Hebrew Word of the Week:
I asked my dad to pick this week’s Hebrew word! He chose curiosity, which is sakranut (סקרנות).
My 97-year-old dad, Fred, is a beloved part of The Shabbat Drop. And this week, he’s back, to chat with me about the art of blogging!
He recently ended his 25-year website, GoodShit, a curated collection of interesting articles on anything from 82 photos that teach history in a way school can’t to John Updike and the Jews.
At its peak, GoodShit attracted around 20k visits a day, with fans from Hawaii to Amsterdam. My dad would receive fan mail and checks from time to time, always beaming with pride whenever he received an envelope.
Here’s an interview we did about GoodShit during Covid:
But for my dad, it was never about the money. He posted every single day (show me another nonagenarian who knows html), mainly because it “kept him out of trouble” as my mom would say, but mostly so that he could share whatever he found interesting with the world.
And the world has loved him for it. When he announced he was ending his 25-year run a couple of weeks ago (via a Woodie Guthrie song, very him), the comments section was a mile long, with messages from people who had been visiting my dad’s site for 20 years, like:
“It’s like walking back into a house you just moved out of and everything is bare and lonely looking. I’ll miss ya, Fred,” and
“You have been an anchor of sanity in a world that is too serious for its own good,” and
“Now I have no reason to internet anymore. You were my world newspaper every morning for over 20 years. You educated me. More than that, you were my friend.” 🥹
To celebrate the end of Fred’s Goodshit era, and to distract us a bit from Israeli elections, I interviewed my dad on his tips and tricks for running such an illustrious long-term project. Maybe his devotion to his craft will inspire you to keep working on your passion project! Or to research and learn about random things on the internet.
I like to think he’s passing the blogging baton, or the keyboard, to me. So by the end of the interview, we turn the tables, and he asks me a few questions about The Drop!
Sigh. All good shit must come to an end. Check it out before November 9th, when it’s gone for good. Shit.
Miranda: Why did you start GoodShit?
Fred: I was retired and bored, and I just felt I had to do something to keep myself occupied with my time. Given my teaching background, I like to explore things, look into them, and I found stuff that interested me and wanted to share that. Some people have mailing lists of 10 people they send stuff out to. I never did that. I wanted to reach a different kind of audience. So I started my own blog or website, or whatever you want to call it.
M: Why the name GoodShit?
F: The title is often attributed to George Carlin, the comic, but it probably developed well before him. But George Carlin used it to say, “Fooling around and puffing marijuana, this is good shit.” Next question.
M: How did you decide what to post?
F: I had to be careful about what I was posting, because what I liked might not appeal to a large number of people. I didn’t want to dwell strictly on literature, or philosophy. So I tried to be more encompassing on things of general interest. I ended up posting stuff from science, the humanities, education, and so on and so forth.
I am constantly learning from the stuff that I post. One of my favorite areas was street photography. I love that. For a while, I was putting up a lot of ruins and abandoned places like the Catskills, what they were like and what they’ve become. And then there were a couple of special favorites. One was a strange place in California that was flooded by salt water, and people live there now in trailers on an abandoned Air Force site. And then there’s a place called the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania, where there’s mountains and mountains of crosses that people keep planting there.
Then I found that political issues were becoming very important, especially with the current president, Donald Trump. And I wanted to post stuff about that, but I didn’t want to be overwhelming because that was being done by other sites. I started posting some basically anti-Trump material and lost a number of readers who made snarky remarks and comments like, “I’m not going to read you anymore.” And all I could say was, “Well, sorry, I’ll miss you.” I decided, well, I’m going to post that stuff and I can’t worry about people that I’m losing since they’re not people that appreciate my point of view anyway. And so I went along, not that I made my site strictly political, but there are a few pieces that were political and I just said, “That’s it. I’m going to do it. And if you don’t like it, you don’t have to see my posts.”
M: Speaking of your audience, how did you work on your branding and marketing to grow your audience?
F: Get up in the morning and start posting. That was my marketing strategy.
I realized that I’m not going to appeal to everyone, so I put up a site that appealed to me. That’s the starting point. I found out that word of mouth helped spread the site. I never asked people to tell other people. I just sort of went along with what I felt I should post. And I changed over a period of time, tried to get more variety in it. I used to have some naked babes on my site. But there was nothing pornographic. There was no sex. It was just beautiful young women.
Years ago, I stopped posting women because your mother yelled at me. No, just kidding. I found out that there were women who were coming to my site. They didn’t really object to it, but I thought I’d see what I could do without the women. And then during Covid, everyone was working from home and they were with their families, so I cut way back on that, and then finally I didn’t have any women at all.
M: How did running GoodShit change your life?
F: Well, it gave me something to do that I enjoyed doing, and it’s nice to wake up and decide I’m going to do the thing that always gets me worked up and excited and interested. The key to a good life of the mind is curiosity. That goes back to Aristotle, the curiosity. Some people have it, some people have a little bit of it, and some people don’t have it at all. You can find this out today, how some people whip out a cell phone and look up something instantly because they want to know what that means or what it’s all about. Other people just sort of shrug and who cares? So I found that I was getting a lot of enjoyment out of finding stuff that I didn’t know that much about and looking at it and reading it and then sharing it. Like watching TV and wondering, why are there so many Jewish news anchors on TV?
M: And did your curiosity lead you to find out why?
F: No. It just occurred to me.
M: So now we’re going to turn the tables! I grew up in a blogging household, watching you update your site every day. It was only inevitable that I’d become a blogger myself! I’ve run a few blogs over the years: one on robots, one on the excitement and instability of being 25, and now one on Jewish culture. Do you have any advice for me, with The Shabbat Drop?
F: You seem to be all over the place. By that, I’m not being nasty. I mean you’re interested in a lot of different things that connect to Judaism, and you’re sort of torn, I think, at times between writing about your concern for Israel and about your Jewish background. Then there’s what I would call “offbeat Judaism.” That is, here’s the Jewish community in some unpronounceable country, and you met a woman on the upper west side who just came here from there, and now you’re going to go talk to her about it.
M: Hey, that happened today! My colleague just returned from a Jewish trip to Georgia and I want to interview her about it. I like being all over the place. There’s so many interesting Jewish topics, from Torah and Hebrew to ethics and global Jewish communities. If GoodShit can be all over the place, then The Drop can be as well.
F: Well, I hope you have as much fun doing it as I’ve had all these years. What is your main focus in your Drop?
M: As you said, it ranges from niche Judaism to Jewish history, but my favorite topic to write about is my own personal Jewish journey, and any advice that I take from that that I can impart to others. Judaism is always a lifelong process of figuring out. Figuring out your relationship with G-d, and with your own Jewish values. It’s also about building the kind of Jewish life that you want for yourself. And I know quite a lot of people who, I don’t want to say struggle with this because it’s not a struggle - it’s a blessing! - but people who are on the same journey.
F: I know a few people who go to your blog, and they’re not Jewish, but they enjoy reading it.
M: Well, I really appreciate that. I’d like to interview them! Get their take on Judaism.
F: You would try to convert them, so I’m not going to give you their names. What Jewish sources do you use?
M: I used to do an “Ask a Rabbi” segment. I should bring that back! For digital sources, I turn to Sefaria for original texts, MyJewishLearning if I need a parsha summary in a pinch (Parsha in a Pinch - good blog name!), and random sources I find through research, like this website called Circumcision Information and Resource Pages which I used for this Drop comparing the Jacobites to the Maccabees.
F: I know you usually end these interviews by asking about Shabbat plans. What are your Shabbat plans?
M: Our friends run a “Jewish house” in Brooklyn. It’s like an unofficial Moishe House, but its own thing. Anyway, they’re hosting one last Kabbalat Shabbat before they all have to move out. It will be spiritual, vegetarian, and bittersweet. What about you? Any Shabbos plans?
F: No plans. I prefer to share my rose, and you are my rose.
Bonus questions! Advice from Fred for people with blogs/Substacks, additional questions, some of his favorite websites, and the answer to why there are so many Jews in journalism.
Be sure to visit GoodShit before November 9th!
Shabbat Shalom! Go call your dad,
💦 If you like Fred, check out these Drops:
The One Where Fred Turns 95
"Churchill smoked cigars all day long. He drank huge amounts of booze daily. He was overweight… he lived to age 90! What do we learn from his life? Life is a crapshoot. Yes, there are things you can do and things you should not do. But the crapshoot remains."
I need to meet Fred!
Lovely closure to Dad’s blog. I hope your readers give visit it and give it a well deserved fare the well. You grew up watching your dad on his computer all morning every morning researching, culling, coding - of course it had an influence on you. I love the Fredside chat you did with him about his blog - the opening is pure genius !