ORIGIN STORY

Ta-Nehisi Coates and the temptations of narrative.

-  PARUL SEHGAL

It is a truth only fitfully acknowledged that whom the gods wish to destroy, they first give an opinion column. "A live coffin," a former newspaper colleague of mine once called hers. (She quit.) Such a space seems an impossible remit, created to coax out vague, vatic pronouncements as the writer, mind wrung dry of ideas, sets about a weary pantomime of thinking and feeling, outrage and offense.

Few writers have seemed as aware of the hazards of professional opinionmongering as Ta-Nehisi Coates. "Columns are where great journalists go to die," he once wrote. "Unmoored from the rigors of actually making calls and expending shoe leather, the reporterturned-columnist often begins churning out musings originated over morning coffee and best left there." And yet few writers have been pressed so needily into service as pundit, as prophet. Coates was a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author of a memoir of his childhood, "The Beautiful Struggle" (2008), when he exploded into the public consciousness with "The Case for Reparations," a 2014 article for that magazine, which documented the long history and devastating reach of racist housing policies, and argued for restitution to the descendants of enslaved Black Americans.