MG: That’s funny—in my mind, one of the best parts about being a columnist would be being spared the deadline-a-minute pressure.

GC: Well, you like a mixture. When there’s really not much going on, like now, you can be planning a column days in advance. But just the fact of deadlines is glorious. I love having deadlines. When I was an editor, I thought, well, of course, I’ll write all the time; I’ll just write on my own schedule whenever I get inspired. And I barely wrote anything. I was very interested to find that if I wasn’t forced to write by somebody saying, “You’ve got fifteen minutes,” then nothing would ever get done.

MG: Do you ever miss editing?

GC: No! No, it was a wonderful experience—it was the best thing to have had a chance to do—but I was always determined that it wasn’t the thing I was going to do forever, that there would be an end to it.

MG: What do you see to be the overarching role of a columnist?

GC: What you really have to do is find a new way of looking at something people have already looked at. But also to bring new stuff to the table—so when people come away from your column, they have new thoughts and new insights and new information, really, about what’s happening. All of the columnists on the op-ed page of the Times are also reporters. Paul Krugman, sure, has never been a reporter, but Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, which I guess is even better than being a reporter—emphasis on the “better”! But everybody goes out and reports. Just sort of saying your opinion is not enough. That doesn’t move it. It’s a much broader challenge than just, “Well, here’s my take on the news.”

MG: Do you see that role changing, now or in the future, particularly given the proliferation of opinion writing on the Web?

GC: The column as we do it now is something that will probably die off with my generation. Currently, the critical thing you have to have to do a column—besides the general reporting and writing—is the ability to be able to deliver exactly 800 words twice a week, on deadline. On the Web, though, there’s no reason for that. The constraints don’t exist. So the next generation of columnists will be a totally different breed than we are. I don’t know exactly what they’ll look like—I mean, you can see hints now of what it will be—but they’re going to be a totally different thing.

MG: Do you ever find the print constraints limiting?

GC: Sometimes, in a perfect life, you’d rather have 1,000 words or 1,200 words. But the great thing about the 800-words-twice-a-week is it’s really an incredible discipline. It forces you to think in a very restricted way, and to keep your thoughts small and focused. No matter how large your concept is, you’ve got to get it into the 800-word-thought thing, along with a couple of anecdotes and quotes and a little humor, perhaps. In fact, I find that even when I write books, I write them in little chunks. The chapters aren’t 800 words—I’ll go on for two or three pages!—but the chapters on all the books I’ve done have been a little subhead and then a few pages. And if you don’t have any of those restraints, you’ve got to invent some of your own, somehow; otherwise, it’s all over the place. That’s going to be the trick for the next generation.

MG: What do you most admire in the work of other columnists?

GC: Maureen is a stupendous reporter. She works really, really, really hard, and she mines the territory that she’s writing about with great skill and great effort. And, of course, Nick—a lot of people go to Darfur or somewhere as reporters, but he brings this personal perspective, and he brings his voice, and he brings the kind of chatty way that he can write about the most extraordinary things, which just draws people into it. And Tom Friedman is, I think, just a genius at taking very large thoughts—and coming up with large thoughts in the first place—and then running with them for a long time, developing them over several columns. That takes a really special talent, because otherwise it’s like you’re being hit in the head over and over again.

Tom is also the most positive columnist I’ve ever seen—in that he just will not write about something without coming to some remedy. Which was particularly admirable when he wrote about the Middle East, where it’d be very easy just to say, “These people are all crazy! Stop it!” He always had something: they can do this, and next they can do that. He never succumbed to the very easy “they’re all nuts and I’m just shocked by them all” kind of thing.

And David Brooks—David and Nick I hired when I was editor; that was my major contribution to the editorial page, I think—David just has so many interests. He is just so smart, and he’s also, for our purposes, the closest thing you can have to a Republican who liberal Democrats really love—or at least feel that if they had dinner with him, he would understand their point of view. We’ve been having conversations back and forth on the Web, and that’s been a lot of fun because he’s also really funny. And we’re going to do more of those in the new year.

MG: Do those happen through e-mail exchanges?