Andrew Gelman's blog schedule

Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University, runs one of my favourite blogs on the Internet. He has been writing there for over 21 years, since October 2004. Many of his collaborators also contribute to the blog, but he is the primary author. In a 2024 post celebrating 20 years of blogging, Gelman mentions having over 12,000 posts. This is a cadence of over 1.6 posts/day sustained for two decades!

One of the more unusual things about Gelman’s blog is that most posts are not particularly topical. Sure, many posts are time-sensitive, posting about upcoming events or commenting on recent publications (like doing damage control on deeply flawed papers like to receive attention). But there is generally one non-topical post each day. A line in a recent post caught my eye:

As regular readers know, our posts are usually on a 6-month lag, but this one is so important I had to share it with you right away.

As a regular reader myself, I was aware of the delayed posting schedule, but out of curiosity, I wanted to see how far back this habit went. Here’s the rough timeline I came up with:

• In 2011, Gelman wrote that his “non-topical blog entries are on approximately one-month delay”.
• In 2012, he referred to “stacking up posts here with a roughly one-month delay”.
• In 2014, he said that “most of the posts here are on a 1 or 2 month delay.”
• In 2016, he casually mentioned “our 2-month delay”.
• Later that year (August 2016), in a post literally titled “My next 170 blog posts”, he said he had filled “the blog through mid-January” and had “170 blog posts in the queue.”
• By 2018, he mentioned the blog was “mostly on a six-month delay”.
• In 2019, he referred to “our 6-month blog delay.”
• In 2022, he wrote: “Usually I schedule these with a 6-month lag, but this time I’m posting right away”.
• In February 2026, he said the “current end of the blog queue is in early July”.
• Then, in April 2026, came the latest “usually on a 6-month lag” remark.

It seems the blog had about one month of content in the publishing pipeline by 2011, ramped up to one to two months by 2014, two months by early 2016, and finally jumped to six months by August 2016, where it been ever since. Quite the arsenal of scheduled content!

On this blog, I have occasionally pre-written posts, up to two days in advance, but not more than that. Most posts are written day-of, but I think it would be good to build up a bit of a queue to handle the variability in available writing time. And it would be good to “empty the inbox” of interesting links, as Gelman put it.