A columnist and the balance between seeing the world and changing it

In most newspapers, the news, entertainment, sports and features pages are where you get to see and understand what is going on in the world.

The opinion page is where you get to consider how to change it.

I am reminded of this distinction after a conversation with syndicated columnist Keith Raffel this week. Raffel — an attorney, tech pioneer, novelist and senior fellow at Harvard University — is one of six Creators Syndicate commentators whose views we publish regularly on the Daily Herald Opinion page. I spoke with him via Zoom as a book of his columns is launching titled “The Raffel Ticket: Betting on America.” A video of the interview is available at www.dailyherald.com.

One of the dominant themes of our conversation centered around the desire to change the world, and it was fascinating to me to consider how Raffel’s remarkably diverse career path has brought him to newspapers to pursue that goal. He is, after all, the founder of an early cloud computing company with a range of technology experience that includes customer service software and DNA modeling.

I asked him about that seeming irony. We generally assume the world is moving in the opposite direction — from analog to digital, as it were, rather than the other way around. Interestingly, Raffel, now a Harvard University fellow, said newspaper column writing was a more natural transition for his ideas, because the newspaper column allows him to reach “many thousands of readers” without having to do extensive marketing and similar ancillary work.

“I write the column, I send it off to my editor and to you (newspaper editors) and you run it … I can just send it off. I spend two days a week writing the column … then I can spend the other five days devoted to my teaching and advising responsibilities and my novel writing,” he said.

And he noted that he was drawn to column writing by the opportunity to express his views to readers in a more direct way. That motivation to influence the world is evident in many of the transitions of his career — starting with frustrations as a young attorney working in Washington, D.C., to a brief stint as an unsuccessful candidate for Congress, to his work in highly consequential technology to novel writing and, perhaps especially, his work with students at Harvard.

While he has written often about his faith in America’s youth, he also noted a concern that he too often finds students heavily focused on career and money-making goals without great concern for how they can make things better.

“You have four years of your life where all of the world’s knowledge is spread before you …,” he said. “The ages 18 to 22 are the ages in which you should figure out your place in the world, not only in how you want to support yourself, but how you can make the world a better place.”

It is, in short, one thing — and an important one — to see and experience the world, but another just as important to try to influence it for the better. For Raffel the two objectives blend somewhat when he realizes that novel writing allows him the “almost divine” opportunity to get lost in inventing characters and situations while column writing gives him that clear path to directly express his views on the subjects he cares about.

That is a balancing act, it occurs to me, that’s not just worth aspiring to but also is evidenced in the functions and inherent nature of the daily newspaper.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald.