Sorry for the long hiatus -- I've been consumed in a project at work. Anyway, the Washington Monthly has an interesting article about Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman. [link] I found the most interesting tidbit to be a brief explication of the mindset of the center-left columnist. According to the article, most came out of the ranks of reporting journalists, and therefore maintain an intellectual distance from their subject matter, just as a good reporter should. By contrast, many notable conservative columnists have come out of politics, where one-sidedness and intellectual fealty to your subject matter is considered a virtue. The result is that center-left pundits are afraid to grab a reader by the lapels and keep shaking him until the point is made; they tend to follow the he-said, she-said model. And therein lies Krugman's appeal to liberals -- he is more apt to make points, with examples and hypotheticals and well-conceived theories, that favor liberal ways of thinking, and to do so over and over and over, in the manner of his conservative brethren.