The Goon Line 040: Hamilton Nolan on the mediocrity of columnists

The greatest job I’ve ever had was as the opinion editor of my high school newspaper. Each month I had an entire page to write whatever I wanted. My column was called “Yesssssss!” and I am forever indebted to one of my greatest high school friends, Chris, for being the editor-in-chief who bestowed upon me this role. We really had a media empire in the 1998-1999 academic school year; he was in charge of both the newspaper and the yearbook, and I helmed the arts magazine.¹ And we stocked all of these publications with an obscene amount of inside jokes and dumb goofs. I’ll never have it that good again, at least not until the New York Times gives me Maureen Dowd’s job.

Hamilton Nolan wrote earlier this week about how being a columnist is, as I learned early on, a cushy-as-hell gig. And you don’t even have to be that smart! He uses as his example one of my personal least favorite columnists, Pamela Paul. He says it way better than I can ever hope to, but this lady is so full of bad, dumb takes that I’m always astonished that she continues to be so consistently ridiculous — a talent in itself, really.

It took me a really long time to get this out today because I fell into a Gmail search hole and got so distracted by reading old emails totally unrelated to what I was actually trying to find, which were pictures of me during my peak journalist year (the below is the best I could locate). So my opinion today is that you should enjoy your weekends; thanks for putting up with FORTY whole mediocre “columns” from yours truly!

1  We also co-led of the “Full Contact Origami” club, which was obviously totally made up and probably yielded three completed pieces of origami all academic year, despite being a sleeper hit with the cool nerd crowd. We were super invested in padding our extracurriculars for college applications.