionate amateur photographer and loved to post about some new thing he’d accomplished with a lens, or an evening he’d spent outdoors trying to capture some moment in the skies. He set up Jabberwocking so as to display one of his photos every time you reloaded it, along with a quote from some writer or blogger. When we checked it after learning of his death, it showed a photo of the Santa Ana Mountains, shot from Irvine in Orange County, California, where he spent his entire life. The quote that accompanied it was “Everything takes longer than you think,” and it was from Kevin himself. We’d like to think it was a reminder: these tough, confusing times will be hard, and will last longer than we’d like, but not forever.
Kevin’s wife Marian has set up a remembrance page on Facebook and we encourage his fans to leave their goodbyes there.