Crooked Timber is a blog with a left-of-center political slant, primarily administered by academics from countries like[vague] the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland. The blog's name is inspired by a quotation from philosopher Immanuel Kant, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made," from his 1784 essay "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose". The liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin alluded to the quotation in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. Crooked Timber frequently hosts online book events and includes contributions from a variety of experts in fields such as philosophy, political science, and sociology.[citation needed]
History
Crooked Timber was founded in July 2003 as a merger of several individual blogs, including Junius and Gallowglass, along with some new contributors. Additional members were added over subsequent months until the group reached an agreed optimum of 15 members.[1][non-primary source needed]
Crooked Timber ranked in Technorati's Top 100 blogs between 2003 and 2005 and is still widely linked to in the academic blogosphere. On March 9, 2008, it was listed as number 33 in The Guardian's list of the world's 50 most important blogs.[2] On April 15, 2011, an article on academic blogs in The New York Times listed Crooked Timber as one of seven influential examples of the type, describing it as having "built a reputation as an intellectual global powerhouse".[3]
Crooked Timber has held several online book events, during which a subset of members (and often also invited guestbloggers) read a book and each write a blog post about it, either a review or a post inspired by the book.[citation needed]
