As always, I want to offer special thanks to Darren Smith, who has continued to help manage the blog. I also want to thank our dedicated editors, Kristin Oren and Hartwell Harrison, who continue their amazing work proofing posts daily to remove my embarrassing typos. Finally, I would like to thank our regular readers for their continued support and contributions. This blog is a community, and this milestone is a testament to each of our daily readers.
This blog was created roughly 20 years ago during a family vacation to North Carolina. While staying at a beach house in 2007, I was on the phone with my editor at USA Today, who urged me again to join other columnists on their blog. I was entirely unfamiliar with blogs and resisted. As my family can attest, I am one of the most habit-bound, tech-challenged creatures on the planet.
Joining us at the beach that year were my wife’s family, who were already considerable figures on the Internet with great success in the areas of politics, academia, and business. When I got off the call, they called me into the living room and presented me with my new blog, which they had registered and designed during the call. Res Ipsa was born.
From that day, the blog seemed to take deep roots and grow steadily until it was one of the most visited legal blogs. I hear regularly from reporters, members of Congress, judges and others who follow the blog and it gives me a great sense of pride in the heterogeneous makeup of our virtual community.
So here is our current profile:
As of this morning, we have 23, 070 posts.
With over 400 posts, we also have over 1,612,200 comments. In the interest of full transparency, we are having a debate over what to do about trolls who are impersonating others in the comments, including false postings from me (I generally leave the comment sections for our community and do not post comments). This is obviously a small number of unbalanced individuals or paid posters who seek to bog down sites or disrupt discourse. There are no great options, which is why many sites have eliminated their comment sections. As a free speech blog, I have resisted that option, but we continue to debate how to address malicious trolls, but their increased presence is a sign of the growing influence of this blog.
We have also continued our steady rise on X with roughly 1.1 million followers. We have over 26,000 people who follow us on WordPress and by direct email (which you can subscribe to with the box on the right side of the blog home page).
In the last month, our ten biggest international sources for readers came from:
- United States
- China
- Canada
- United Kingdom
- Australia
- Germany
- Netherlands
- Russia
- New Zealand
- France
The top five posts in terms of readership in the last 30 days were:
- The Purge: Princeton Faculty Reach Perfect Zero in Support for Republicans
- Palestinian Activist Defaces Churchill Statue and Boasts About it in Court…British Jury Finds Him Not Guilty
- The Secret to “Sleeping Well”: A Response to Kevin Reddington
- “The Funniest Thing”: Academic Jokes About Celebrating the “Kirkiversary” by Assassinating Nick Shirley
So that’s the update. I cannot thank our regulars enough for their support of the blog. This is an expanding vibrant community and it is a great pleasure to see our community expanding around the world. I particularly appreciate most of our readers remaining civil and respectful to others.
It remains a great honor to serve as the host of this blog and to discuss issues that range from the world-shaking to the merely wacky. Thank you for coming by each day to check in and contribute your voice to our community.
Now on to the 1,000,000,000!