John Wilcock

ANYBODY WHO HAS EVER edited a paper will tell you that virtually every potential contributor wants to be a columnist. And why not? Here’s a job in which, to a large extent, you can write whatever you want, whenever you want, unconstrained by what newsmen used to term “the today angle.” In other words, the column can be a riff on current events, musings on a historical incident, or it might even be about the exploits of your cats.

In the case of Jon Carroll, who’s been writing an every-weekday column for 15 years and is about to be honored by his peers, his cats (Archie and Bucket) have popped up frequently enough for them to be as familiar to his readers as some of the other themes ranging from word pronunciation and “failure” to violin playing or camel riding.