There’s no one who wants to relive 2020. Yet it was a year of extraordinary opinion journalism as we strove to contextualize a pandemic, a global recession, protests and an unprecedented American election — not to mention our everyday lives as these events swirled around us. I personally found myself in search of wisdom and perspective, and found both in March in the gorgeous column Bret Stephens wrote about his grandmother, an artist. As Bret writes, “The real masterpiece she painted was her own life.” |
Below several Times Opinion editors share their favorites from our report this year — though the exemplary prose was hardly limited to The Times. Another of my favorites was Caitlin Flanagan’s gutting essay for the Atlantic from June about the graduation the coronavirus stole from her. |
What 2020 journalism stuck with you? Let us know, and in the meantime, Happy New Year. |
Programming note: This newsletter will be off for the next two weeks for the holidays. We’ll see you in your inbox again on Jan. 4. |
“When my colleague Basharat Peer, a staff editor who focuses on international news, told me he wanted to write about two young men in India who were forced by the coronavirus lockdown to travel some 900 miles from the city where they worked back to their home village, I had a hunch that it was going to make for an amazing story. And I was right. Basharat’s essay is one of those truly special pieces of journalism. It’s about a pandemic and a right-wing government, economics and politics. But most of all it’s about the power of friendship. It’s been five months since we published this piece and the story of Amrit and Saiyub is still rattling around in my head.” — MAX STRASSER, International Editor |
“One of my favorite pieces of the year — Pagan Kennedy’s story about the secret history of the rape kit — had nothing to do with the pandemic. She argues that a woman, Martha Goddard, deserves the credit for inventing the evidence-collection kit, instead of the man it was named after. What’s more, Goddard deserves credit for using the kit to force the police to start treating sexual assault like a crime. This is an Op-Ed in the form of a detective story, and it took Pagan six months of reporting to figure out what happened to Goddard. After we published the piece, Pagan signed deals to turn it into a TV series and a book. I’m so glad more people will know Goddard’s story.” — HONOR JONES, Cover Stories Editor |
“This year, Isvett Verde and Jay Caspian Kang both wrote election post-mortems that enrich our impoverished understanding of how race (and racism) operate in national politics. It’s become a political truism that ‘Latino’ or ‘Asian-American’ — let alone the umbrella term ‘people of color’ — do not denote monolithic political categories, but it’s less clear what the implications are for the parties and politicians who seek to win voters who belong to those groups. Their analyses differ in important ways, but I was struck by how both Isvett and Jay emphasize the fact that it’s not just that out-of-touch politicians or media don’t understand what it means to be a ‘person of color,’ but also that the people who ostensibly belong to those categories don’t even understand it.” — EZEKIEL KWEKU, Politics Editor |
“The Editorial Board started kicking around ideas for what would become ‘The Case Against Donald Trump’ package back in June, as the pandemic raged and the final contours of the election were far from clear. The board endorsed Joe Biden for president in October, but there was a sense that still more needed to be said — a verdict on the Trump presidency. ‘He is a man unworthy of the office he holds,’ the board wrote. The package, which included a complete issue of the Sunday Review, was buttressed by pieces from individual board members on particular facets of Trump’s tenure in office. One that appeared to resonate most strongly with readers was Farah Stockman’s piece on Trump supporters, ‘Why They Loved Him.’ It was also in June that I accidentally stumbled across the draft of a piece that was midway through being edited. I went to close the file, but then I read the first sentence: ‘I have rape-colored skin.’ It was the newsprint equivalent of having a fishhook plunge through your cheek and the barb not letting you go. That’s the finest lede I’ve read in this newspaper, or any newspaper, this year.” — ALEX KINGSBURY, Editorials Editor |
“The video ‘Heartache in the Hot Zone: The Front Line Against Covid-19’ was one of the very first glimpses into the crisis inside an I.C.U. at the start of the pandemic. Even today, so much of the pandemic is invisible. We see the charts, the death and case counts, but we don’t see the horror. This video shows the tragedy and the trauma of health care professionals on the front lines. I sent producer Alex Stockton and cinematographer Michael Kirby Smith into the I.C.U., where the columnist Nicholas Kristof was reporting, at a time when we still didn’t fully understand how the virus was transmitted. What they captured is a historical document of the heroism of doctors and nurses.” — ADAM ELLICK, Executive Producer, Opinion Video |
“Early in the pandemic, Tomás Pueyo became a viral sensation for his Medium posts, including ‘Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance.’ His idea — which combined a ‘hammer' of strict countermeasures with a ‘dance’ of more delicate responses — became a widely-used metaphor. We approached the San Francisco tech executive this summer with a question: Could we blend his way of thinking about coronavirus data with our best visual minds to create an immersive argument that might change the course of our virus response? The resulting Op-Ed combined data from public and private sources to make a case for a different way to control the virus: through closed borders and limited travel. It changed how I thought about the virus — and our response to it. And since publishing it, more states have put in place quarantine measures to stop infections from spreading between states.” — STUART THOMPSON, Opinion Graphics Director |
“In ‘My Mother Is Busy Getting Ready to Die,’ which we published during the early days of the pandemic, LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant writes, “My mother is dying a painful death, and it has everything and nothing to do with Covid-19.” She explains that her mother had liver disease, which was diagnosed too late to save her. The 64-year-old did not have Covid-19 and was not in a nursing home or a hospital, yet her experience — the isolation she endured in her final days and the inadequate health care that contributed to her condition — is part of the story of the coronavirus. This essay is just one of thousands of stories that offer a window into the deep suffering that this pandemic has caused — above and beyond deaths that are directly attributed to it. It’s heartbreaking, and an important part of our record of this difficult time.” — JENÉE DESMOND HARRIS, Senior Staff Editor |
“When Warner Bros. announced that they would be smashing the theatrical window and releasing their much-anticipated 2021 films on a streaming service, directors like Christopher Nolan and theater companies like AMC were livid. So it was the perfect time to invite the WarnerMedia C.E.O. (and my old boss) Jason Kilar on our podcast, ‘Sway.’ Kara Swisher, the host, pressed him on whether this was really a pandemic plan or a media empire’s big move to kill theaters forever. The conversation was sassy, spirited and ripe for a debrief, so I was delighted when Kara called up Ben Smith, The Times’s media columnist, for a bonus episode. They parsed the future of Hollywood and contemplated what streaming service Ben would take with him to a desert island. It felt like listening in on a gossip session that I shouldn’t be privy to.” — NAYEEMA RAZA, Senior Editor |
“This year we took up a suggestion by William Cole, a regular writer of letters to the editor, and we asked readers to select a book that was influential in their lives. More than 1,300 readers responded, mentioning books from ‘Middlemarch' to ‘Being Mortal.’ The result was “The Book That Changed My Life,” which appeared in January. Little did we know at the beginning of the year that readers, spending more time at home, would be reading more than ever in the Pandemic Year of 2020.” — THOMAS FEYER, Letters Editor |
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