William Marvel: Maunderings

Columnists at some of the big dailies and national magazines like to see their work published under a standing head. When Andrew Sullivan was still allowed to write for a publication as liberal as New York Magazine, he called his column “Interesting Times,” and whenever the times weren’t interesting he made them so. Peggy Noonan appears weekly in The Wall Street Journal under “Declarations,” and she often manages to be fairly declarative. For the first couple of decades of this century, Michael Shermer wrote a monthly column called “The Skeptic” for Scientific American, and when he stopped writing that provocative commentary, I stopped reading the magazine.

If prospective columnists prefer not to have to come up with an inventive headline to distinguish every new piece, I suppose having a standing head would be the way to go. That seems reasonable for writers who focus exclusively on specific topics, but for those who dabble in opinion it strikes me as a little conceited to assign their columns permanent names.