Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em Podcast 234. Pamela Paul Spills On Her Exit From The New York Times
This is a hot one! Pamela Paul — longtime editor of the New York Times Book Review, author of nine books, current writer-at-large for the Wall Street Journal — tells Nancy and Sarah about her unceremonious exit from the New York Times, where she had been an Opinion columnist. What happened? Well, it’s a long and juicy story, one that includes a J.K. Rowling column, a “lot of dishonesty and fear,” and an email dispatched in the middle of the night, a story that caused Nancy’s and Sarah’s jaws to literally drop. (It’s on video!) Paul joined the Opinion section in 2022 to “create space for liberal opinions that had been snuffed out,” the thorny topics most journalists in 2020 were afraid to write about — and might still be. “It’s really unsettling when an Opinion section is afraid of opinions,” says Paul. “You cannot pretend culture out of existence.”
Also discussed:
* How were things inside the New York Times in 2020? “Really awful.”
* George Will, 2014: “Victimhood [as] a coveted status that confers privileges.” NYT 2020: “Hold my beer.”
* “You’ve lost the room…”
* We are not finished talking about the defenestrations of Times’ James Bennett, Bari Weiss, Donald McNeil Jr….
* New York Times readers are smarter than we give them credit for.
* Props for Jesse Singal, Michael Powell, whoever Pamela’s editor was at Opinion, whose stand-up-ness makes Nancy tear up
* “The truth is a motherfucker.”
Plus, tasty bits in the hotbox: a Disneyland for Netflix grown-ups, the 1000-page book about revenge and justice you should be reading, a new old-skool medical drama, and much more!
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