In a loose sense, all those who take time to comment extensively on Monadology are monadologists—part of the loose monadological family that continues to keep things interesting around here. For several years, however, I’ve had the dream that someday Monadology would become a multi-author blog. Multi-author blogs become less about the personality of their primary author, and more about a central core of discussion. At various times, I’ve been tempted to consider what it would take to make Monadology into a “successful” blog, and have always ended up resisting, largely because I wasn’t really interested in reducing the blog to a single topic. No, Monadology was going to have to remain a “personal” blog. But I have continued to try to push toward writing more “content” entries—things that require at least some exposition on my thoughts about something, rather than simple updates about my life. These entries—and the often surprising conversations that ensued—tended to be the things I enjoyed looking back on months and years later.

The last few months on Monadology have been quite enjoyable for me, as the level of conversation has slowly increased. This has been entirely due to the participation of a group of interesting personalities. Monadology has become, if unofficially, a multi-author blog, as the entries themselves (the things exclusively by me) were merely conversation starters. As such, I’m very pleased to welcome M. Sullivan as an official Monadologist. This means, simply, that he will be writing some of the main entries that appear on the blog. The author of each entry will continue to be noted (as it has, unnecessarily, all year) below the entry’s title.

M. Sullivan has been a long-time friend of mine, and our conversations have always been interesting and instructive. Though we certainly differ in opinion on quite a few matters, we share a similar perspective on what kinds of conversations are good ones, and why they are important. He clearly has an interest in online conversations, but didn’t want the responsibility of his own blog; to my mind, signing on to Monadology is a great solution.

My primary hope is that this will inspire me to actually do some house-repair around Monadology.

Any unofficial monadologist who finds himself or herself similarly interested in the coming months and years should certainly consider the possibility of capitalizing that first “m”.