Pamela Paul (Wikimedia Commons)
A journalist friend emails: “I’m not sure what to make of Pamela Paul’s decision (assuming she wasn’t forced out).” I stare at the message for a second, thinking only: who is Pamela Paul?
A New York Times columnist, it turns out—and I subscribe. But lazily. I write back, saying that after skimming Paul’s goodbye column, I think I would have enjoyed her work. She begins by recalling her vow “to write to Times readers rather than to Twitter.” She insisted on quitting that platform altogether, because it “had by then become a forum that could lead journalists to mistake the loudest voices for the most legitimate or to temper their positions so as to avoid social media blowback.” This, I respect.
Now curious, I check Bluesky for gossip about her departure.
Good lord. People loathed this woman. “Pamela Paul is a reactionary bigot with no talent or insight or intellectual ambition,” writes one. Another makes it “vile bigot.” A third says of that final column, “Pamela Paul going out like she went in—with incoherent squiggly lines where a brain should be.” Someone calls her “an uncurious black hole”; someone else charges that “her reactionary liberalism paved the way for the authoritarianism we’re hurtling toward.”
This woman I never heard of singlehandedly paved the way for authoritarianism? I zap that and a few other examples to my friend, stunned by how harsh they are. This is the new way: caricature anyone you dislike as a comic-book antihero.
“I think this demonization of those we disagree with is a core issue plaguing our society,” he replies. “It reflects both self-righteousness and a lack of humility, which implies that we think we have nothing to learn from those who don’t see the world the way we do.”
Agreed—but now I want to know how Paul managed to inspire such venom. She even polarized the Times newsroom, with some journalists glad she criticized orthodoxy and others convinced she was intellectually lazy and deliberately inflammatory. Also so divisive and aloof, she managed “to make enemies on every desk.”
Killing Paul’s column was part of a broader set of cuts, but was she an easy, eager sacrifice? The Times offered no official farewell acknowledging her contributions. Her editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, told New York Magazine, “Any insinuation I make staffing or editorial decisions based solely on political viewpoints is false.” Read that again, and try not to fall into the big black loophole of “solely.”
Skimming more neutral summaries of Paul’s work, I feel a sick tingle of dread. She is impatient with extremes and often nostalgic. She has criticized cancel culture, the excesses of wokeness, the effects of social media, the distortions of porn, the declining interest in reading. I am likely to agree with all of that.
Unnerved by this proximity to pure loathing, I turn to the columns themselves. An old one raised ire by suggesting #MeToo overreach and “a lack of due process in responding to accusations…. We’ve thought about how seriously to take such accusations and what to do with the monsters. But we still haven’t thought enough about how to handle all accusations with proportion and fairness. And we haven’t thought much at all about what to do when we’re wrong.” Agreed, if reluctantly. For a while, zeal took over. There was bound to be unwarranted fallout.
I try another column. In this one, she reproaches the American Historical Association for condemning Israel’s destruction of the education system in Gaza, demanding an immediate cease-fire, and committing to help rebuild the educational infrastructure. The headline is “Historians Condemn Israel’s ‘Scholasticide.’ The Question Is Why.”
She has to ask?
Paul calls the resolution, which passed 428 to 88, “counterproductive.” First, she says, the historians abdicated their “defining commitment to ground argument in evidence.” There is plenty of evidence for the destruction—90 percent of the schools were either damaged or destroyed. But she wants an acknowledgement that Hamas could have been hiding inside. She is afraid “the resolution could encourage other academic organizations to take a side in the conflict between Israel and Gaza.” And she thinks the resolution “substantiates and hardens the perception that academia has become fundamentally politicized.” But surely there is a huge difference between a rigid ideological agenda that punishes anyone who opposes it and a group of historians who cannot bear to see schools destroyed?
There are plenty more columns just as vehement, and just as devoid of nuance, questioning, or exploration. Interspersed, maybe for comic relief, are columns made of fluff. One talks about how she did not make any summer-vacation plans (“I do not like insects or wet sand lodged in the crotch of my bathing suit”). Another reveals that she has begun eating “grandma food,” like British digestives. A cutesy piece is headlined “My Impeachment”—by her family, because she wants them to make their beds in the morning.
I write stuff just as lame all the time. I rather like poking into the minutiae of everyday life. But at least I worry about it. Paul seems incredibly sure of herself, determined to ignore any criticism. Maybe somebody told her that was the tone a columnist should take? Odd, to be so deliberately polarizing when she is clearly not fond of conflict, mess, or activism. In “No, I Don’t Want to Protest,” she writes, “I’ve never been much of a tribalist or a joiner, and I have no use for conformity of thought…. When someone drones on about solidarity, all I hear is, ‘Get in line.’”
Though she is proud of standing aloof, she is political, often giving us columns that simply relay her own opinions without any self-interrogation, challenge, or fresh information. Between the politics and the pabulum are deeper dives into issues of gender and language, because she does show solidarity with oldschool feminism. Like J.K. Rowling, whom she has defended, Paul is protective of the word “woman” and offended by language changed to include a small minority who can still menstruate and get pregnant but do not identify as women. Fair to conclude, then, that she automatically defines those who menstruate and get pregnant as women. Yet it is the far left and far right she accuses of reducing us to our biology?
Paul positions herself as a liberal, free-thinking centrist, yet she blithely ignores the positions of those who disagree with her. When she slams, she mainly slams left. Repeatedly, she questions gender-affirming care for transgender kids—by focusing on a much-criticized report and on a handful of kids who changed their mind about being trans. She makes good cautionary points, but from the perspective of a concerned and clueless parent, uninformed by the point of view of someone who is transgender.
This, I suspect, was the lightning rod; the topic shows up in the angriest comments. For some reason, the idea of acknowledging that some of us are not at peace with our assigned gender makes a lot of people crazy—and so, for a different group, does any suggestion that caution is needed before major surgery. We finally made our peace with same-sex marriage, which took an intolerably long time. So now what do we do? Grab for this issue instead, and let it polarize our minds and our policies. Ostensibly, Paul was pushing back against that—but because she did so by ignoring the points of view of the very people in question, she fell victim to the left’s protective outrage.
The condemnation was often personal, vindictive, and mean, and any influence it wielded would be a shame if her work had more substance and sensitivity. Instead, I am beginning to see why people accuse her of using her influential position merely to amplify her own contentious views. Columnists are obliged only to their own voices; Paul did not need to swing back and forth reporting both sides. But her work gives me the sense that each time she found herself with a strong opinion, or found a trusted source with a strong opinion, she grabbed hold, and the thinking stopped there. As a result, this person I had hoped was free of knee-jerk catering to social media and partisan orthodoxy wound up being just as polarizing.
As a columnist with The New York Times, Paul had the attention of a large chunk of the world. Her advice to us in this turbulent political time, in a column I would love to think smartass but fear was sincere? “Refuse to react.” Also, “disregard Musk,” because analysis “will offer no spiritual benefits.” And finally, “remember fun. Scowling your way through the next four years isn’t likely to be a good time.”
Readers do not come to the Times for a good time.
One of Paul’s many critics, journalist Hamilton Nolan, believes that “decades ensconced in bourgeois antechambers have drained her of the ability to access true anger at the state of the world.” Andrea Long Chu writes in New York Magazine, “Her principal opinion is that everyone else’s opinions should be as weakly held as her own—the idea being that if all our opinions were weaker, society as a whole might be stronger.”
Chu, who won a Pulitzer for her criticism, issues a takedown so wicked sharp, I might recoil if it were not, unlike Paul’s columns, so damned well executed. “There is limited utility in devoting our attention to a person so rarely visited by serious belief,” she begins, yet she finds Paul an excellent example of what she calls the far center: “a loose coalition of disillusioned Democrats, principled humanists, staid centrists, anti-woke journalists, civil libertarians, wronged entertainers, skeptical academics, and toothless novelists, all brought together by their shared antipathy to what they regard as the illiberal left.” Uh-oh. This sounds like a party I would attend. And Chu is scathing, arguing that members of the far center are concerned only with individual freedom and their own sanity, they reject the idea of a shared ideology, and their “vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice.”
Critics want Paul to take a stand, not just scold others for fighting too hard.
Even her affection for books (she was the editor of The New York Times Book Review for nine years) is used against her. As a girl, she realized that “books were a way for rule-followers like herself to experience ‘a kind of secondhand rebellion.’” Now, Chu writes, she seems to see literature as “a kind of glass container for the world, one that permits the safe pleasures of empathy without the distress of responsibility.”
Again, this hits home. We are both White ladies who want everybody to be polite and nice so we can go back to reading our book.
Chu, on the other hand, is as “polarizing and contrarian” as Paul became. Chu stands directly opposite on gender-affirming care, saying minors should have unfettered access, no medical gatekeeping. Desire alone justifies access, she says, regardless of age or psychiatric history. She calls Paul “a zealot attired as a skeptic, one who has gladly paved the way for the anti-trans right.”
Duly polarized—by a columnist who stayed at the edge of the fray but threw bombs in now and then—people now either see Paul as a tragic casualty of cancel culture or think her departure was long overdue. No matter. According to an AI-generated bio, she already has a new role: she “has become a proxy for broader debates about media bias, free speech, and the limits of contrarianism in modern journalism.”
That is a shame, because the limits that undid her might belong only to her.
At least I hope so.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
