In 2014, I began writing on a regular basis at The Washington Post. This space was my idiosyncratic look at developments in international relations, American politics and popular culture.
Given recent events at The Post, I fear some conspiratorially minded readers might conclude that I am a small piece of collateral damage from all the drama. The truth is more banal: My contact was up, and management wanted to go in a different direction. The Post is figuring out how to best organize its opinion sections, and I do not fit into those plans.
If that sounds bad for me, the truth is that it was growing ever more difficult for me to tolerate the status quo, as well. This had nothing to do with the folks at PostEverything; they always edited me with a light touch, and their interventions always improved my prose.
My problem was the pace. I wrote four columns per week on average. If one thinks of those as simple blog posts, perhaps that does not seem like too heavy a lift. Over time, however, Spoiler Alerts morphed from being a blog to being much more like a column. Each contribution got a bit longer, a bit more polished The tone of Spoiler Alerts became less irreverent and more, dare I say, mature.
Part of this evolution was probably because I was writing for, you know, The Washington Post. Consciously or subconsciously, I was striving to ensure that I belonged at the same newspaper that employed legendary reporters and columnists. Another part, no doubt, was the times we live in. A lot has happened over the past eight years: two wars (or, rather, one long war) in Ukraine, Donald Trump’s election and presidency, a pandemic, the Afghanistan pullout, the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, and so forth. I found a few ways of writing about some of this with a bemused tone, but there were limits.
The biggest driver for this change, however, is probably a less forgiving public sphere. As I have noted before, Spoiler Alerts was a form of “contingent writing” — speculations about the state of the world that might or might not turn out to have legs. Some of these musings held up well; others, not so much. And that was fine — I have been perfectly fine admitting when I was wrong.
At some point over these past eight years, however, it seems as though the judgment of public discourse shifted. Years ago, many were lamenting the notion that prominent pundits could prove to be massively wrong about big questions and still not lose their standing in the marketplace of ideas. That trend mostly persists, but it has been obscured by a more prominent one, in which the consequences of being impolitic are far more severe.
We live in an age in which retweeting a tasteless joke and then apologizing and deleting it 10 minutes later still winds up being on your permanent record. Not all infractions are equal, and in some cases such behavior merits serious sanctions. There is something bizarre, however, about the capricious nature of reactions and overreactions to acts that less than a decade ago would barely have merited a shrug.
It is entirely possible that as a middle-aged straight white guy, my read on this is wrong. Another trend I have noticed over the past eight years is that my inner cranky-old-man voice is starting to get louder. I am keenly aware that this voice is not always wrong, but it ain’t always right, either. That said, a public discourse that is implacably hostile to only a particular slice of norm infractions is not fertile ground for the contingent writing that inspired Spoiler Alerts.
We need a more forgiving public discourse, one in which it is possible for mistakes to be made, apologies to be sincere, criticism to be tolerated, and respect to be preserved across genuine ideological disagreements.
I will probably have more fully formed thoughts about this in the near future. Maybe those thoughts will be published somewhere — but not here. It is time for the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts to log off and wish loyal readers a very fond farewell.
