There’s a new columnist at the New York Times. The Jewish name begins with a “G.” The “G” is a color. It ends with a typical Jewish name suffix. Is it…is it…Goldberg? Yes, it’s Michelle Goldberg. My mother’s maiden name was Goldberg. What are the chances? Slim. It’s a very common name, but getting the opportunity to write as a columnist on the Times’ soapbox is uncommon.

Gail Collins does a question and answer column to introduce Goldberg, which isn’t the sort of thing normally done or, to be frank, necessary. If someone hasn’t sufficiently established their bona fides to stand on their soapbox, why would they get the nod? And it’s not as if Goldberg hasn’t done her share of writing. Heck, her name has even appeared in the august pages of SJ. But what niche will she fill at the Times?

Gail: Well, you’ve picked quite a moment. What’s your take on Donald Trump? I don’t mean “Are you happy he’s president?” How do you see your role as a columnist — articulating a national cry of pain? Re-evaluating him on the basis of what happens each week?

The only unacceptable answer is “Crawling under the bed and assuming a fetal position.” It won’t fill 850 words — trust me, I know.

Michelle: Remember a few weeks before the election, when Hillary Clinton said, “I’m the last thing standing between you and the apocalypse?” I think she was basically right. Part of the job of a columnist, as I see it, is to bear witness to a nearly inconceivable civic disaster, and part of it is to grope toward an understanding of how it happened and how to move forward.

“Bear witness” is a curious choice of phrase, and since words and phrases are a writer’s stock in trade, one would be fair to assume she chose it purposefully. It’s a phrase taken from psychology:

Bearing witness is a term that, used in psychology, refers to sharing our experiences with others, most notably in the communication to others of traumatic experiences. Bearing witness is a valuable way to process an experience, to obtain empathy and support, to lighten our emotional load via sharing it with the witness, and to obtain catharsis.

She further adopts Hillary Clinton as savior from the apocalypse, the end of times. Dramatic stuff, provided one doesn’t mind Goldberg’s admitted bias. Then again, one can never get enough columnists dedicated to the Times “Trump is the devil” agenda.

But Goldberg comes to her column tainted. In her book review of Vanessa Grigoriadis’ Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus,, a subject discussed here on occasion, Goldberg ripped Grigoriadis a new one.

There’s no consensus about what constitutes sexual assault on campus, how common it is or how it should be prevented. In this confusing climate, a cleareyed elucidation of the murky campus rape phenomenon would be enormously welcome. “Blurred Lines” aims to be that book, but is too sloppy with the facts to succeed. ***

Occasionally she makes baffling errors that threaten to undermine her entire book. ***

Other inaccuracies are smaller, but still jarring. ***

It concludes:

But if you’re going to challenge people’s preconceptions, you have to have your facts straight. “Blurred Lines” gives readers too many reasons not to trust it, even when perhaps they should.

Goldberg’s book review is then followed by a couple corrections,* essentially saying that everything Goldberg criticized was wrong.

Despite the fact that the Times might have done better with a slightly less politically aligned columnist, Goldberg has written some very insightful stuff in the past.

It’s easy to sympathize with the young feminists’ desire to combine maximal sexual freedom with maximal sexual safety. Yet there are contradictions between a feminism that emphasizes women’s erotic agency and desire to have sex on equal terms with men, and a feminism that stresses their erotic vulnerability and need to be shielded from even the subtlest forms of coercion. The politics of liberation are an uneasy fit with the politics of protection. A rigid new set of taboos has emerged to paper over this tension, often expressed in a therapeutic language of trauma and triggers that everyone is obliged to at least pretend to take seriously.

Which Goldberg will show up to write her column is unclear. Is it the biased Goldberg, who proclaims her dedication to bearing witness to the end of times? Is it the critical Goldberg who throws stones from very glass houses? Is it the thoughtful Goldberg who admits her empathy, but can also admit the ironies that go along with untenable positions?

We shall see. Now, if the Times decides its G-Spot still needs massaging, I’m sitting by the phone as I type.

*Boom.

Correction: September 17, 2017 
A review on Page 11 this weekend about “Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power and Consent on Campus,” by Vanessa Grigoriadis, refers incorrectly to her reporting on the issues. She does in fact write about Department of Justice statistics that say college-age women are less likely than nonstudent women of the same age to be victims of sexual assault; it is not the case that Grigoriadis was unaware of the department’s findings. In addition, the review describes incorrectly Grigoriadis’s presentation of statistics from the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. She showed that there is disagreement over whether the data are sound; it is not the case that she gave the reader “no reason to believe” the statistics are wrong.

Correction: September 18, 2017 
An earlier version of this review misspelled the given name of the top civil rights official at the Department of Education. She is Candice E. Jackson, not Candace.

The New York Times used to have editors, whose job it was to make sure this didn’t happen.