"Editor" can be a job that perplexes people.
My parents and grandparents had jobs everyone understands: coal miner, seamstress, hardware store clerk, telephone operator, purchasing agent, computer programmer. |
I, however, am an editor, which, it turns out, is a job that perplexes people. After a minute or two of conversation, their politeness slips away and they ask, pointedly, “What exactly do you do all day?” I don’t have a good answer to this question, except to say that I focus mostly on politics, but I can give you some idea of what I do with Tom Edsall, who writes a column for The Times’s Opinion section each week from Washington. |
Early on Tuesday mornings, often after staying up most of the night, Tom sends me his draft. This week, he wrote about the very deep roots of partisanship in the Trump era and how “intensifying differences between the two parties, particularly over matters of race, sex and the family have created a fertile environment for what amounts to the partisan politicization of human nature.” |
Tom read dozens of papers and interviewed many of the psychologists and political scientists who do research on both political partisanship and the question of whether our biological and psychological systems can help us understand our political system. |
Needless to say, this is a contentious area of inquiry. I wrote batches and batches of questions for Tom to follow up on, look into more deeply, forget about or otherwise wrestle with. We go through this process every week, and it takes hours. If Tom writes 2,000 words, I probably write 1,000 inside his piece in brackets. He then spends another couple of hours disposing of all my suggestions, revising, reinquiring, adding, subtracting and smoothing. |
Whether all this effort helps us understand the deepening hostility that has swept over politics in America — and the way in which “the nation’s faltering attempt to contain the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed once again the role of political partisanship in every aspect of American society” — you’ll have to decide for yourself. |
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Here’s what we’re focusing on today: |
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