Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation
On Pamela Paul, and similar.
As soon as the sun crept back out after the eclipse yesterday, I thought to myself, “This much-hyped natural occurrence is a gift that will offer a day’s reprieve for a desperate newspaper columnist who is out of ideas.” And lo, when I looked, there it was: “A Moment of Unity, on Earth as in Space,” by the New York Times’ Pamela Paul.
Paul traveled to Buffalo to watch this eclipse, and observed, “Maybe it takes an extraterrestrial event to bring this shredded country together.” Sure. She traveled to Wyoming to watch the eclipse in 2017. “Wearied by the chaotic churn of Donald Trump’s presidency and desperate for a vacation, I told my family I wanted to see something in this country Trump couldn’t bash, alter, destroy or tarnish.” I guess wherever you go, there you are. With the same mind you had before.
Being a newspaper columnist, like being a blogger, is not a job that calls for poetic writing chops, highly placed inside sources, or even hard work. The only thing necessary for success is ideas. In writing for a demanding and distracted public, one must always have new ideas to put forward—an insight into a particular mechanism of power, a suggestion for a modest or not modest reform, a probing question that opens the door to an interesting discussion. The ability to succeed in this work depends not on education or intelligence or good character, but on having a particular personality type that causes you to always be thinking about stuff, along with an accompanying personality deformation that causes you to want to share those thoughts with the world. There are many fine writers of all stripes who are not cut out to be a columnist. Some people are meant to be buried in dusty library stacks. Some are meant to be relentlessly filing FOIAs. Some are meant to be schmoozing to collect gossip, or traveling the byways of America in search of profundity. As long as we all are slotted into appropriate roles, the system works.
Complicating this, though, are matters of money and prestige. Columnist jobs, especially at a high profile paper like the New York Times, are arguably the very best gigs in journalism. They come with (relatively) high pay, fame, book deals and speaking gigs on a platter, and automatic attention. They are an official stamp that reads, if not “Public Intellectual,” at least “Public Talker.” If you land one of these jobs, you have reached the top of this industry. You will be well paid, well known, and people will listen to you. Whether they should or not.
Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week. (I say this as someone who writes at least twice a 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. Thomas Friedman is the Platonic Ideal of this type: taken seriously by important people and utterly full of shit. Will smart phones change the Middle East? Thomas Friedman will most certainly coin a phrase to answer that question, and his answer will be wrong. This sort of columnist is actually malicious, but hard to uproot. The world is full of overconfident but not smart people, and they must have their champions, like everyone else.
The most interesting variety of columnist, though, is the type who should never be there in the first place. This is the person who is handed a columnist job as some sort of professional reward, for reasons unrelated to editorial output, and who then proceeds to quickly use up their meager handful of ideas, and who then faces the existential torture of having to fill the empty space on the page every week without any of the intellectual tools that might make doing so manageable. Watching these people grow increasingly desperate, grasping for ever more trivial topics as time goes by, is like standing on shore and watching someone that you despise trying to bail out a sinking rowboat. You know that you should feel bad for them. And yet.
Pamela Paul is the United States of America’s best example of this type of columnist. She was made a New York Times columnist in 2022 after being the editor of the Book Review for a decade. This was a mistake on her part. Editors can hide their flaws, but columnists are exposed. Paul is often criticized for her tiresome obsession with campus politics and bad faith gender issues, and she is indeed the sort of sucker who is not even smart enough to know that she is standing in The Land of Bad Faith Arguments. But I enjoy reading her quite a bit, in the same way that you might derive some malicious joy from watching a bad but rich comedian bomb night after night. She is handcuffed to her job by prestige, and she will not stop writing until her fan base is exclusively made up of idiots.
“I write about culture, politics, ideas and the way we live now,” she states in her bio. Well, I guess that about covers it.
Bad writers with strong ideological convictions, like me, at least have a burning sense of political grievance to fuel their output. Not so with Paul. Decades ensconced in bourgeois antechambers have drained her of the ability to access true anger at the state of the world. This is always a dangerous affliction for elite columnists, who tend to live not in the normal world but instead in a world of nice offices and speaking gigs and Atlantic Ideas Festivals and therefore have a very hard time imagining what sort of complaints regular people might have. Hence the omnipresent spectacle of well-paid columnists fuming about airline delays and the annoyances of social media. Much of Paul’s work at the Times has been tea party culture war pablum interspersed with ever more frequent riffs on ever more frivolous irrelevancies. You can almost hear the beads of sweat dripping off her as the weekly deadlines advance.
Thus, in two short years, she has written about how Twitter is bad, what it was like to lose her sense of smell for a little while, her old after school job, the slackers of Gen X, the related question of whether Gen Xers are middle aged, the HBO show “White Lotus,” Thanksgiving, Selena Gomez, going on a cruise, vegetarianism, and Bruce Springsteen. That was just in first year. Do you see what I’m saying? Do I need to keep going? Okay in the following year she also wrote about those darn digital devices we all use and new kinds of lightbulbs and why we should all have more sympathy. This is true. The sickening feeling of being so bereft of ideas that you are forced to whip up a New York Times column on your trip to watch the eclipse is not something that any writer should be forced to endure.
These types of columns are the telltale sign of desperation. You can imagine them all as a writing exercise where a teacher tells you “You have one hour to write a thousand words about something that you see in this room. Go!” Paul is forced to do this because she can only go back to the well of rude college kids and White Person Brave Enough to Say that DEI Is Maybe Not the Best so often. Her politics, to the extent that they exist, are purely reactive—I don’t think I have ever seen someone whose political philosophy appears to be “Check Out This Thing I Just Read.” Some book about elites! Some scary stories about shoplifting! Some tweets about J.K. Rowling! In general, the political writings of this sort of columnist should be seen not as evidence of some coherent set of beliefs but as the closest straws that could be grasped after you already hit your limit on writing about the TV shows you’re watching.
Is there anything meaningful to be said about Pamela Paul, and the other columnists of her ilk who fill the most scrutinized pages of the American press with flop-sweat-soaked works of unimaginable paltriness? At least one thing, I think: The existence of these uninspired and uninspiring people occupying the very best jobs in their industry is evidence of the limits of the ideals that liberal society purports to value. Sure, the institutions of journalism name truth and enlightenment and justice and equality as their goals, but the unspoken qualification, “within the pool of people who went to, at least, Brown,” is every bit as important as the more noble part that is spoken louder. There is no reason for there to be even one shitty New York Times columnist. They can hire anybody they want. Anybody. The existence of shitty New York Times columnists, therefore, is an unimportant thing that reveals some important things about the myths of meritocracy. The most self-assured liberal institutions are in some ways more profoundly corrupt than some of the more raffish institutions that they look down on. I mean, the NFL is one of sickest symbols of America’s barely subdued imperial impulses, but you don’t see a guy playing nose tackle on the New York Giants because he was the owner’s kid’s college roommate at Yale. Can the New York Times say the same?
Maybe my attempt to use Pamela Paul, of all people, to make a point about the insidiousness of genteel corruption is the sort of dubious stretch for meaning that Pamela Paul herself would attempt on a particularly grim day. But at least I didn’t write about the Barbie movie. As Ruth said in the Barbie movie, “Humans have only one ending. Ideas live forever.”
Also
If you would like to write a takedown of my own work I recommend that you buy a copy of my new book about the labor movement, “The Hammer.” Or several copies. Better yet, come out and tell me in person at one of my upcoming book events. I am in Sacramento tonight, and California for the coming week! Here are my events in April:
Tuesday, April 9: Sacramento, CA—At Capital Books, 6 pm. With the United Domestic Workers. Event link here.
Thursday, April 11: Oakland, CA—At the Oaklandia Cafe x Bakery, 5 PM. In conversation with Eli Rosenberg. Event link here.
Friday, April 12: San Francisco, CA—At the San Francisco State U Student Center, with DSA SF Labor. Event link here.
Monday, April 15: Los Angeles, CA—At Stories LA, 7 pm. In conversation with Adam Conover. Event link here.
Sunday, April 21: Chicago, IL— “The Hammer” book event and Labor Notes Conference after party at In These Times HQ, 2040 N. Milwaukee Ave. 5 pm. Get your free ticket here.
April 23: St. Paul, MN—At the East Side Freedom Library, 7 pm. Event link here.
Seriously, I would love to see any and all of you. Please come out and talk about the labor movement with me. And if you’re interested in bringing me to your city to speak, email me.
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My modest proposal: Since NYT columnist is apparently a SCOTUS-style cushy lifetime appointment, at the very least they should make their columnists do regular "real journalism" sabbaticals. Let's say, for every four years of bi-weekly column writing, you have to then work a year on the metro desk, the sports desk, the Mexico City bureau, something. For a year you are banned from writing about college campuses, or conflicts that you've only read about from the couch of your Upper West Side apartment, or some idea about geopolitics that occurred to you on your third glass of wine while watching the West Wing. You are not to set foot in Aspen, Davos, or any "ideas summit" where people wear lavalier mics. You have to cover the story you're assigned every day, and you have to go out in public and talk to people, getting primary source confirmation for anything you write. Realistically, I'm not sure how many of them would last a whole year. But for those who did, optimistically, maybe they would actually come back with different ideas, different interests, different perspectives? (Or at least new metaphors?) Maybe they'd be a little more scrupulous about facts, and more inclined to think "is this actually a story?" Maybe they'd go back to the conference circuit and think "what the fuck are these people even talking about? That's not how any of this actually works..."
Or, you know, they could just hire better columnists, from more interesting backgrounds, and get rid of them when they start to suck. But I'm trying to be realistic here.
That description of Friedman could not be more perfect and spot on.