New York Times columnist Nicholas “Nick” Kristof started the New Year with a blog post announcing the removal of his middle initial (“D.”) from his byline, a letter he said added “authority and gravitas” when he was just a wee lad at Harvard. Now, he writes, “In the Internet age, the middle initial conveys a formality that is a bit of a barrier to our audience. It feels a bit ostentatious, even priggish,” like the pinstripe suit he used to wear to work.
The real question is why anyone would care, which Kristof wondered aloud to mass response on a popular micro-blogging platform, valued at tens of billions of dollars, used for broadcasting personal minutiae online. #2014
