The Case for Patience in a Year That Refuses to Wait
Argument, in 2026, has become the enemy of attention. There is a remedy.
I have spent twenty-three years writing columns. The most useful thing I have learned is also the least fashionable: most of the time, the second sentence is wrong.
The first sentence of a column is generally the one you have earned. It is the one you arrived at because you read something, or watched something happen, or noticed something in yourself. The second sentence is the one you write because you have a column to file and 750 words to fill. It is, more often than not, the sentence that turns an observation into an argument.
What arguments cost
Arguments are cheap in 2026. They are cheap because the platforms that publish them are optimized for the ones that provoke, and because provocation is a technology whose costs are, by design, borne by someone else. The reader pays in attention. The subject pays in reputation. The writer, in the short run, pays in nothing at all.
The remedy
The remedy I have found — for myself, and for the writers I edit — is not restraint. It is patience. It is the willingness to sit with an observation for a day or a week before deciding whether it becomes a column. Most observations do not become columns. The ones that do are, as a rule, the ones I could not stop thinking about, and the ones I know how to write only because I have thought about them long enough.
The news cycle does not wait. That does not mean you have to answer it in its own tempo. The most useful writing I have done in the last five years has been, without exception, the writing I filed a week late.
