Charles Blow, who spent decades at the New York Times as an op-ed writer, says his passion for the job faded in his final years, leaving him struggling to justify the work “even for pay.”

“My last years at the paper weren’t my most pleasant,” Blow confessed in the debut entry of his new Substack newsletter, “Blow the Stack.”

“My job went from being one I would say, earnestly, I would do for free, to one I struggled to justify doing for pay.” 4

Blow, 55, said his once-fiery commentaries had dwindled into “the zombie thing that came to be published under my name,” a product with “a dwindling trace of my breath in it.”

“It was no longer fully my voice,” he wrote.

But the grind of churning out essays eventually wore him down.

“Frankly, my confidence was injured in that space, and c

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