Meghan Daum is used to being controversial. A columnist for the Los Angeles Times for more than a decade, Daum has tackled big culture-war subjects, from the right to die to the commodification of feminism to trigger warnings on campuses. But over the past few years, almost so gradually that you wouldn’t notice it, Daum has gone from controversial to problematic.
“I’ve been saying controversial things since my mid-20s,” Daum tells me. “That’s how I was able to carve out a career. Back then, that was the whole idea. It’s what a public thinker was supposed to do.”
That, however, has changed. And while there’s still clearly a market for controversial ideas (my own continued employment being proof), the backlash for expressing those ideas has grown by several orders of magnitude. Before the internet, before social media, a column might inspire a few irate letters to the editor. Today, it can mean thousands of comments and tweets, and the rage is more often directed at the author personally than the ideas he or she raises.
