Congrats to Ross

Ross Douthat, as we all know by now, has been chosen to take up residence on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. This is excellent news: Ross is a smart, young conservative who also happens to be a very good writer and capable of crafting cogent, interesting arguments (and he’s a movie nut, to boot). His (and Reihan’s!) Grand New Party is as good a book as I’ve seen laying out the problems with the Republican party and some practical ways to try and fix it. All of this is a ambling way of saying: Don’t turn into the rest of the NYT’s op-ed page, Ross. Via Rod, George Packer briefly describes the problems with his new coworkers:

Dowd publishes a column of inadvertent self-parody whose subject is Michelle Obama’s arms, and whose sum total of reporting is a conversation in a Washington taxi with her fellow columnist David Brooks. Kristof continues to call necessary attention to chronic, less-noticed disasters, but he does it more and more by making himself the hero of a moral drama and, in a recent series of columns from Darfur, insulting his readers with the suggestion that they’re too shallow to read on unless he bribes them with celebrity gossip. [Frank] Rich never challenges his own side, and the result is a weekly display of rhetorical bravura and cheap shots. Bob Herbert has one tone of voice, and as often as outrage is called for, it’s also tiresome. Only Brooks and Krugman seem to be registering the earthquake in a meaningful way, asking themselves difficult questions on a regular basis and struggling out in the open with the answers, which is why the page is at its best on Friday.

I just hope this new move doesn’t restrict his film and television writing; his post on the two versions of “Lost” nailed my feelings on the show in a way I’d never quite been able to articulate. And his piece on the return of the paranoid style in film is excellent (so excellent, in fact, that I cited it in my review of “Race to Witch Mountain”).