I knew I wanted to be doing public work
I am a columnist for the New York Times Opinion Section.
I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2009. I studied political theory at UVA. I did odd jobs around Charlottesville for a year, mainly working at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, which is just UVA’s Public Affairs Center, but I wasn’t doing anything substantive, right? I was an assistant that they had around to do random stuff.
So, I spent a year around Charlottesville trying to pay rent, and during that time, I was trying to find some other thing to do.
I thought I might apply to law school.
I ended up applying for a writing fellowship at The American Prospect — I had been doing some freelancing, so this wasn’t totally out of the blue. I got this writing fellowship, and that was my first job in journalism, that was in 2010. My path from there to the Times, from my perspective at the very least, has been about devoting my time to working, all the time. Trying to cultivate a journalistic voice, but, also, like, developing knowledge about the world that could be deployed for political analysis.
I don’t think I knew exactly what I wanted to do, coming out of college. I’ve always been interested in politics, I’ve always been interested in law. I did lots of public speaking in school, and in college. I did a lot of civic engagement. I was a Boy Scout, that kind of thing. I knew I wanted to be doing public work of some sort, but, what that looked like, I had no particular vision.
I remember talking to one of my college professors who I was close to, and just sort of, you know, brainstorming ideas with her about what I might do with my life. Things came up, like, obviously, lawyer, you know, maybe labor organizer, like, that kind of stuff. But, journalism, I got into journalism more because it was an opportunity that was available, and less out of any aspiration.
What I don’t think I’m doing, what I’m not trying to do, is sort of, oh, “This is a running compendium of things Jamelle has thought about during a week”.
How does one approach the work, and how does one get started? These are two separate conceptual questions.
How does one approach the work?
It’s a big picture question about “What is it that I think that I’m doing?”, because that shapes how I go about writing a column. I can say what I don’t think I’m doing. What I don’t think I’m doing, what I’m not trying to do, is sort of, oh, “This is a running compendium of things Jamelle has thought about during a week”. That’s boring. The things I think, and the things I dwell on are, like, “Should I buy a camera lens?”
I don’t have some ready repository of takes to deploy, on a weekly basis. I think that that kind of approach to a newspaper column, especially at a place like the Times, is wasting the space and wasting the resources.
We’re given a lot of resources, we can do a lot, and I think it’s incumbent upon those of us who have this kind of platform to try to use it wisely, and make good use of the resources that we have been given. When I conceptualize the job, it is less about what it is that I think, and more about, “Okay, what can I provide to readers? Given what I know, my own expertise, my own interests and the resources available to me, what would be the most useful way to use this space?”
To my mind, the most useful way to use this kind of space is to do as much as possible, because I’m not a scoop-breaking reporter, that’s not really in my skill repertoire. We can provide, like, deep context for events happening in the country. Specifically, context coming from American political history, and American history, broadly. We can bring up questions of politics and policy, historical context, and also maybe think a little more deeply about what is happening: This is what the American political system is, this is how it works, this is why it works this way and not that way, here are the benefits and detriments of that, and here’s how you might be able to change it.
When it comes to writing any given column, the first question I ask myself is, “Do I actually have anything useful to say to anyone?” Has an event happened? Has something happened for which I can actually bring something to bear to help people understand? If I can, that helps set me on a path to figure something out. If I can’t, then I have to go back to the drawing board, and I might not even write that week, because I’m resistant to writing for the sake of writing, I think that’s where you get into trouble.
When I started in 2019 at the Times, I did two columns a week, plus a newsletter, and I did that until last year, when I switched to one column a week. The one column a week became more like a long essay, so, roughly the same amount of writing, just, like, compressed into a single piece.
I don’t know if an editor is going to say this, but, I’m saying it, at a certain point, people have to trust you to have good judgment about what you should and shouldn’t write, and, so, there is an expectation that you’re going to write something once a week. If, at any point, you say, “You know what, I don’t have a column this week”, or “I just want to do a short newsletter that’s just chiming in on something that happened”, because nothing warrants a longer treatment, I think people are like, “Alright, well, okay”.
I’ll say that, for my first year or two at the Times, I needed to build up the confidence to have that good judgment and that was why I wrote two columns a week. I don’t think I took a week off, except for vacation time, and I was like, “I need to make sure that this plane is staying in the air, you know, I’m gonna make sure I’m delivering.”
My kids are younger, and every year, they go on winter break or spring break or something like that, and I’m like, “I’ll write some stuff, I’ll schedule it”, but if we’re on vacation, like, I’m not working. They’re kids for a very limited time. I don’t want to miss out on any of that.
I just don’t have this kind of, like, massive ego about my work to think that, like, “Oh, it would be a tragedy if I didn’t write this week”.
Other people can probably write off the cuff, but I can’t with any coherence.
The things I write, I try to divide into two large buckets. One contains straight news analysis. Something has happened, and I’m trying to lend some context or insight to what has happened. That kind of thing can be written very quickly.
The second bucket are pieces that are somewhat longer, more essayistic, and are explorations of themes and ideas, typically drawing heavily on historical context. These are things that take a lot more time. I’ve worked on some pieces that took upwards of 3 to 4 weeks. I know I have an angle, and I know what I want to do, and it becomes a question of, “Okay, what books do I need to read? What articles do I need to read?” Then you do the reading. You prep your thoughts on the thing, and then you write. In the process of writing, I almost always encounter a point where it’s like, “You know what? I don’t know what I’m talking about, I actually need to know more”. So the 90% completed column has to be set aside to do more reading to get to the place where I’m like, “Okay, now I understand this more”.
I have a couple of friends who read my columns closely, who sometimes will observe that only about a quarter, or, sometimes maybe half of the research I do for a given piece actually makes it into the piece, because so much of it was background that I needed to know, so that I could understand what I needed to say, but isn’t actually going to be in the final piece itself.
Reporting columns are columns where I talk to sources. I’ve written columns where you talk to a couple people, I’ve written columns where it’s, like, a dozen people. You start reaching out, you schedule time with these people, and sometimes you’re working over 2 or 3 or 4 weeks to have the time to do all of this. Then you have to sit down and write the thing. After you write it, it goes through a rigorous edit process at the Times.
I will often extensively outline before I write, because writing and thinking are deeply intertwined, and you need to map out your thoughts before you can write in a way that is actually coherent, in my experience. Other people can probably write off the cuff, but I can’t with any coherence. Part of me wishes I could, but I can’t, and so I outline extensively, and then I write from the outline.
Somewhere around halfway through a piece, I will have a much better sense of what I’m trying to say. I go back to the outline, I rework the outline, and, then, I finish the piece. Then there’s the self-editing process. You write a column, you read it, you let it breathe for a day or two, you read it again.
Sometimes I’ll read a draft out loud, because that’s a good way to get a sense of how it sounds. Then it goes to an editor. Usually, I am reasonably confident in the column by the time that I turn it in. But I have definitely submitted things that were trash, and, like, my editor was like, “This is not going to work”, and so you go back. Because he was right, it’s not going to work.
The first layer of editing is very tight line editing, which is pretty unusual in my experience. Then you go through a copyedit and a fact check. If I say, you know, “FDR won in a landslide in 1936”, I don’t need to actually cite that in the piece, that’s just something I know. But the fact checker is going to be like, “Yep, that’s true”, or “No, you’re wrong”. Once we’re done with all of that, it’s only then that it’s published.
Then it starts all over again.
There’s a style guide for the New York Times. It’s a very long style guide. I don’t think I’ve ever had reason to look at it, in part, because the copy desk is on top of all of that. If I style something incorrectly, it gets fixed. There are a few style choices that writers themselves will make, though.
I need to have it in my brain, so that I know when I say this thing in the piece, it’s correct
I’m sitting in my office right now, in my house. I’ve got a reasonably nice desk, a pretty comfortable chair, a pretty nice monitor. I have a nice keyboard and mouse that I like. I’ve become a bit of a keyboard nerd in recent years. I really like mechanical keyboards, so I have a couple, a few different mechanical keyboards that I like using. I have some little knickknacks, but not too much, because I don’t want a ton of clutter around me when I’m working.
I want to be able to, you know, focus. I often will have music on when I’m working. I find that sometimes I need music, and sometimes I don’t. It kind of depends on where I am in the writing process. I have a lamp for if I’m working at night, and I have a window so I can look outside. I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, and, like, I have trees right outside my window, so that’s nice.
If I am working on a piece that is in that mode where it is, the hard part of writing, where you’re just, like, sitting there, and you have to write, the time of day that I think I do best is the morning, so, if I can sit down in the morning and work, that’s the best. But, you know, other kinds of writing tasks don’t require that same kind of focus, and so those can be done any time of day.
I don’t really take many notes. I read a lot, and if I think, like, “Oh, that’s a good point!”, then I’ll, like, snap a picture on my phone of the page. When I’m writing, I’ll go through the pictures. Often, I won’t use most of them, because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but it’s not relevant to the final piece. I also take little voice memos for myself. So, if I’m on a walk, and I’m thinking about something, I’ll be like, “Okay, I’ll do a voice memo”, and kind of talk to myself about it.
On historical questions and research, I’ll go read a book, and I want to absorb what it is that the book is saying. Much of what I learn from the book won’t end up in the piece. It’s just, like, I need to have it in my brain, so that I know when I say this thing in the piece, it’s correct. If I’m calling someone, I will take notes during the call, then type up the notes, so I have them in a place I can work with them.
I think the big thing that I’d like people to take away is an understanding that not everything we’re experiencing now has happened before — I reject that
Writing for the Times is my main thing. It’s what I draw a salary from, it pays for my and my kids’ health insurance. But I’ve been experimenting with video, for the past 2 years, really. I’m really kind of ramping it up, as of late. I do stuff on TikTok and YouTube. At the Times, I’ve been doing a lot of video, almost weekly videos now, and then weekly podcasts.
I have a podcast with my buddy, this writer, John Ganz, where we talk about political thrillers from the 1990s. I also just do lots of general podcasting. But I don’t have, like, a Politics podcast, necessarily, that people can go listen to. I tend to just show up on lots of other people’s podcasts as a guest, and then I show up on non-politics podcasts quite frequently, like comedy podcasts, as a guest.
My day job is Times columnist, and it intersects with — but is not entirely coterminous with — my job as, like, internet personality. Which is… I find quite strange. Like, me, the internet personality, is very odd, because, in my own head, I’m just a guy who wears tweed all the time, I don’t know what I’m doing.
I give talks at universities and colleges, sometimes even high schools. I exclusively talk to educational institutions. They’re civic-oriented talks. I think of the video as being part of that — as a kind of commentary on the news, but I’m also trying to provide, like, an informal civic education. Many people do not get a particularly good civic education, and it often leaves them feeling disempowered, and so part of what I hope to do with the video stuff is remind people that they have agency.
I’m trying to sort of teach something about the country, about the political system, and so on. That’s kind of how I see that. That’s my objective with video, and it’s very much similar to my objective when I give a talk to a bunch of college students.
I think the big thing that I’d like people to take away is an understanding that not everything we’re experiencing now has happened before — I reject that. The past is truly a different country. Although you can find historical analogies, they’re just that: analogies. They aren’t one-for-one equivalents. But what you can say is that past generations of Americans have had to sort out their own struggles, and have faced similar questions that we face today, similar questions about the nature of our country, the nature of who belongs here, etc., etc.
You can learn a lot from how they approached those questions. You can learn a lot from the choices and successes and mistakes of previous generations of Americans.
Part of what I want people to take away from my work are, like, practical lessons for how to do democracy, how to live in a democratic society, how to engage in democratic life, with an eye towards learning from people in the past, but applying the past to our present.
People will often describe me as being very optimistic — I don’t perceive myself as being some sort of, you know, Pollyanna-ish optimist. I perceive myself as being someone who takes the agency of individual people very seriously, and think that It’s important to remind ourselves, continuously, that our choices actually do matter a great deal.
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