Skip to content
Culture & Religion —

From Bill to Jill at the NYT

“I don’t know enough about the inner workings of (The New York Times) to offer definitive judgments, but from the outside it looks like Keller did a pretty good job.”
Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

What’s the Latest Development?

Hendrik Hertzberg on Bill Keller’s eight years in the saddle as executive editor of the New York Times. “I don’t know if the job is inherently harder now than it used to be, but it is certainly more inherently stressful. Keller has had to deal with something that none of his predecessors needed to worry about: a prolonged existential crisis of the institution itself.”

What’s the Big Idea?

“From the outside it looks like Keller did a pretty good job overall. Yes, the way that he and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., handled the aftermath of the Judith Miller/Iraq/WMD fiasco left a lot to be desired. …But there were countless triumphs as well, up to and including the Times’s painstaking curating of the WikiLeaks cables.” 

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.
Related
A bearded man wearing glasses and a plaid shirt speaks with a microphone clipped to his collar in front of a purple background with white dots.
The Well
How Rainn Wilson discovered sacredness
The hospital where Rainn Wilson’s wife and son nearly died became his own personal holy site. There, he discovered that the sacred can exist in places we least expect it. During his talk at A Night of Awe and Wonder, he explained how the awe we feel in moments of courage and love is moral beauty — and following it might be the start of our spiritual revolution.
▸
13 min
—
with
Rainn Wilson
Up Next