THE DRAMA OF THE GIFTED CHILD: NYT columnist Bret Stephens quits Twitter, reports critic to his boss for calling him a “bedbug.”

If you wanted to get ugly and compare someone to vermin, “bedbug” isn’t the insult you’d choose. Stephens must realize that, but it’s easier to pretend that Karpf had crossed some sort of line than that he himself did.

The most interesting part of the clip, by the way, is how he rationalizes cc’ing Karpf’s provost. He wasn’t trying to get him in trouble, he claims, he just thinks employers have a right to know how their employees are engaging with the broader public. Laying aside the fact that that does sound like him trying to get Karpf in trouble, where does it leave us with the Times’s complaint yesterday about dastardly right-wing operatives combing through reporters’ social media posts to find embarrassing things they’ve said in the past? if Karpf’s boss should know what his professors are saying to people, shouldn’t Dean Baquet and the Sulzbergers know what their journalists are saying? You can answer yes or no in both cases but it has to be the same answer to each, right?

Related: The New York Times Should Stop Whining. “I think it’s a bad idea for either side to rummage through old social-media postings and writings looking for firing offenses. It’s an inherently punitive project, and often an unfair one (no one is the sum of their tweets). But the rules of this game were established by the Left long ago. It should either change them — or stop whining.”

Exit quote: “What gets lost here, and maybe not to Bret Stephens, is that the prof and the pile on was from the left. Begging to be liked by the left gets you to the place of Bret Stephens. Please don’t compare me to a bedbug, come meet the wife.”