Some of The Dumbest Things I Ever Wrote

In honor of my retirement from “takes,” here are a few of my worst.

Last week, in my final column for Medium’s GEN magazine, I made a big production of announcing that after 25 years writing opinion columns and “think pieces,” I am never, ever, ever, ever doing another one.

While the sentiment was sincere, the fanfare was a bit tongue-in-cheek. Just as I’ve long suspected that society was not holding its collective breath waiting for my “take” on the cultural kerfuffle du jour, I was pretty sure the earth would not dislodge itself from its axis upon hearing the news that my opinions would be out of regular circulation. What I didn’t count on was the number of people who responded with some version of: “Great! Tell many of your opinion-having colleagues to do the same!”

It’s not like there aren’t some truly sensational opinions out there, many of them put forth by virtuosic columnists and bloggers whose pontifications you wait for with trembling anticipation of waiting for the new iPhone. But as I said to Aryeh Cohen-Wade recently on his Bloggingheads podcast, one of the biggest problems with the op-ed racket is that the kind of gig everyone wants — a regularly scheduled column with regularly scheduled payment — is ultimately the thing that makes that gig unsustainable over the long…