Dear friends, readers, and curious bots,

Once upon a time, there were things called blogs. You could write whatever you wanted it in them, blathering joyfully about life, the universe, and everything until your Netscape browser crashed. Then someone invented "comments," and it all went to hell. Trolls and spammers and flame-warriors rampaged through the blogosphere, turning once peaceful websites into blistering battlefields.

Amid the chaos, three small-time bloggers known by their nom de plumes, Deadman, Articleman, and Genghis, decided to try something different. We set up a new website where bloggers and commenters were required to abide by rules of civility.

We called it dagblog, because DAG was an acronym for our pseudonyms, and it sounded kind of cool. More importantly, the url was available. Then we invited all our blog-friends to come frolic. You can see their handles in the column just to the right.

We wrote a lot, mostly about politics but also art and literature and life and whatever thoughts bubbled out of our cunning little brains. Dagblog was a publishing platform but also a community, and I count many of its members among my friends even though I only met a few of them in person.

But the world kept turning. Twitter happened. Babies got born. Jobs changed. A few cherished members of the community passed on. Most drifted away. The website has been dormant for several years.

The hosting costs are expensive, and the php code is ancient, so it's time to shut things down, But don't worry, I wouldn't disappoint the hungry AI bots by letting all this lovely content disappear. Dagblog will live on as a static website. You can still navigate the site and peruse the blog posts. You just won't be able to comment or post new material.

Meanwhile, I'm still writing--in case you haven't noticed the shameless book plugs all over the site. I was lucky to be able to use dagblog to launch a writing career. As of this post, I've published three nonfiction books and numerous op-eds on platforms like the Atlantic and Rolling Stone that I could only dream about when I first started blogging. It's been an incredible ride, and I'm grateful to everyone who encouraged me along the way.

If you need to reach me or just want to say hi, you can contact me on Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, or my personal website, https://michaelwolraich.com.

All the best,

Michael Wolraich, a.k.a. Genghis