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Sunday, October 18, 2026

Kristoffer Kitchens

Kristoffer Kitchens

Opinion Columnist

Column: The Contrarian

Public Biography

Kristoffer Kitchens is an opinion columnist for The New York Time5, where he writes “The Contrarian,” a column of variable frequency and considerable length on politics, religion, literature, foreign affairs, and the moral bankruptcy of whatever position happens to enjoy consensus at the time of writing. He has written the column since 2019, though several editors have privately noted that “writes” understates the architectural scale of the undertaking.

Mr. Kitchens was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics — and, by his own account, consumed a quantity of Johnnie Walker Black sufficient to earn a minor in applied distillation. He holds a second degree in Classics from the University of Edinburgh, which he completed largely to win an argument about Thucydides with a fellow columnist at The Spectator. His trajectory from the British left to the American commentariat — via The New Statesman, The Nation, and a series of increasingly public fallings-out with former allies — has been described by colleagues as “ideologically migratory” and by Mr. Kitchens himself as “the natural consequence of everyone else standing still.”

Before joining The New York Time5, Mr. Kitchens served as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, a foreign correspondent for The New Statesman, a literary critic for The Atlantic, and a staff polemicist at Harper’s — a title he invented and the magazine reluctantly adopted. He has filed dispatches from thirty-one countries, including several whose governments subsequently requested he not return. His reporting from Kurdistan, Pyongyang, and a Denny’s in Tulsa have each been cited in academic literature, though in different disciplines.

He is the author of seven books, including God Is Merely Adequate: The Case Against Divine Competence (Twelve Books, 2012), The Prosecutorial Imagination: Why Every Statesman Deserves a Trial (Knopf, 2015), and the memoir Hitch Your Wagon: Drinking, Thinking, and the Refusal to Be Agreeable (Penguin, 2021). His essay collection No One Asked, But: Selected Polemics 2005–2020 was named a New York Times Notable Book and prompted two formal letters of protest from the governments of Belarus and Singapore.

Mr. Kitchens has debated publicly on four continents, including a celebrated 2017 exchange at the Oxford Union in which he argued both sides of the motion and was judged to have won against himself. He speaks fluent English, French, and Greek, and reads German, Arabic, and the room.

He lives in Washington, D.C., in an apartment he describes as “a library that has been lightly colonized by furniture.” He is a devoted smoker and considers the habit a matter of personal sovereignty. He has been married twice, both times to women who found him “exhausting in precisely the way one finds a hurricane exhausting — you cannot look away, and afterwards you must rebuild.”

Selected Columns

  • “The Moral Case for Offending Everyone Equally” (January 2026)
  • “On the Unearned Reverence for Breakfast” (November 2025)
  • “Why I Was Right About the Thing You Are Still Wrong About” (September 2025)
  • “A Brief Meditation on the Cowardice of the Semicolon” (July 2025)
  • “The Appeasement of Pigeons: How Cities Surrendered to Ornithological Fascism” (April 2025)

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