Times Columnists Admit Their Mistakes

After a woman accused then-Sen. Al Franken of sexual harassment in 2017 amid the #MeToo movement, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg called for his resignation. (Franken eventually quit as the pressure built.) Nearly five years later, Goldberg thinks she got it wrong. "I regret calling for Franken to resign without a Senate investigation," she writes. Franken was entitled to at least that, and while he may have had to resign anyway, "it wouldn't have seemed that he'd been railroaded," writes Goldberg. "Due process may not be convenient, but there’s no legitimate way around it." Read her full essay. She's one of several Times columnists writing "I Was Wrong" essays on Thursday. Others include:

• Inflation: Financial columnist Paul Krugman writes that he was way too "relaxed" about inflation in early 2021 and about how a government relief plan could make it worse. The "whole experience has been a lesson in humility," he writes. In "the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, standard economic models performed pretty well, and I felt comfortable applying those models in 2021. But in retrospect I should have realized that, in the face of the new world created by COVID-19, that kind of extrapolation wasn't a safe bet." Read the full essay.
• Trump voters: Conservative columnist Bret Stephens writes that he missed the boat on supporters of Donald Trump in 2015. He dismissed them as "moral ignoramuses" and Trump himself as a bigot. But what "Trump's supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo," writes Stephens. Their anger was real, and it was potent. "I was blind to this," he writes. Read the full essay.

(More Al Franken stories.)