Nicholas Kristof Reflects On 35 Years At New York Times With A Linked Anthology Of His Work

That’s me working in my office in Beijing in 1992.                                                                                  Walter Baranger

By Nicholas Kristof Opinion Columnist

This week marks 35 years for me at The New York Times, so I dug up some of the pieces that have meant the most to me over the decades. After I posted this compilation, I had congratulations on my “retirement” as well as an inquiry on Instagram: “He’s not dead, is he?”

So let me clarify that I am, more or less, still alive. And I’m not retiring: I’m looking forward to another 35 years at The Times.

It was deeply moving to go through and pick the coverage that shaped me the most. Darfur. Sex trafficking. The Iraq War and Tiananmen massacre. But also the inspiration: Heroes like Dr. Sanduk Ruit fixing cataracts, or “Dr. Tom” surviving bombings in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. One of the points I try to make in the piece is that we pundits instinctively weigh in on the hot news of the day, but I find I rarely change minds when I write about President Trump, or the Middle East, or abortion or other topics that people already have thought about. Our greatest impact comes not from swaying people’s minds about issues already on the agenda, but rather from propelling new issues onto the agenda. So here’s my collection of some of the pieces that have meant the most to me since I first walked into the Times building as a business and economics reporter 35 years ago.

I won’t have a Thursday column this week because I’m working on a longer-range project about gun safety. Speaking of which, Joe Biden issued an excellent 11-page policy on guns, clearly reflecting input from public health policy wonks. There’s been a good deal of discussion about guns in the Democratic debates, but this is the most sophisticated policy outline I’ve seen so far. It’s ambitious but perhaps plausible.