Public Biography
Jorge Will is an opinion columnist for The New York Time5, where he writes “First Principles,” a twice-weekly column on governance, civic virtue, and the constitutional implications of whatever happened to catch his attention that morning. He has written the column since 2017, and it has never once been described as “breezy.”
Mr. Will was educated at Trinity College, where he read Philosophy and Classics, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he completed a second degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University, where his dissertation — “The Madisonian Temperament: Deliberation, Restraint, and the Architecture of Republican Governance” — was praised by his adviser as “the most elaborately footnoted document I have encountered outside of case law.” He subsequently completed postdoctoral work at the Hoover Institution, though colleagues note he appeared to have arrived fully formed.
Before entering journalism, Mr. Will served briefly as a legislative aide to Senator Gordon Allott of Colorado, an experience he describes as “an education in the distance between the Federalist Papers and the appropriations process.” He joined National Review in 1973, moved to The Washington Herald-Tribune in 1975, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1978 for a series of columns arguing that the designated hitter rule represented the most significant erosion of American institutional norms since Reconstruction.
Mr. Will is the author of nine books, including The Pursuit of Virtue in a Vulgar Age (Free Press, 2008), The Geometry of the Infield: Baseball and the Structure of Democratic Life (Simon & Schuster, 2013), and Toward a More Perfect Syntax: The Decline of the American Sentence (Knopf, 2021). His most recent work, The Founders Would Have Walked: Why Baseball Is the Constitution in Cleats (Harper, 2025), was reviewed in The Wall Street Journal as “the definitive statement by a man who has been making the same statement, definitively, for forty years.”
He is known for his bow ties, which he has worn daily since 1971 and regards not as an affectation but as “a small act of civilizational maintenance.” He owns approximately one hundred and forty, organized by occasion, season, and the severity of the column he intends to write. He has been photographed in a necktie exactly once, in 1969, and considers it a youthful indiscretion.
Mr. Will lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland, with his wife, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown, and a library he describes as “adequate.” He attends between thirty and forty baseball games per season and has kept a personal scorecard for every game since 1962, a collection now housed in a temperature-controlled room he does not call a shrine but which his children do.
Selected Columns
- “There Is No Crying in Baseball: A Reaffirmation of First Principles” (March 2026)
- “The Infield Fly Rule and the Limits of Executive Discretion” (February 2026)
- “On the Moral Seriousness of the Bow Tie” (January 2026)
- “What Madison Would Have Made of the Seventh-Inning Stretch” (October 2025)
- “The Suburbanization of the American Vocabulary” (August 2025)
- “Against Enthusiasm: A Defense of Measured Appreciation” (May 2025)