Thomas Sowell is giving up his column. I can think of lots of columnists whose writing we wouldn’t miss. Sowell isn’t one of them. Every column he wrote in a quarter-century career as a columnist was eminently worth reading. I say this having read nearly every one of them.
What made his columns so good? He wrote with sparkling clarity. He relied on facts. He didn’t showcase his scholarship, but his range of subjects was impressive. He understood his readers and didn’t write down to them. He was prolific. He wrote two columns a week and, when he had more to say, sometimes three or four. Best of all, he analyzed things from conservative—and somewhat libertarian—perspective better than anyone else and in fewer words.
In his farewell column, he explained why he’s stopping his weekly chores. “Even the best things come to an end,” he wrote. But that wasn’t all:
Good as his columns were, they may be the least of Sowell’s writings. I referred to his columnist days as a “career.” It wasn’t really. He is, at 86, America’s greatest public intellectual and has been for years. His books fill two shelves in my bookcase, and I’m proud to say I’ve read almost half of them. His latest book, a revised and enlarged edition of Wealth, Poverty, and Politics, was published in September.
Absent the columns, Sowell enthusiasts can turn to his books. They cover a breadth of subjects. The first one I read was Ethnic America about how immigrants have fared in this country. It’s an example of his style: scholarly but filled with fascinating details and written for the average reader. It’s a great book, though not political. I was hooked.
He’s best known for his work on economics and race—that is, economics and race all over the world. He’s also written about late-talking children, liberal intellectuals, civil rights, the education system, markets—and I could go on.
For a public intellectual, Sowell doesn’t appear in public very often. So don’t get your hopes up. He is anything but a self-promoter. He keeps his private life quite private. He’s been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford since 1980, but he’s not often seen on campus. I assume he writes at home.
In 2003, I got Fox News to agree to an hour-long interview with Sowell, if I could get him to be questioned by me. He agreed, and we taped the Q&A at Hoover. There were no second takes. Sowell was great. I don’t think my questions had anything to do with it. The show was cut into 30-minute segments. For many viewers, it was the first time they’d seen Sowell on TV. They were tremendously impressed.
In a break from taping, I happened to tell Sowell that I couldn’t make it through one of his books. He knew exactly which one it was, Knowledge and Decisions. I’ve since learned that many smart people regard it as his greatest work.
Sowell, it turns out, doesn’t tolerate sloppy editing or even any editing at all. Sometime in the 1990s, I noticed the arrival at THE WEEKLY STANDARD of a book about the black student rebellion at Cornell in 1969. And I happened to recall that Sowell had been teaching at Cornell at that time. I was delighted when he agreed to review the book.
He made it clear he would pull the review if it was edited in any way. He wasn’t exaggerating. When the STANDARD’s book editor tinkered slightly with Sowell’s punctuation, he noticed and yanked his own review. In the end, Sowell’s precise punctuation was restored and the review ran.
In his next to last column, Sowell noted words and phrases no longer used today. The phrase “none of your business” is one. “Today, everything seems to be the government’s business or the media’s business,” he wrote. “And the word ‘risque’ would be almost impossible to explain to young people, in a world where gross vulgarity is widespread and widely accepted.”
That short paragraph should make one sad to see Sowell’s columns stop. It made me sad.
