Gene Weingarten

Gene Norman Weingarten is an American journalist, and former syndicated humor columnist for The Washington Post. He is the only two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.

Weingarten is known for both his serious and humorous work.

Through September 2021, Weingarten's column, "Below the Beltway," was published weekly in The Washington Post magazine and syndicated nationally by The Washington Post Writers Group.

Weingarten also writes Barney & Clyde, a comic strip with illustrations by David Clark.

Gene Norman Weingarten was born in New York City.

He grew up in the southwest Bronx, the son of an accountant who worked as an Internal Revenue Service agent and a schoolteacher.

In 1968, Weingarten graduated from The Bronx High School of Science and attended New York University, where he started as a pre-med student but ended up majoring in psychology.

He was editor of the NYU daily student newspaper, The Heights Daily News. Weingarten left college three credits short of a degree.

In 1972, while still in college, Weingarten's story about gangs in the South Bronx was published as a cover story in New York Magazine.

Weingarten's first newspaper job was with the Albany, New York, Knickerbocker News, an afternoon daily.

In 1977, he went to work at the Detroit Free Press. Weingarten then moved back to New York City to work at The National Law Journal.

From 1981 to 1990, Weingarten was editor of the Miami Herald Sunday magazine, Tropic. In 1984, he hired Dave Barry, giving one of America's best-known humor columnists his big break.

Tropic won two Pulitzer Prizes, including Barry's, during Weingarten's tenure.

In 1984 he created the Herald Hunt, along with Barry and his current editor at the Washington Post, Tom Shroder, whom he refers to frequently in his online chats as "Tom the Butcher".

In 1990, Weingarten was hired by The Washington Post.

Weingarten wrote "Below the Beltway," a weekly humor column for The Washington Post that was nationally syndicated.

Illustrator Eric Shansby contributed drawings to the column, which has been a long-term collaboration over 10 years.

He was diagnosed with what was then a near-fatal infection of Hepatitis C, which led to the publication his first book, 1998's ''The Hypochondriac's Guide To Life.

And Death.''

Weingarten cowrote a series of humor columns in The Washington Post with feminist writer Gina Barreca about the differences between men and women.

However, Weingarten admitted responsibility in 1999, writing, "I run a reader-participation contest every Sunday in The Post. It is called The Style Invitational."

He claimed credit again in 2001, acknowledging that he was editor of The Style Invitational.

Weingarten created and, until 2003, edited The Style Invitational humor contest for The Washington Post.

As part of the contest, he often hid his connection to the Invitational, using the pseudonym "The Czar."

In 2005, one of Weingarten's in-house critiques was leaked online, where he said The Post was suffering a failure of imagination.

Selected passages were later re-posted on his column.

Weingarten hosted a popular Washington Post online chat called "Chatological Humor," formerly known as "Tuesdays with Moron."

Common topics in his online chat include the art of comic strips, analysis of humor, politics, philosophy, medicine, and gender differences.

Many of his columns addressing gender differences have been written in a he-said, she-said style in collaboration with humorist Gina Barreca, his co-author for I'm with Stupid.

It was during one of these chats he coined the phrase "Marrying Irving.".

In 2007, for one of his "Below the Beltway" columns, he humorously enhanced his Wikipedia entry until he was caught and the edits reverted.

In his live online chat on June 22, 2009, Weingarten disclosed that he had accepted a buyout offer from The Washington Post, which meant he was retiring as a longer-form feature writer.

The frequency of his online chat was reduced from weekly to monthly.

His column continued under a contract with The Post, but he stopped contributing feature-length articles.

, he was semi-retired from the paper, working on other projects.

In the September 26, 2021 Washington Post Magazine, he wrote his last humor column titled “The Short Goodbye.”, and in a followup comment, stated that he was not retiring, just discontinuing his regular column.

However, Weingarten announced via Twitter on December 8, 2021, that he and the Post could not come to terms on a new contract, and he was no longer writing for them.

His final story was "A Dog’s Life: Why are so many people so cruel to their dogs? My search to understand a hidden scourge".

Weingarten is a self-acknowledged hypochondriac.

His last chat at the Post was November 3, 2020, where he revealed that Chatalogical Humor had been cancelled, partially or wholly due to his public criticism of the Post's rollout of their new online chat software the previous week.