Two very different takes on this moment.
This week I faced an old-fashioned problem. |
I needed a cover story on major news — the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and its impact on the court and the country — for the Sunday Review. But the section goes to the printers on Friday night, and President Trump said he wouldn’t announce his nominee until Saturday. Basically, we needed a piece on the week’s big questions that was so powerful it wouldn’t matter that it was missing the latest news. |
It feels like ancient history, but it wasn’t that long ago that print deadlines ruled editors’ days. When I started in Op-Ed in 2008, none of us were even allowed to go home until the page was proofread. Now we close articles from our living rooms for 5 a.m. or 3 p.m. and publish them directly to the internet. |
But every now and then news breaks late, the print deadline looms — and we have to scramble to meet it. Last week, we learned that Ginsburg had died with just enough time to pull something out of the Sunday Review and replace it with a piece by R.B.G. herself that we’d first published in 2016. It felt like an imperfect solution but looking back, I’m glad. Her words carried more weight in that time of loss than anything we could have come up with. |
Which brings me to this week’s impossible assignment. Naturally I emailed the columnists: “Help!” Frank Bruni and Ross Douthat wrote back with ideas. |
Frank thinks America is in terrible danger, that “this country, already uncivil, is on the precipice of being ungovernable, because its institutions are being so profoundly degraded, because its partisanship is so all-consuming, and because Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground.” |
Ross agrees America needs a president who actually leads “instead of flouting every norm of decency, treating half the country as his enemy, and delegitimizing an American election because he fears he might not win.” And yet he finds himself “slightly more optimistic about the resilience of our country than almost anyone I know.” And he explains why. |
So there was our cover — two very different takes on this moment. |
And neither one dependent on the name of a nominee. |
I hope you’ll read the essays. They made me think, hard, about how worried about our democracy we need to be. I’m not sure we would have arrived at the same place if the logistics hadn’t pushed us there. I hope next time news breaks and I look at the clock and panic, I’ll remember that old-fashioned cliché: A print deadline is the mother of invention. |
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