Columnist brain (non-fatal but chronic)

Why no one should be a columnist and if they must there should be term limits.

Previously: The cockwomble industrial complex

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Sometimes looking at other people’s mentions on Twitter feels like overhearing a conversation on a train or in a pub that the participants mistakenly believe to be private. I stumbled upon one such dialogue on Twitter earlier this week:

James Marriott (Times columnist)… I think columnist-brain is making me say I hate things when they only moderately annoy/bore me. I’m now in reverse gear… 

Sam Leith (Literary Editor and Columnist, The Spectator)Columnist brain is a terrible affliction. I have it too. Normal people don’t have strong opinions once a week. 

David Aaronovitch (Times columnist turned Substack writer)Are you absolutely certain about that? 

Sam Leith
My theory is that normal people either don’t have strong opinions very often at all or that they have them dozens of times a day. Once a week, of the type that makes a decent thousand-worder, is some kind of profitable mental deformation. 

Another problem with columnist brain is that most British newspaper columnists end up believing that they are ‘different’ from ordinary people; it is the columnist exceptionalism theory — the notion that having the luck/curse of a newspaper column allows you to ascend to some higher level.

In truth, writing a column on a weekly basis is, as Leith puts it, “some kind of profitable mental deformation”. The columnist joneses for new topics to write about and they often stray from areas they understand into complex and very contested areas about which they have no more than a rough idea.

The origami castle

I’ve written recently about ‘the origami castle’ — the seemingly elegant column that collapses when subjected to a light rain of criticism or a hurricane of piss — and columnist brain is what turns a ‘normal’ writer into a paper architect.

Long-term column writing ruins your attention span, attention to detail, and attitude to ‘normies’ / ‘civilians’. Consider someone like Allison Pearson who clearly invents useful ‘sources’ to provide anecdotes in her columns or, at best, mines the outraged letters she provokes for similarly unhinged rage. Even young columnists like James Marriott — who is just 30 — degrade quickly, panicking about deadlines and producing half-baked but ego-rich output.

If columnists are needed — and there is a strong argument that they are needed for the mix of content in any given paper as well as a draw for some readers — then they should be given more to do in terms of reporting/feature writing/interviews and rotated off the columnist beat every five years or so. Term limits would allow columnists to stave off columnist brain and go out into the world more to encounter ideas that don’t fit neatly into a column.

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