A new group blog, Crooked Timber, has just been born. So far the group is Chris Bertram, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, Kieran Healy and moi.

There will be others appearing on the scene in the near future – to a first approximation Crooked Timber will be a broad-based leftie academic blog. But we’re open-minded about what counts as leftie, and as what counts as academic. To mangle a cliche or two, the party is meant to be more prominent than the party line. It’s a very exciting project, and I was rather honoured to be asked to join it.

As far as I know, Chris Bertram did most of the organising work to get the blog running, and Kieran Healy and Henry Farrell have done the technical work to get the blog looking as good as it does. (And it really does look rather good. Go on, take a look.) So much thanks to all of them.

What will this mean for TAAR? I haven’t quite worked that out yet. Crooked Timber is meant to be somewhat less of a niche publication than TAAR, so I won’t be posting entries there on the intricacies of Lewisian counterpart theory, or on counterexamples to analyses of vagueness. But I will post there some things that I previously posted on TAAR – not just posts not about philosophy but posts about political philosophy, or legal philosophy, or philosophy of economics, or more generally anything that could conceivably be of interest to those not in linguistics and philosophy departments. So the volume of posts here will necessarily decline. On the other hand, there may be slightly more focus to the entries that remain. We’ll have to see how this works out in practice, I think, rather than trying to legislate in advance. The papers blog won’t be affected, though I probably won’t resume the practice of posting links to the daily entries except on days where there is something especially worth noting.