Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation

April 11, 2024 8:12 AM

Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week...

Even the sharpest thinkers on matters of politics and policy and global news can have, at best, one or two good ideas a month, and by definition most of the population of columnists are not the sharpest thinkers in that same population. The best columnists lean into their good ideas and minimize their output the rest of the time. Most columnists sink into a comfortable bath of hackery, spitting out work that is acceptable enough to fill space on a page, yet rarely worth taking the time to read. Their careers are like room temperature bowls of cream of wheat left on a table, still edible but not appetizing. Other columnists are gifted with a fountain of ideas, but all of their ideas are bad.

posted by TheophileEscargot (43 comments total)

"The world is full of overconfident but not smart people, and they must have their champions, like everyone else.".

I have never actually heard someone explain why Friedman exists. I've always assumed it was some malicious force imposing him on the world, but this gives me pause. Maybe does exist for someone. Maybe he has an organic audience.
posted by whm at 8:17 AM on April 11 [12 favorites]

This is why I appreciate NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie for not only cogently opining on US politics and culture multiple times a month, but giving his brain a rest occasionally with reviews of breakfast cereals and movies about talking hedgehogs.

I feel like part of the ecology of the mind must necessarily include the consideration of things that are patently silly and/or trivial. I think cultivating a keen sense of the absurd prepares one for encountering it in places you might not expect, like the national news, and that's part of why Bouie seems to understand this moment in ways that other columnists seem not to.
posted by Strange Interlude at 8:38 AM on April 11 [29 favorites]

It's a mistake to think that the point of columnists is to have good ideas, rather than to write things that attract eyeballs, which is generally most easily accomplished by expressing either controversial ideas or ideas that affirm the target audience's pre-existing beliefs — or ideally expressing ideas that have a veneer of being controversial but also, at their base, affirm the reader's beliefs.
posted by ssg at 8:56 AM on April 11 [10 favorites]

I have never actually heard someone explain why Friedman exists.

Or David Brooks, whose singular achievement is reliably being the most insipidly wrong tool in the NYT toolbox.
posted by Pedantzilla at 9:09 AM on April 11 [22 favorites]

Heather Mallick of the Toronto Star seems like a good person at heart, but as a columnist she's like a depressed female version of Andy Rooney.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:14 AM on April 11 [3 favorites]

It's likely that a lot of the good, spicy, correct takes we'd all love to read are shot down by editorial as not being "the voice of the paper." So you get, like, melba toast with a scrape of pepper jam on it, instead of the Hot Chip we dearly crave.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:18 AM on April 11 [6 favorites]

My childhood dream was to be a newspaper columnist. So guess how that went.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:20 AM on April 11 [6 favorites]

When I was a child, I wanted to be an editorial columnist. (like other mefites, apparently) This was when Mike Royko was still writing in the Chicago Tribune and I always read his columns. I don't know how they'd hold up now, but they seemed good at the time.

Honestly, I don't think a columnist really needs to have good ideas so much as good-enough ideas sincerely held and expressed. The ideal columnist both informs and stimulates debate - I always felt (admittedly as a child and then a young teen) that I knew a bit more after I read a Royko column but we also talked about what he had to say at home. This is an advantage of a newspaper, of course, because we did all read Royko.

I think it's fine to want to attract eyeballs and be a little flamboyant; Mike Royko sure did have a persona. That's different than clickbait.

Again, I think local-ish newspapers printed on paper have a real advantage here, since a writer can develop a persona over time and can situate their writing in a way that your substacky "oh probably writing from New York or LA" writer can't. Someone talking about their street in New York, especially their affluent street, doesn't really hit the same as someone talking about specific Chicago stuff when you live in or around Chicago.
posted by Frowner at 9:26 AM on April 11 [13 favorites]

(I see looking back that he got fairly conservative in the end, alas. I mostly remember him as a critic of the Daley machine, and that was a big influence on little me.)
posted by Frowner at 9:27 AM on April 11 [4 favorites]

I've been noticing youtubers getting suggestions for topics from their viewers.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:35 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]

Royko got printed in one of the Houston papers when I was a kid, and even as a kid I would seek out those columns. Alexandra Petri is the only columnist today that I can think of that gets me excited to read whatever new thing she writes.
posted by Navelgazer at 9:47 AM on April 11 [9 favorites]

Heather Mallick (and the cop-simp Rosie DiManno) have both gone TERFy in recent years.
posted by sixswitch at 9:49 AM on April 11 [5 favorites]

I figured out a while ago that hate reading was bad for my mental health, so I stopped reading opinion pieces. Then I came up with a theory that opinion page editors get where they are because they are the best at "both sides" policy, and the opinion pages are the apex of "both sides" bullshit. It's not even moral relativism, it's a complete (and probably willful) lack of understanding that some things just aren't worth publishing, a denial of possible harms from granting legitimacy to extreme views, and some amount of publisher meddling so that business interests are never questioned too sharply.

After I figured out that I needed to stop reading them, I got pretty good at scrolling past the opinion sections of the NYT and WaPo home pages or mobile apps without actually registering the headlines. I used to maintain a thread of "opinion pieces I'll never read" with screenshots of the worst headlines that I failed to scroll past, but then I wrote some custom userscripts that hide them for me. I also quit using the mobile apps and installed the userscripts plugin in Safari on my phone too, so now I just don't see them at all. It's nice.
posted by fedward at 9:53 AM on April 11 [6 favorites]

Or David Brooks, whose singular achievement is reliably being the most insipidly wrong tool in the NYT toolbox.

David Brooks' job is to make conservative ideas sound palatable to liberals, and the next time anyone says the NYT and NPR are liberal, recognize that they both have him around for exactly that reason.
posted by Gelatin at 10:17 AM on April 11 [17 favorites]

most insipidly wrong tool in the NYT toolbox

I'm sure he praises the lord every day for the arrival of Pamela Paul
posted by pjenks at 10:27 AM on April 11 [5 favorites]

A few weeks back I saw in a used bookstore a collection of the entire works of Herbert Spencer. It went on and on, volume after volume.

I flipped through, and it was one confident under-informed opinion after the other, about a huge range of topics. I haven't checked, but my immediate thought was that he must've had a job as an opinion columnist.
posted by clawsoon at 10:54 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]

Thank you for this post, it is my long and deeply held belief that columnists. like Supreme Court justices, should have term limits.
posted by kensington314 at 11:19 AM on April 11 [3 favorites]

Oh man, I would have thought I was the only kid who wanted to be a columnist. I read a lot of Dave Barry and Lewis Grizzard (why? he was terrible). I came to realize that being a columnist involved being a journalist first, and when I came to it, journalism was a sinking ship.

Now being a journalist, or even a sapient being, doesn't seem to be required. But I am no longer in love with my own opinions.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:20 AM on April 11 [4 favorites]

I was a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist back in the 90s, which means when I was in my 20s, and if you think it's probably a bad idea to give a 20something straight white man a nationally syndicated newspaper column, boy, I'm here to tell you, you are right. These days, I describe my writing mode as a columnist as "professional mansplainer." I am here to tell you that these columns did not age well, and that I'm pleased one has to make a real effort to locate the vast majority of them. That said, I loved writing columns, and it's not a coincidence that I've been writing very much in that format ever since on my website, which has been around for 25 years now. I like to think I've gotten less mansplainy as I go along, but that's really for other people to decide.

I am also glad that my site updates when I feel like updating it, not on a set schedule, and that I'm not required to follow politics for pay at this point in my life. Honestly, for the last several years, I've been confronted with the fact that there are only so many ways to say "The GOP has gone full fascist, don't fucking vote for them," in an entertaining and engaging fashion. Trying to spin that into 800 words twice a week would make me want to walk into the sea.

Also: The GOP has gone full fascist, don't fucking vote for them. Thanks.
posted by jscalzi at 11:20 AM on April 11 [61 favorites]

Honestly, I don't think a columnist really needs to have good ideas so much as good-enough ideas sincerely held and expressed.

And really, you don't even need your own ideas half the time - providing thoughtful, considered analysis and response to other people's ideas is also a valid approach!
posted by nickmark at 11:46 AM on April 11 [1 favorite]

> Heather Mallick (and the cop-simp Rosie DiManno) have both gone TERFy in recent years

I didn't know that about Mallick. I don't follow her closely, but it seems like most of her columns are a variation on "Doesn't ______ suck and make you sad? I know it makes me sad."
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:51 AM on April 11

To be fair, Davids Brooks also sucks on the level of being utterly high on his own supply of self-importance, which is why fully half of his columns* are about the inherent moral failure of people being mean to or about him.

It's a shame that Royko drifted conservative in his later years. I was reading him in the nineties and don't recall that, but I also probably wasn't intellectually mature enough to notice at the time. But what I remember from him is that he was both trenchant and funny. The same is true now for Petri. Maybe being funny, and having the freedom to do so in the newspaper, covers for a lot of the problems that we see with other columnists, I wonder?

Like, as has been said a million times before, being funny lets you get away with being potentially offensive. Not just in a "Oh I know I'm so bad but you laughed and you can't take it back!" sort of way, but like, in a "our readers want to see views they agree with, but they'll be willing to stretch that for a chuckle" kind of way.

Also, if you have two good "bits" a week, that's a lot easier to stretch into the requisite column inches than trying to come up with two great ideas per week. Either way you're ultimately responding to the news of the day (or, in Brooks' case, whatever comes up on a twitter search for his own name) but joking about the news - which isn't easy and takes a lot of talent to do well - is probably an easier rhythm to get into than constantly having the fresh take that cuts through all the noise and connects with the common man blah blah blah.

*The last time I checked, which to be fair was almost five years ago.
posted by Navelgazer at 12:12 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]

I recall Rushdie raised this issue in his autobiography. He recognised not only was unable to have 'good ideas' frequently, but that he did not want to have opinions about everything.
posted by Tiet Peret at 1:07 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]

I'd already lost a lot of respect for David Brooks for various reasons across the years, but the pandemic revealed he sorts books on his shelves by color and that was sort of a last straw for me.
posted by hippybear at 1:41 PM on April 11 [10 favorites]

Mike Royko was still writing in the Chicago Tribune and I always read his columns. I don't know how they'd hold up now, but they seemed good at the time.

royko was apparently, unfortunately, rather homophobic in the way that older men were back in those days.

I didn't know that about Mallick. I don't follow her closely, but it seems like most of her columns are a variation on "Doesn't ______ suck and make you sad? I know it makes me sad."

heather mallick though, she's rather¹ transphobic² in the way² that many³ "liberals" are⁴ in these days⁵

so, like. @the card cheat: now you know.

---

¹: the usual women's safety vs men's violence and trans people are making it hard to see because inclusive language is bad
²: the usual eliding of what the event was, which actually *was* an anti-trans event featuring noted transphobe meghan murphy
³: the usual worries about free speech without ever considering what the speech in question was, because it's usually hate speech, and in this case, transphobia, white supremacy, and anti-first peoples rhetoric
⁴: the usual transgender rights are destroying women's rights, also drag is evil
⁵: the usual "if transgenders are a thing why not transracials, huh? ever think about that?" the lead in to this, of course, being the israel-palestine conflict
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:44 PM on April 11 [11 favorites]

honestly i'm struggling to think of one non-bipoc columnist for any major publication that i like these days and i'm coming up blank.
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:49 PM on April 11 [2 favorites]

They published Royko's columns twice a week in my little rural paper when I was in middle school in Colorado, and I read him religiously. I gotta imagine some of his work holds up, as much as some probably doesn't. I'm surprised there hasn't been a Royko FPP! I think of him as the last of the old-time newsmen.
posted by Pickman's Next Top Model at 1:51 PM on April 11 [3 favorites]

Aren’t most (anything) mediocre, by definition?
posted by TedW at 2:05 PM on April 11 [4 favorites]

I'd already lost a lot of respect for David Brooks for various reasons across the years, but the pandemic revealed he sorts books on his shelves by color and that was sort of a last straw for me.

a columnist should organize their books in columns
posted by clawsoon at 2:19 PM on April 11 [9 favorites]

revealed he sorts books on his shelves by color and that was sort of a last straw for me

OH MY GOD, THANK YOU FOR POINTING THAT OUT! I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONE BUGGED BY THAT!
posted by Reverend John at 2:42 PM on April 11 [4 favorites]

Kind of sad to see that nobody has yet mentioned Herb Caen, the San Francisco writer and man-about-town who wrote a pretty damn good column/stream-of-consciousness seven days a week for well over fifty years up to his death in 1997.

A combination of gossip, bad puns, and thoughtful insights, and always, always full of love for his adopted city, it was never too serious but always fun to read. Here's one paragraph from a column in 1970 which pretty much captures his entire ethos.

I love our crusty Little Old Ladies, and the crustiest of the lot may be Mrs. Julia Rezek, a 70-year-old widow and native San Franciscan. When Pres. Nixon vetoed the HEW bill this week, she was so outraged she phoned the White House, got a Nixon aide on the phone and snapped: “Tell the President to go COMPLETELY to hell!” A few minutes later, she got a call from one of Mother Bell’s agents who said. “We understand you used profanity over our lines, is that correct?” “I don’t know,” said Mrs. Rezek. “I told him to go to hell.” Deciding this was not a capital offense, the phone co.’s man let her off the hook, but Mrs. Rezek, beginning to worry a little, then called the FBI here to ask: “Is telling the President to go to hell the same thing as threatening his life?” “Er ... no,” decided the FBI. The Secret Service concurred. (Now that we know for sure: go to hell!)

posted by fuzzy.little.sock at 4:18 PM on April 11 [15 favorites]

At the moment, there is only one columnist that I always make sure to read - but she is pretty niche, Australian federal politics, Laura Tingle. She only does one column a week, and not every week, published in the Australian Financial Review, and on the abc.net.au website (the Australian government broadcaster.)

I never really read editorial columns - thank you, I have my own opinions, I don't need yours. But decent analysis, that is in short supply, so I will take all that I can get.

PS. And from Australia, - The GOP has gone full fascist, don't bloody vote for them.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 4:28 PM on April 11 [2 favorites]

If you think H. Mallick was bad, I was just relieved when Margaret Wente finally left The Globe & Mail, after many years of vicious trolling, proud ignorance, and scandal (and rewarded with a Massey College fellowship, of course). Her words and influence were a putrescence in Canadian journalism (I have as few words for the late C. Blatchford).
posted by ovvl at 4:35 PM on April 11 [6 favorites]

In defense of ordering books by color: when I did this once I found that locating books was almost instantaneous due to my sensory memory coupling the physical object with the content. Also putting books back in order became a requirement because otherwise my picture-straightening OCD would kick in. Nowadays my bookshelves are in entire disarray, and finding anything means scanning all the shelves, usually twice. When I put something back in haste it just goes wherever there's space, deepening the chaos. Anyway, organizing by color beats spine-in by miles.
David Brooks can stuff it though.
posted by St. Oops at 9:47 PM on April 11 [1 favorite]

Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe fits the bill as well. Actually, I think all of the Globe columnists are shit.
posted by mattgriffin at 5:38 AM on April 12

if transgenders are a thing why not transracials, huh? ever think about that?

This is definitely a derail, but my response to that "gotcha" is none of the usual or expected ones (which, AFAICT, are "ah, I now see the error of my trans-affirming ways!", or "that's totally different because [some justification about how race and gender are substantively different aspects of identiy]", or even "That causes cognitive dissonance and I'm going to ignore it"), but rather, "sure, people could be transracial, why not?".

Like, maybe my theory of mind is unusually naïve, but I generally assume, absent other evidence of bad faith, that the things people say are an accurate reflection of their mental state, and thus that any statement they make about how they feel is a true recapitulation of their feelings (whether or not such feelings agree with, contradict, or have no connection to empirically verifiable fact). When someone says, "I believe that the earth is round", I take that as an accurate statement of their mental state which happens to correspond to a verifiable truth. When someone says, "I think vaccines cause autism", I take that as an accurate statement of their mental state which happens to correspond to a verifiable falsehood. And when someone says, "I feel like, inside, I'm a man, notwithstanding my female anatomy", I take that as an accurate reflection of their mindset. On that level, it's clear that transgender identity (and by extension trans- any other identity) is real.

Of course, the question isn't purely the academic one of "is this something that exists?" but rather the societal one of "what do we do about this thing that exists?" And the historical stance on transgender identity was to treat it as pathological, an accurate statement of mental alignment which contradicted verifiable fact (i.e. that gender is fixed, immutable, and determined by anatomy) and thus required correction. I hope we (us here, still working on society as a whole) all agree that was a wrong way of regarding it, but we mostly still have that attitude about racial affinity, assuming that anyone who professes a personal sense of being of a different race is either speaking in bad faith or mentally ill.

Obviously, race and gender are different (gender has a much more definable biological component, whereas race is a kind of amorphous blend of some ill-defined biological aspects together with a lot of cultural aspects), but both are ultimately to a large extent culturally performed, and it's my understanding that for many (although not all) transgender people the social performance of gender is far more important than the biological component. With that in mind, if someone had the same sense of discomfort towards the social performance of their born ethnicity, I'm inclined to regard that as valid.
posted by jackbishop at 5:49 AM on April 12

When I was a managing editor I dealt with a lot of reporters who wanted to become columnists because they were tired of reporting. I had been on the hook for a biweekly column for years, and it seemed like a grand lark and easy money for the first 96 hours . The nadir was a weekly '00s column about enterprise Unix my editor insisted be "cheeky and breezy." So when the reporters would come around asking to be relieved of the burden of discovering and checking facts, I knew what they were asking for.

I'd point out that columns paid less. If they persisted, I'd say "sure, let's schedule a kick-off. Bring twelve ideas for review." If they showed up with the twelve ideas, I'd tell them I would always require eight ideas on the calendar to keep the column going. When they'd stall out I'd suggest that technical tutorials were the actual underground river of money both according to the analytics and their potential for resale given a light updating after the rights reverted and they'd go do that.

Personally, I was a bad columnist. I majored in philosophy and came to the trade believing that my job was to preempt objection. Once an editor understood what I was doing and began strategically removing key load-bearing elements in my cathedrals of logic, I got a thicker skin and loosened up, but we both knew that the week I argued "yes, a column about how Emacs is an excellent enterprise instant messaging client" was just me bullying him because he didn't know what Emacs was, and once he learned what it was he had no way to disprove that "elite technical cadre in enterprise development shops" would completely understand where I was coming from.
posted by Pudding Yeti at 7:10 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]

it is a derail, and virtually everyone talking about "transracial" in any sense outside of cross-ethnicity/nationality/race adoption (which is the original meaning used by said transracial adoptees from whom it was ripped from) is speaking of it in bad faith, and if you're cis, maybe try not to generalize too much about what is more important to trans people.
posted by i used to be someone else at 8:31 AM on April 12 [9 favorites]

I agree very strongly with i used to be someone else; I flagged that comment earlier and it's shocking to me that it's still up.
posted by an octopus IRL at 9:30 AM on April 12 [3 favorites]

i used to be someone else thank you for bringing those receipts, sorted and stapled! It’s work I should have done in my comment, but sloughed off lazily, and I really appreciate how it’s made the thread better.
posted by sixswitch at 9:48 AM on April 12 [2 favorites]

If you believe that the purpose of a system is what it does, the purpose of opinion writers is to get people to (virtually speaking) turn to the opinion page and read! That's it. There is no higher purpose. The eyeballs are the end product.

There are, of course, lots of ways to cause people to want to read your stuff. Back in the days of newsprint, this was more true because readers didn't have an entire multiverse of entertainment options in their pockets. As a teenager I read Dear Abby (and, god help me, sometimes even the bridge column, when I don't even play) because it was better than the alternative of re-reading the cereal box for the 10th time. Back then, a mildly quirky columnist persona with a slight interest in the world could build an audience over time.

I would say now mediocrity isn't the defining characteristic, but novelty, or at least the simulation of novelty, combined with the ability to provoke outrage. Getting a reaction strong enough to cause the reader to share on social media is the thing now. Thus the popularity (in a numerical sense) of conservative writers in papers with largely left-leaning audiences. I read George Will or Friedman not because I expect them to provide wisdom, but because they're going to tell me something I didn't know or give a perspective that I don't already have. Whether the take is good is, frankly, beside the point. That's not to endorse the state of affairs, mind you. But the situation has shifted dramatically from the time a few decades ago when people across the ideological spectrum were all reading the same paper (or watching the same network TV).
posted by wnissen at 10:17 AM on April 12 [3 favorites]

Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week...

IIRC someone once asked Charles Krauthammer how many columns he had written over his long career. "Two or three."

Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe fits the bill as well. Actually, I think all of the Globe columnists are shit.

BG sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy has been phoning it in for so long that there's an entire blog devoted to picking him apart; "we read him so you don't have to."

I'm glad that with the internet, the days of syndicates forcing people to do regular work are behind us (though I guess having a steady income was good). It's the same with newspaper cartoons: Charles Schulz ran out of ideas in 1972, but kept Peanuts going until 2000.
posted by Melismata at 2:25 PM on April 12 [1 favorite]

I met him too late for his newspaper days (1981-95), but my drinking buddy Steve Daley was a genuinely funny arts, political, and national columnist for the Trib. He opted for the private sector for the remaining few years left to him. He never said so in so many words but I think he'd agree with the well running dry.

His Trib work is behind a paywall but here's some of his post-journalism stuff.

https://www.cjr.org/author/steve-daley-1

Surprised no one mentioned Molly Ivins.

Edit: This one is evergreen

https://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/decision_2012_mad_libs.php
posted by MarcWolfe at 7:37 PM on April 13 [2 favorites]