Charles Blow, who spent decades at the New York Times as an op-ed writer, says his passion for the job faded in his final years, leaving him struggling to justify the work “even for pay.”
“My last years at the paper weren’t my most pleasant,” Blow confessed in the debut entry of his new Substack newsletter, “Blow the Stack.”
“My job went from being one I would say, earnestly, I would do for free, to one I struggled to justify doing for pay.”
Blow, 55, said his once-fiery commentaries had dwindled into “the zombie thing that came to be published under my name,” a product with “a dwindling trace of my breath in it.”
“It was no longer fully my voice,” he wrote.
But the grind of churning out essays eventually wore him down.
“Frankly, my confidence was injured in that space, and confidence is essential for an essayist,” Blow admitted.
“The reader can sense hesitation, unease and lack of conviction just as they can recognize the muscularity of thought and the sure-footedness of a well-crafted phrase.”
His farewell column ran in February. Within months, however, a senior editor at the Times Book Review pulled him back, offering Blow the chance to review “Baldwin: A Love Story,” the first major James Baldwin biography in three decades.
He said the assignment restored his faith.
“The editor was strong and sure, but also delicate, careful to preserve the voice and craft in the writing,” Blow wrote.
“He was respectful. I had forgotten what that felt like.”
That experience, he said, was “confirmation” that he held no animus toward the Times, and that his voice still had value.
“The Times took a chance on me,” he wrote. “It allowed me to do things I could never have imagined, inventing and reinventing myself.”
Blow’s exit from the Times op-ed page wasn’t nearly as tumultuous as that of Paul Krugman, whose departure was marked by what he described as a deteriorating relationship with the Gray Lady’s management, particularly after the discontinuation of his newsletter and growing editorial constraints.
Krugman said the conditions at the Times had become intolerable for his writing style and the kind of policy analysis he wanted to provide, prompting him to move his work to Substack, where he now publishes more technical and frequent pieces.
The Post has sought comment from the Times.
For Blow, who spent 17 years hammering out Times columns after joining the paper as an intern three decades ago, the break came without tears.
“So, when I parted ways with the Times, it was without sorrow,” he said. “On balance, my years at the paper were weighted towards the good. I still wanted it to succeed — even if without me.”
Blow insisted he remains proud of the institution that took him in as a “gawky country boy with little more than grit, ambition, and budding talent.”
He recalled that the Times gave him the chance to reinvent himself repeatedly — even serving as creative director when the Styles section launched its Thursday edition in 2005.
“I believed in it — and still believe in it — because the Times is in my blood,” he said.
