Not quite a year ago I celebrated the fifth anniversary of this blog. I wasn’t sure, at that time, precisely how many posts I had on here, but knew it was just over 400. I’ve kept better track since then, and as far as I can tell this post is the 500th in just under six years.
To celebrate, I looked back at my analytics from the beginning of this site in December 2017 to the present to see what the biggest hits have been. It’s an interesting grab-bag—a few things I consciously tried to make as appealing as possible, a few things that made almost zero impression when I first wrote them but slowly gathered momentum over years, a couple that have crept into the top Google results for very specific terms, and a few personal pieces that made it big in surprising ways, including getting linked from a New York Times op-ed. I offer these up as a top-ten, with a little commentary.
10 most popular blog posts to date
Ranked in order of popularity:
Willy Wonka’s Hidden Nazi Joke, May 2, 2020—A favorite bit of trivia that I wrote about in the structure of clickbait as an experiment. Apparently it worked. This is far and away the most popular thing I’ve ever posted here and is the top Google result for several related searches. Three and a half years on and I can still count on it going viral on Facebook or Reddit a couple of times a year.
Kingdom of Heaven, March 26, 2018—The most popular—and probably the best—of my short-lived Historical Movie Monday series, this post has gotten a steady drip of traffic for five and a half years. I still refer back to it myself, as I recently did when responding to Ridley Scott’s ideas about history and historical accuracy.
Jon Daker, RIP, February 24, 2022—I was as surprised as anyone that this post blew up. When I found out that internet legend Jon Daker had died early last year, I was moved to pay tribute and reflect a little on what we can both enjoy and learn from his public access TV humiliation. It seems to have resonated with a lot of people. Note that this is easily the most recent post on this list and you should get some idea of the speed with which it spread.
My top nine Civil War novels, August 2, 2018—A personal favorites list that I published ahead of the release of Griswoldville. Needs updating but still gets traffic. Every once in a while someone looks at Griswoldville after reading it, but only every once in a while. I guess I should try the Willy Wonka clickbait approach.
What’s wrong, Chesterton? February 28, 2019—I wrote this one day after driving back and forth between two campuses of my college. The famously misattributed/misquoted Chesterton line “Dear sirs: I am” had crossed my mind and I determined to find the source for myself, definitively. When I did, I transcribed and shared the whole original source so that it’d be more easily accessible. To my surprise, a lot of people were also keen to find it. Even more surprising, this post is now in the footnotes or bibliographies of at least four books (here’s one, and here’s another that came out just last month), which I accidentally discovered early this year, and was cited in a David French op-ed in the New York Times this summer.
I’m not saying it was aliens, August 9, 2018—A slightly labored reflection on the pseudo- or ersatz-religious role played by aliens in many popular imaginations. An important idea to me, but perhaps not expressed as well as it could be. I’ve been considering revisiting this topic one of these days, especially considering how much more I hear about Joe Rogan, Graham Hancock, and the pyramids than “Ancient Aliens” now.
I’m not saying Ancient Aliens is racist… November 6, 2020—Curiously, despite a gap of more than two years this post only has a few hits less than the one above, meaning that these two, which both play on an old meme, are almost tied in this top ten. This one has gotten more traffic in less time thanks to a few prominent shares on Facebook and Twitter and the attention given to pretty much any accusation of racism. As it happens, I think the racism of ancient astronauts theories is an accident born of their chronological snobbery (as Charles Portis noted in Gringos), which I tried to suggest in this post.
The Winter War, May 14, 2018—Another Historical Movie Monday post, one made possible by the loan of a DVD copy of this hard-to-find Finnish war epic from a Finnish coworker who has now retired. A seriously impressive and hard-hitting movie that I hope this post has made more people seek out. Now if some enterprising home media company would just release a good Region 1 Blu-ray…
Jefferson on ignorance and freedom, October 3, 2019—A short reflection on a relatively well-known passage from one of Jefferson’s late letters. I’m glad this one has (again, unexpectedly) gotten so much attention, because the quotation is often garbled or misattributed and I think it’s an important idea well worth meditating on.
Hacksaw Ridge, April 16, 2018—One of the last Historical Movie Monday posts before that series petered out, a post that I remember getting little response at the time but which snuck into the top ten most popular posts on the blog over the last five years. A good movie I need to revisit.
Ten most popular blog posts of the last year
You might note a kind of inverse recency bias in the top ten list above, as older posts have had more time to collect hits and work their way up in Google search results, which is still where I get most of my traffic. But I’m also struck that it’s not the most representative sample of what I typically post here. To get a better glimpse, to give more recent posts a chance to shine for anyone who hasn’t looked at them, and to unnecessarily drag out this celebration, here are the ten most popular posts from the last year, a top ten I’m pretty proud of:
Borges on the two registers of English, June 7, 2023—A response to a clip of William F Buckley and Jorge Luis Borges discussing the relative strengths of English and Spanish on “Firing Line,” this clip got picked up by two much more popular blogs (one on linguistics, one on Catholic homeschooling) and a professor with a lot of Facebook followers and really blew up. I really enjoyed these reflections so I’m glad others have found them enlightening.
Frozen II’s big dam problem, December 13, 2022—This post started as an e-mail to my friends at Before They Were Live, a Disney animation podcast, and turned into a protracted grumble about one of the many things in Frozen II that don’t make sense and why it’s not just an artistic failing.
Notes on rereading Storm of Steel, December 3, 2022—Exactly what it says on the tin: a less structured series of observations and reflections based on my first reading of Ernst Jünger’s great World War I memoir since grad school. Storm of Steel is an astonishingly powerful book that, like its author, has often been misrepresented. I hope those who have stumbled across this post have found it helpful, and that if they haven’t read the book they do after reading these thoughts.
Orwell, Camus, Chesterton, and bad math, March 16, 2023—2+2=5 is a commonplace example of denial of reality. It’s strongly associated with Orwell, but when the author of an essay I came across suggested that Orwell got it from Camus, I had to go back further and suggest that one or both of them were riffing on Chesterton. This post has gotten interesting traction in the months since I shared it.
On the term “Anglo-Saxon,” November 11, 2022—One of the most important posts, to me, in the last year, a response of the foolish, politically-motivated movement to avoid or censor the term “Anglo-Saxon” as racist.
History must be written forward, May 10, 2023—A short reflection on historical perspective and presentism inspired by a passage in the introduction to a history of Germany that I didn’t finish reading. I’ll return to it one of these days on the strength of passages like this.
2022 in books, January 2, 2023—My favorite reads of last year. These posts usually don’t get sustained traffic but people keep coming back to this one. I hope they read at least some of what I recommend, because last year was a very good reading year for me.
All Quiet on the Western Front, March 19, 2023—My ambivalent but mostly negative review of the new German-language film adaptation of Remarque’s novel. Short version: a technically magnificent bad adaptation.
My problems with Glass Onion, February 10, 2023—Another film post, of which I’ve written more this year, this time sorting through some things that hung on and bothered me in the otherwise entertaining Rian Johnson whodunnit Glass Onion, which Sarah and I saw last fall.
On ancient and medieval “propaganda,” January 16, 2023—Another post parsing a controversial term, this one a term that seems to me to have a purely modern and political valence that is distorting and anachronistic when applied to the past. I picked apart several examples that have been bugging me for years. I still see and hear people do this, so the struggle isn’t over yet.
Conclusion
As always, I appreciate y’all’s readership. This little bit of practice, this commonplace book, has been a fun and rewarding outlet, and the fact that people read and enjoy it still humbles me. It’s been a busy month, but I’ve got more things line up to write about once I can scrape together the time. It means a lot that y’all will be here for it. Thanks again! Here’s to 500 more posts!
