![]() ![]() “Whenever you name names, you think, Oh, I should have said this other person.” Her reticence caught me off guard. When I asked Paul about writers who shaped her thinking on such matters, she initially demurred. (It opens by acknowledging that a colleague advised her not to write about leaving Twitter.) Her remit as a columnist is broad, and she generally regards her subjects as “books and culture and ideas, sort of way-we-live-now”-a sphere that encompasses consumer concerns, the workplace, and social issues. “What I’m trying to do is write about things with a little bit more nuance and complexity than you might find on, let’s say, Twitter.” Paul herself has left Twitter, a choice she described in her second column. “I don’t think of myself as a blunt object,” Paul told me. Now she had become “a blunt object on the opinion page, whacking away at conflicts over cancel-culture and appropriation that had burned their way through Twitter,” as Ben Smith put it in a column last fall. That work, however, had tended toward anodyne meditations on standing desks or summer camp. Paul had written essays for the paper not infrequently during her tenure at the Book Review. These missives, which often circled the subject of online outrage, were greeted with the same-and also with a measure of surprise. Paul wrote that she saw left and right alike abandoning women (on the left, by using trans-inclusive language on the right, by passing anti-abortion laws) and banning books (on the left, by inculcating “self-censorship” on the right, by banning books). because of perceived thought crimes on the part of the author”), and the growing use of the term “queer” rather than “gay” (“Confused? You should be!”). Subsequent Paul columns dealt with #MeToo overreach (“Often the accused are convicted in the court of Twitter”), Internet vigilantes run amok (“In this frightful new world, books are maligned . . . New columnist comes out of the gates with a straw-man panic attack on wokeism. “Not according to many of those who wish to regulate our culture-docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts.” One representative response, by the press critic Dan Froomkin, read, “Wow. For example: “Am I, as a new columnist for the Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns?” Paul wrote. Her inaugural column, “ The Limits of ‘Lived Experience,’ ” took up the question of who has “the right” to address culturally specific subject matter. Yet, since stepping down as editor of the Times Book Review to become an opinion columnist, early last year, Paul has produced a body of work-deliberately contrarian or not-that reliably results in buttons being pushed. To my mind, the role and responsibility of a columnist is to always write what you think.” “A kind of writing that I don’t like to do myself is deliberately contrarian writing-like, people who are just pushing buttons and testing waters,” she told me. She paired it with soft skirts in floral print or pink stripes: a look to suit a provocateur temperamentally averse to provocation. Pamela Paul and I met twice, in the same Times conference room, and on both occasions she wore a black biker jacket. ![]()
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