Those who read Sunday op-eds, and who’ll read think pieces posted online, will know that all that glisters is not gold, and that some writers are consistently uninteresting. In the spirit of disinterested benevolence I propose a metric (which for self-interested reasons I’ll call the Buckley Measure) to help separate the bores (0 Buckleys) from the consistently interesting (10 Buckleys). Let the entirely unreadable Kathleen Parker = 0 Buckleys, and (can’t read beyond the first sentence) Ramesh Ponnuru = 1 Buckleys, and St. Augustine = 10 Buckleys, and then rank people in-between.

Leave off the TAS writers, all of whom are consistently 9 Buckleys, or one short of sanctity. My problem is that I can’t think of too many people who rank above 4-5 Buckleys, and most are lower than that.

I note that it is contrary to the rules of the game to rank its author.