I write three op-eds a week, and today is one of the days I normally write an op-ed, publish it to the web at the Garrison Center, and submit it to a crap ton of newspapers.
An op-ed has to fit into the "news cycle" in a particular way. It has to be something that people are going to still read a few days from now.
For the next few days, I expect there to be one, and only one, story people are really going to be that into -- the Prigozhin "mutiny"/"coup" in Russia.
And that story is changing by the hour. If I wrote something right now, the facts would be so different than they are now by the time a newspaper editor had time to look at it that it would be ... "old news," even though it would be an opinion piece.
Sometimes an op-ed writer can pull off the Nostradamus routine, figure out what's about to happen, and put out a piece that reads as "fresh" a couple of days later.
I'm definitely not equipped to play Nostradamus on the Internet with respect to events in Russia over the next 24-48 hours.
I guess I may write something up on another topic, knowing that it's probably not going to get much love from the newspapers.
Or I may wait until tomorrow and see if any kind of clarity is emerging in Russia that I can riff on.
"Developing."
Update, Sunday, 6:40pm: Well, I did get a column written. Sorry, Thane, no bicycles this time ... but soon, very soon, I hope. This is one I expect to not get very many newspaper "pickups," as the subject matter is ... uncomfortable. But I don't like missing columns, and this was the only news hook I came across that seemed timely, and interesting, and that the facts were clear enough on to not have it quickly become obsolete (I was thinking of writing one on the Titan submersible incident, but that may have cleared the news cycle already, and if it hasn't it likely won't have by Tuesday, either).
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