Dear reader,Let me begin with the story of arguably the world’s first great newspaper column.In 1751, a newspaper in London started featuring the writings of a man who signed himself as “The Inspector”. His real name was John Hill, and he was a physician, a botanist, a professional controversialist and a “literary nuisance”. The London Advertiser and Literary Gazette announced Hill’s column in March that year. He wrote about books, plays, manners, medicine and, most importantly, gossip and the hypocrisies and absurdities of the noble.It was initially a twice-weekly piece but became so popular that the newspaper expanded it to five days a week. Hill eventually produced more than 700 instalments of the “Inspector” columns. Soon, the column became a prominent front in London’s “paper war” of 1752-53. London then had its own version of the attention economy, called Grub Street. The district that gave its name to the city’s struggling literary hacks was crowded with writers producing pamphlets, newspaper articles, political smears, and gossip for whoever would pay. This market, in which personality, controversy, and sheer volume could be as valuable as literary ability, set off a war of sorts between writers who looked down upon the Street and its inhabitants. John Hill fit beautifully into this world.The eminent writer Henry Fielding, writing as “Sir Alexander Drawcansir” in The Covent-GardenJournal, helped turn a mock campaign against Grub Street writers into a real literary quarrel involving Hill and other authors. After Hill reviewed, quite critically, Christopher Smart’s 1752 poetry collection, Smart replied with nothing less than a mock epic called The Hilliad (1753). The affair set off a series of retaliatory writings, pseudonymous personas, personal literary invectives, and a lot more.As you can see, the format was exhibiting the ingredients of the modern columnist: personality, regularity, controversy, reader appetite, and enemies, almost from the beginning. While the idea of a newspaper came up partly from a desire to distribute information more efficiently, the column emerged from the understanding that readers wanted help deciding what that information meant.In the following decades, the column went on to become one of the most popular content segments in media, and gave birth to some of the finest writers, or, I would say, today’s influencers of the modern world. The line-up is extraordinary: Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe, William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, H.L. Mencken, Walter Lippmann, Dorothy Parker, George Orwell, James Reston, Murray Kempton, A.J. Liebling, Art Buchwald, Pauline Kael, Christopher Hitchens, A.G. Gardiner, Bernard Levin, Malcolm Muggeridge, and, in India, M. Chalapathi Rau, Khushwant Singh, R.K. Laxman, Pritish Nandy, Arun Shourie, Jug Suraiya, Mrinal Pande, Shashi Tharoor...Over 300 years since “The Inspector”, the strange consequence is that the good old newspaper column has become one of journalism’s most useful surviving forms. It still gives a writer whose mind can be followed over time. Today, almost everybody with an internet connection has become some version of John Hill, or a columnist. We have columns on Instagram, columns on X, columns as LinkedIn posts, columns delivered via podcasts and columns delivered by people who have discovered with astonishing confidence that breakfast is a suitable time to explain geopolitics. Technology has made publication effortless and made attention scarce. The modern reader has access to more news than any previous reader in history, and good reasons for closing the tab. That is where the columnist becomes useful.In 1922, Walter Lippmann, one of the most important columnists of all time, argued in Public Opinion that citizens rarely encounter the world directly; they encounter pictures of the world constructed by journalists, politicians, institutions and their own assumptions. Lippmann called these mental pictures “the pictures in our heads” (Chapter 1). Most of us have never visited Parliament, sat inside the RBI’s headquarters during a policy meeting, or watched a Cabinet discussion unfold. We depend on accounts. A reporter can tell us what happened, while a columnist can explain what the event means, what history has to do with it, and what the obvious interpretation of the event omits.It was the last part that people like George Orwell focussed on. Orwell’s column, “As I Please”, for Tribune, began on December 3, 1943, and let him wander between and explain politics, books, language, food, war, bureaucracy, national habits and whatever else had irritated or amused him that week. One column might begin with American soldiers in a tobacconist’s shop and move into the oddities of British attitudes towards foreigners; another might discuss handwriting before wandering into the politics of empire. Orwell could write about the large affairs of the state without surrendering the small observations that make political writing enchantingly human and rooted. Orwell’s columns continue to be useful for people like yours truly because his personality is visible inside the argument, in all its raw, unnerving and at times disturbing charm.The freedom columns enjoyed helped to create, over the years, a distinctive kind of literary journalism. A reported article will generally begin with an event and move towards explanation. A column can begin with a man complaining about the weather, a badly written signboard or a book found on a table, and end somewhere entirely unexpected. The form allows for such associations. The best columnists make this look natural and effortless, which is one reason readers underestimate the craft. A good column may contain reporting, history, argument, anecdote, statistics, philosophy, and humour, all while pretending to have been written because the writer happened to have an opinion while sipping morning tea.Walter Winchell, the American gossip columnist and broadcaster who said “today’s gossip is tomorrow’s headline”, turned names, rumours, scandal, and social information into mass entertainment and became one of the most influential media figures of his time. At his peak, his combined print and radio audience was around 50 million people. Politicians feared his mentions, celebrities wanted his attention, and ordinary readers followed the peculiar social weather he developed. Winchell showed us an important fact about columns: the writer can become part of the news system. Once readers begin checking a name every day, the name itself becomes an institution. Khushwant Singh’s “With Malice Towards One and All” is perhaps the great Indian example of the column as a long-running conversation. Singh wrote about politics, books, religion, sex, Delhi, friends, enemies and himself, frequently with the tone of a man who had arrived at the keyboard carrying a joke he was determined to use before somebody stopped him. His columns often closed with a joke sent in by a reader. The boundary between writer and audience became porous. Readers were not merely consumers of the column; they could supply material for the next one, sometimes becoming part of its machinery.But there is some danger here. The columnist who becomes a personality can begin mistaking attention for authority, and journalism has accumulated a grim museum of people who discovered that an irresistible sentence is very tempting when the facts are troublesome. History has many examples of that type too. Westbrook Pegler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist whom many describe as “one of the godfathers of right-wing populism”, turned political invective into a mass-market art, at one point reaching some 12 million readers through 186 newspapers. Then there are the likes of George Sokolsky, who used his syndicated column to wage a relentless ideological war against liberals, trade unions, and the working class; and, back in India, we have plenty of examples of columnists who shocked us with their ideological somersaults and commoditisation of opinion. The history of the column is therefore full of both heroes and frauds, which is probably one reason it continues to be cool.That relationship between the columnist and the reader is easy to underestimate in the age of social media, because modern publishing gives everyone a kind of illusion of immediate intimacy. A reader can reply to a post in ten seconds, and a writer can respond ten seconds later. Yet familiarity takes longer than interaction. A reader needs to encounter a columnist repeatedly before the writer becomes a character in the reader’s life. You learn which subjects make them unreasonable, which ones make them funny, where their knowledge becomes thin and shallow, and where their thinking becomes sharp, and so on. You begin to know when a columnist has spent three weeks thinking about a subject (wink wink), and when the deadline has landed at an inconvenient hour.That continuity is the column’s real advantage. An individual social-media post has the lifespan of whatever has distracted the reader most recently. A column can accumulate an archive, and the archive becomes a record of a mind reading and responding to history, though in a hurry. Read a good columnist over five years, and you discover something more valuable than a series of opinions: you learn a method of thinking. You can disagree with Vaishna Roy about Kashmir, the budget, cinema, cricket or the meaning of democracy and still be interested in how she arrives at the conclusion. The reader develops a relationship with the reasoning itself.That is why the column still serves as one of the small pillars of a society’s conversation with itself.This fact matters at a moment when much of public argument is built to reward instant certainty. Platforms are very good at identifying the sentence that produces outrage, agreement or tribal recognition. They are far less interested in whether the argument stays interesting after the emotional charge wears off. A column gives the writer enough room to build an argument, qualify it, bring in a historical example, admit a weakness and still crack a joke before the reader leaves the page. The good columnist makes complexity pleasurable. That may be one of journalism’s least appreciated services to the public.Frontline has been quite fortunate in this department. The magazine has carried the columns of the likes of E.M.S. Namboodiripad, A.G. Noorani, R.K. Narayan, Vijay Tendulkar, Praful Bidwai, Bhaskar Ghosh, and Jayati Ghosh, and it continues to feature an eclectic line-up of some of the country’s sharpest and wittiest minds even now—writers such as Mani Shankar Aiyar, Aditya Sinha, C.P. Chandrasekhar, Prathyush Parasuraman, Saba Naqvi, Rajeev Bhargava, Mitali Mukherjee, Ajaz Ashraf, Anand Teltumbde, V. Venkatesan, Susan Ram, Jyoti Punwani, and recently the CPJ movement’s popular face, Saurav Das, alongside the newsletters.I hope I’ve made a case here that can nudge you a little to think pleasantly or curiously of the good old column. Please go read them, and do start with Frontline. Start with Mani Shankar Aiyar’s latest piece, a moving one on India-Pakistan ties set against the backdrop of Partition memories.And that reminds me: have you checked out our blogs, which work rather like a readers’ opinion page? Take a look, and send in your entries too.Wishing you a lovely week ahead,Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor,FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS