A lesson in wrongology

Here are the words you never thought you would read in The New York Times, at least as we have known our newspaper of record since the beginning of the Trump era: “I was wrong.” And yet there they were this past July, not once but many times over, as eight of the Times’s star columnists participated in an interactive feature under that title, each of them professing to have seen the error of his or her ways in some significant—or, more often, insignificant—respect. It was almost enough to make me think that I had been wrong in supposing that the assiduous propagandists of the post-Rutenbergian Times had chosen to reject traditional news-and-comment for ideology at least partly as an insurance policy against ever having to admit to error—since the regnant ideology currently espoused by the international...