Twitter has been twittering about the last two opinion columns by Nicholas Kristof and David Brooks. Kristof wasted valuable space telling us that he was dropping his middle initial from his byline. Just fasincating. David Brooks wrote about his stoner past. Don’t do drugs, kids. All this was catnip for the snark masters on Twitter.
In other media gossip, Ezra Klein has left WaPo. I guess he asked Bezos for $10m to start a new website and the boss declined.
Apt. 11d 
The middle initial thing was weird. I do insist upon my middle initial when I publish stuff because my name is relatively common. Even with my middle initial, more than 34th of the articles on PubMed with my name aren’t me. At a glance, nearly all the rest are by the same guy. I should send him an email and see if he’ll pay me to take a second middle initial.
But the Brooks column was just bizarre.
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There’s a Post writer – Jennifer 8 Lee. She was applying to college and they were up to their eyeballs in Jennifers Lee, so she did it then. Now, it’s her distinctive byline. A truly great 80s New Yorker cartoon was a nursery school class picture, as I remember it was captioned Jennifer, Jennifer, Scott, Jennifer, Scott, Scott, Mrs Priepzyk, Scott, Jennifer, Scott, Jennifer, Jennifer… Mrs Priepzyk looked a little frazzled.
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Friends don’t let friends read David Brooks.
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Maybe somebody should make an exception for his editor or something.
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To be fair to Kristof, I think he published a substantive column without the middle initial. The comments to that column were focused more on the initial drop than the substance, so he blogged about it so people would stop obsessing about it.
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As our society grows ever more unequal in income distribution and other aspects of material life, we become steadily more “informal” and “unostentatious.” So you’ll never get tenure, but you can call the professors by their first names, and the average freelancer has no chance of earning a tenth of Nicholas Kristoff earns, but hey, no middle initial. It’s like he’s just an average joe.
You might even think it was a trick to distract people from the material reality of their lives.
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OK, you finally made me click through (I started wondering if Kristof was dropping his middle name in solidarity with all of those who have no middle names, i.e. people of other cultures with different naming conventions, like Indians and Chinese).
My main reaction was to wonder, seriously, there are no other Nicholas Kristofs in the world? Is he mistaking the fact that he is orders of magnitude more famous (at least on the internet) than any other Nicholas Kristof with being the only one?
There is a Nicki Kristof (a photographer who specializes in new borns: http://www.nickikristof.com/)
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“(I started wondering if Kristof was dropping his middle name in solidarity with all of those who have no middle names, i.e. people of other cultures with different naming conventions, like Indians and Chinese).”
Indians often use middle initials, though, don’t they? And I heartily encourage them to do so. Take, for example V.S. Naipaul, AKA Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul.
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