Nicholas Kristof Departs New York Times As He Weighs A Run For Governor Of Oregon

Ted Johnson
·2 min read
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Nicholas Kristof, who has written a column for The New York Times for the past two decades, has left his post as he weighs whether to run for governor of Oregon next year.

Kristof filed a statement of organization of a campaign committee with the Oregon secretary of state. If he decides to run, he would run as a Democrat. The current governor, Kate Brown, also a Democrat, is not running due to term limits.

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Kristof has been on leave since June, when he told the company that he was considering a run in his native state, the Times reported.

He wrote in a note on his departure, “This has been my dream job, even with malaria, a plane crash in Congo and periodic arrests abroad for committing journalism. Yet here I am, resigning — very reluctantly.”

At a time when political opinion has flooded the marketplace, Kristof’s columns have stood out for their focus on human rights, health and global politics. But he’s also weighed in on the state of polarization in the U.S. The last column he published, in June, focused on a Black musician who hangs out with Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis so that he “chips away at their racism.”

He wrote, “There’s a reason we try to solve even intractable wars by getting the parties to sit in the same room: It beats war. If we believe in engagement with North Koreans and Iranians, then why not with fellow Americans?”

Kristof, 62, won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work. In 1990 he won for reporting on the Tiananmen Square student movement, in a prize that he shared with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn. He won another Pulitzer in 2006 for his columns on the crisis in Darfur.

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