When John Tierney wrote a cover story for the New York Times Magazine titled "Recycling Is Garbage," the reaction was fierce.
One critic sent him a box filled with garbage.
The 51-year-old reporter will have a prime opportunity to keep stirring things up after being named yesterday to the newspaper's op-ed page, succeeding William Safire as a columnist. A self-described libertarian, Tierney has mused about the privatization of Central Park (complete with turnstiles) and attacked commuter rail under the headline: "Amtrak Must Die."
"I don't like to make people angry for the sake of being angry, but I want to challenge people's assumptions," he says. As for his political views, "my gut feeling is that most people outside the Beltway can solve most of their problems without guidance from us."
The Times has been grooming Tierney for years. A veteran of the old Washington Star, he began writing the "Big City" column in 1994 -- first for the Sunday magazine, then twice a week for the Metro section -- before moving back to Washington in 2002. Tierney was handed the paper's campaign digest column, "Political Points," last year.
Editorial Page Editor Gail Collins says she likes Tierney's "contrarian" approach. She says he was not tapped to fill a "conservative" slot -- the only other columnist on the right is former Weekly Standard writer David Brooks -- but to broaden the "mix" of the generally liberal opinion pages.
"He's just a very interesting thinker," Collins says. "He thinks outside the box, has a very distinct worldview and I think he'll be a lot of fun. . . . He'll be writing about stuff in ways that no one else on our team does."
Tierney has pulled his share of stunts as a columnist. When Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rosie O'Donnell were attacking then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani for not allowing the homeless to sleep on New York's sidewalks, Tierney donned scruffy clothes and tried to sleep outside their homes (a security guard banished him from O'Donnell's gates). To test the reaction of cabbies, he once put on a ski mask, told them he had just robbed a bank and asked them to step on it (no one much cared). After New York was dubbed the nation's rudest city, he went to Nashville and posed as a blind panhandler with a rap-blaring boombox to see who would give him money (few did). But even Tierney's prank columns made serious points that brought them "closer to a series of briefs for laissez faire," the liberal American Prospect said in a profile. "In his breezy attacks on rent control, his advocacy of school-voucher programs and workfare, and his conceit that norms can be bought, he sides again and again with the free market and personal initiative." That, by the way, included a defense of strip clubs.
This piece last year, about his migration to Chevy Chase, captures the flavor of Tierney's philosophy:
"I don't like even my own car. For most of my adult life I didn't even own one. I lived in Manhattan and pitied the suburbanites driving to the mall. When I moved to Washington and joined their ranks, I picked a home in smart-growth heaven, near a bike path and a subway station. Most days I skate or bike downtown, filled with righteous Schadenfreude as I roll past drivers stuck in traffic. The rest of the time I usually take the subway, and on the rare day I go by car, I hate the drive.
"But I no longer believe that my tastes should be public policy. I've been converted by a renegade school of thinkers you might call the autonomists, because they extol the autonomy made possible by automobiles."
"When I first knew him he was a very left-wing guy," says Forbes FYI Editor Christopher Buckley, who met Tierney at the Yale Daily News and is co-author of their novel "God Is My Broker: A Monk Tycoon Reveals the 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth."
"But he was too bright to remain so. He was affronted early on by the featherbedding he saw in unions. Now he's known as a house conservative at the New York Times."
Tierney has reported from six continents, including a stint in the Times's Baghdad bureau, and has written for magazines ranging from the Atlantic and Esquire to Rolling Stone, Vogue and Science, where he was a staff member for five years. The question now is how he adapts his style to the rarefied world of the op-ed page.
