Come Let Us Reason Together

Why do you insist on making them mad?

As you may know, the New York Times has not had an ombudsman since 2017. But so many readers responded to our recent story about two American families — one that moved from a red state to a blue state, another that went from a blue state to a red state — and what that says about our divided country that we have decided to address these responses in an Editors’ Note. (I use “we” in the loosest sense because, though I have written for the Times on a number of occasions, mostly about the new wave in ceramic arts, I am not officially employed by the paper, though it remains a dream of mine.)

The overwhelming majority of respondents felt as if the story drew a misleading equivalence between the situation of the Bremners, who moved from upstate New York to North Dakota, and the Fuenteses, who moved from Tennessee to Massachusetts.