Blog Spotlight: Unsolicited Analysis

I have a svelte 400ish blog subscriptions on my feed reader, so it stands to reason I could tell you about one every day for the next year.

That would probably get a little tiresome, so I thought I’d start with one a week. Here’s the first.

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I love Unsolicited Analysis. It’s probably my favorite blog of this year to date.

That doesn’t have anything to do with the unsolicited analyzer being my increasingly tight friend and occasional drummer Chaz. It’s more about an obscenely diverse mix of topics, all delivered with decisiveness and snark.

The title “Unsolicited Analysis” is a thesis statement – the blog is dedicated to providing unasked dissections of life’s data. That often translates to providing hard-core (but still layperson-accessible) financial analysis – but also to world events, old and new music (and musicianship), politics, television and film, gender and race relations, reflections on content married life, and first-time home-ownership.

It’s all delivered with an unrelenting attention to rhetoric, but also dedicated to learning stuff about the world and finding moments to be an actual human being in the sometimes dehumanizing process of occupational and financial transactions that make up our life.

Do I always agree with Chaz? Oh god, no. Even when I don’t, he speaks from a place I can appreciate, as in this comment, after pulling a 17hr shift in the office yesterday:

There is no reason for me to have any faith in the future or illusions of inevitable reward for my labor – everything I’ve done will be torn up in front of my face by a mob of regulators and lost in the collapse of the Western democracies.

Nope, no careerism here; I’m just making sure Titanic gleams iridescent fang-white the whole voyage to hell.

Even if my eyes glaze during passages about credit default swaps, I appreciate every post because Unsolicited Analysis is the absolute definition of why someone should have a blog – because they are passionate about writing and they write passionately.

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PS: UA is a Tumblr blog, which makes for a lot of community discussion that you can’t take part in if you aren’t on Tumblr. But, you can subscribe to its RSS feed just like any other blog, so the only downside is not being able to mock Chaz when he finally admits he likes Lady Gaga.

PPS: If you are a Tumblr user you can follow a simul-cast of CK there, with occasional bonus re-blogs from other Tumblrs.