After 24 years of writing columns for the FT, this is my last. I was a sports columnist from 2002 to 2010 before switching to this column about more or less anything. As a goodbye, let me recount what it’s been like doing the job in our peculiar era.
My approach was that every column starts with one original idea — or at least a thought that is new to most readers. The idea should be something that can be stated in a sentence: for instance, that some Maga folk such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk had formative childhood experiences in apartheid South Africa. What’s not a column is restating the conventional wisdom. That seems pointless, though I’m sure I sometimes ended up doing it.