I am sure Lambert is honored and humbled by the many many expressions of appreciation as he wraps up his time at Naked Capitalism. I hope those of you who have enjoyed and perhaps even tangibly benefitted (particularly on Covid!) from his in-depth, incisive, and often mordantly humorous work have seen fit to stop by his donation page and make a final contribution. If not, do so right now! Since Lambert is a WASP and WASPs are not great about asking for money, I will refrain from embedding the Harlan Ellison classic Pay the Writer.
Lambert’s last Water Cooler will take place later today. He has graciously agreed to help with the transition to new writers by also working this weekend, so you will see one more links and original article from him.
Many of you have said how much you will feel the loss of his regular contributions, not just his yellow wader analyses of speeches, his election horse races and debate open threads, but also in his many other areas of interest, from gardening and permaculture to important political works to photography to trains and transportation, manufacturing, and class warfare. I will very much miss him, not just as a highly reliable and insightful writer, but an important participant in the management of the site, from helping evaluate new writers to organizing the fundraisers to working with our tech maven Dave to tackle the more than occasional site anomaly to determining what to do about particular comments and commentors to even playing Mr. Diplomacy in reviewing missives to less than receptive parties. We’ve spoken pretty much daily for over ten years. So I will miss his counsel and sanity-checking on both news and the business of the site.
But we hope to keep the site at the high level of vim and vigor it attained during Lambert’s era with the additions to our writing team and new contributions by current members. As we announced earlier, KLG will be providing a weekly, health-and-science-news-related post in the old Water Cooler slot every Friday, which we are calling Coffee Break (there can, after all, be only one Water Cooler). Two other writers are stepping up to provide topical Coffee Breaks: Kevin Kirk, who will post a Europe/UK focused weekly offering on Mondays called Across the Pond, and Haig Hovaness, a defense industry/economics/politics overview (what Ray McGovern calls MICMATT) in the Tuesday Coffee Break slot. Attentive readers may recall that Kevin Kirk posted on the ultranationalist Zionist plans to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque. We also featured a very informative talk he gave on Myanmar, which many said helped them get a better grip on the complicated history and present of the war-torn country. Both Kevin and Haig will each make additional weekly contributions, Haig a Links and Kevin an original post.
KLG’s first Coffee Break also launches today, but it will be a bit short since Lambert will be providing his final Water Cooler, which will include his regular Covid and health policy coverage. KLG intends to cover the Covid/pandemics beat, albeit not at Lambert’s intensity. He will set up an e-mail address to solicit reader input for Substacker Twitter and Bluesky accounts worth following (Twitter makes it impossible for Lambert to export his well-curated list of experts).
Finally, we have two more occasional contributors joining the Naked Capitalism team: Charlie Krauss, an energy and energy politics expert based in Central Europe, and Tom Valovic, a professional writer and editor describes himself as moonlighting as a political journalist. His work has appeard regularly at Common Dreams. They join our roster of other ad hoc contributors, such as Michael Hudson, Satyajit Das, and George Georgiou.
So see how many writers it is taking to fill Lambert’s yellow waders? But hopefully you will come to appreciate their range of expertise and distinct voices.