What's Tony Thinking

The Year in Review/ Most Read Posts

As a “Year in Review” piece I thought I would share with you the five most read and “shared” of my blogs of the past year.

I’ll take them in the old Letterman style, though limiting it to the top 5 instead of the top 10. In this post, I will countdown from 5 to 2. Then in a couple days I will disclose what was my most read and shared blog of the year. And in terms of numbers of readers and shares, what was number 1 outdistanced the others, mentioned here, by a lot. I’ll speculate in that next post on why.

But for now, drum roll, the 5th most read/ shared was “Is ‘Social Justice’ Killing Synagogues and Churches?”

For that piece I riffed on a column by Joel Kotkin, partly agreeing, partly not, with his affirmative answer to the question.

Number four most read/ shared was titled “The Work of Aging.”  For that one I considered an excellent Atlantic article by Arthur C. Brooks, shared with me by friend and reader Mike Bennett. Mike has been a source of several referrals that morphed into blogs this year. Thanks buddy!

Number three was written in response to the sad and shocking death of our dear friend, Bob Almquist, in March in Ecuador. Bob was murdered during a home invasion. The piece I wrote then was titled, “The Way Death Awakens Us.” Family and friends of Bob and his widow, Marcia, continue to grieve his loss. I was pleased to see that Plymouth Housing Group is going to make one of its building a memorial to Bob. He worked for some years on the PHG staff.

And Number two on the most/ read shared list was “Is Seattle Dying?” That was written in response to a provocative and disturbing documentary on homelessness in Seattle from the local station KOMO. As you can read, I thought the show was a contribution to a discussion/ debate that needs to take place. I also thought it was dismissed too summarily, with no small defensiveness, on the part of Seattle’s political establishment.

So these were four of five of the most read and widely shared of my 2019 blogs. Was there a theme here? Kind of looks like there is one . . . death, dying, killing and aging.  But I’m not sure the obvious references in one form or another to mortality is actually a common theme since the pieces themselves are quite different.

What seems to me of somewhat more interest than commonality of the mortality metaphor was the range of pieces to which readers responded. One was explicitly about church, another on managing life’s journey, another a memorial to a friend and the last about the city where I live. I do try to write about a range of topics. Your reading interests seem to reflect or support that. It is also perhaps noteworthy that neither Trump nor Impeachment showed up on the most-read list though I have addressed those topics multiple times (who hasn’t?).

As noted, I will reveal # 1 of 2019, speculate on why it attained that status, and add a bit further commentary on the topic of # 1 most read in my next post.

In the meantime, I hope you continue to celebrate and enjoy the twelve days of Christmas and the final days of this decade. Thanks so much for being a reader of my blog in 2019!