Dead but unburied

THERE is an unspoken rule among columnists that we should not draw attention to each other's work, particularly if one is writing for a competing publication. This rule is occasionally suspended when someone's work is of such low quality as to be harmful to the public — such as spreading blatant misinformation or committing lazy writing sins that would earn the work a failing grade if it were a student assignment — but in general, we tacitly respect each other's space. Everyone crouches in their own little foxholes, shooting at different things, but not at each other.

That is probably not the way things should be. If opinion columnists, as a class, are the thought leaders of the country — and even if we don't harbor that pretension personally (a lot of us do), our respective publications' positioning of our products is certainly based on that — then we ought to be able to engage in shared discussions and debates.