Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Best Op-Ed of 2011

Instead of posting a single best-of list, I'll post a few things over the course of this week.  Here's my first one: My favorite op-ed of the year, written by Nicholas Kristof in June.  I'm guessing many of you read it when it first came out, but it's worth another look...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/opinion/05kristof.html

4 comments:

Quinapalus said...

Does anyone else ever feel like they basically know the content of a NYT columnist's editorial just by reading the title? Kristof is better than most of them, but I've pretty much gotten away from reading the opinion pages of the Times altogether. It's not that I disagree with them (except inevitably Tom Friedman), it's not even that they're not making salient, thoughtful points (except often Maureen Dowd)...I just feel like they've been beating the same drumbeats in kind of the same ways for years and years, and I barely even have to glance at them anymore to get the drift. Instead I've gotten really drawn into reading political bloggers, especially at the Atlantic.com, but also Andrew Sullivan (who's wrong as often as right, but usually insightful on some level) and Glen Greenwald (who also to a certain degree writes the same columns over and over again, but maybe I just haven't reached the saturation point with him yet). I also used to always enjoy reading Christopher Hitchens (RIP), because even if he was saying something horrible, he certainly said it in a witty, interesting way, that sometimes made me reexamine my own assumptions in a way that was probably healthy.

texplush said...

I agree there's something that makes me queezy about NYT editorials, but this is a pretty good one. I may have to whip it out for my dad this weekend. BTW, I'm excited to hear which Republican he is supporting these days! Last I checked it was Pawlenty...I'm thinking it might be Perry now because of his platform on sending Congress home for half the year.

drischord said...

I feel like the next step for most Pawlenty voters is Mitt Romney. What's the verdict, Tex?

drischord said...

Also I basically agree about NYT editorials, but I think this one was great. To some degree their columnists are quite predictable (actually the least predictable is probably Ross Douthat), but they're still worth reading because they still dictate the mainstream left's dialogue as much as any newspaper's offerings. I basically assume most of Obama's administration is reading these, so I want to keep checking in. (Not that I don't frequently fall behind, because I do.)