Kevin’s wife, Marian, posted this last night:
With a heavy heart, I have to tell you that after a long battle with cancer my husband Kevin Drum passed away on Friday, March 7, 2025.
No public memorial services are planned.
In lieu of flowers, please donate to the charity or political cause of your choice.
A Facebook page, ‘In Memory of Kevin Drum’, has been created as a place for friends and family to share memories of Kevin. I encourage you to post your thoughts and memories there.
Thank you to all the wonderful blog readers who supported, encouraged and challenged him through the years.
He will be greatly missed.
Kevin was one of the earliest bloggers, maybe even a bit before me, and like a vanishingly few number of us he kept to the form over these last 20+ years. First with CalPundit, then Political Animal at the Washington Monthly, his eponymous blog at Mother Jones and his last one called Jabberwocking he was a blogger to the core.
They were all great blogs, delivered with his characteristic sharp, informative style. He was one of the people who created the form way back when this whole thing was the wild west and his particular method was unique in its calm, clear, analytical style which we all linked to in order to back up our more hyperbolic analyses. We trusted him to be right and he always was.
He invented Friday Cat blogging as a way for all of us to take little breather at the end of the week and remind our readers and ourselves that we were human beings. ( My Friday Night Soother was modeled on it.) Kevin and his famous cat Inkblot were even featured in the NY Times:
“It brings people together,” said Kevin Drum, who began the cat spotlight last year on his own blog, Calpundit (www.calpundit.com). “Both Atrios and Instapundit have done Friday catblogging. It goes to show you can agree on at least a few things.”
Kevin wrote for many years at Mother Jones and did important work there. His pieces on lead poisoning were seminal and according to his friend and former publisher Paul Glastris at the Washington Monthly should have won the Pulitzer Prize and I agree. (Glastris’s tribute is well worth reading.)
He was not only a great blogger, he was a real mensch. His former Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffrey revealed on BlueSky that he had always refused raises, telling them to give the money to younger journalists. He was always kind to me as well. Although we lived not far from one another we only met in person a handful of times, once when he generously hosted a book party for Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland. But we emailed from time to time although I did not reach out as often as I should have as his illness progressed over the past few years.
I read his blog religiously, however, and I learned so much from his writing, all the way until the end. I will miss it very much. R.I. P. Kevin. Say hi to Inkblot.
