In case you missed it, he’s in Romenesko letters today defending affirmative action:

In this debate between Dave Nakamura and Jeffrey Goldberg — with Jack Shafer and Tim Noah swinging in with thoughtful pieces — its easy to see how, as Shafer puts it eloquently, it is really difficult to have a meaningful conversation about race in this country. I think the problem is not that Jeffrey Goldberg was told that a spot he could have had was being held for a Hispanic. It is perfectly conceivable that this statement was made and the statement was untrue. Managers tend to have difficult times delivering difficult news — like a person not being hired — and there were a number of times where I heard from news assistants at The Times who were told that there was not a chance that they would be hired because they were white. They bought into this convenient explanation, despite a lot of evidence of young white people being hired into our training program, because it