The closing date has now passed for university students thinking of putting their hat in the ring for a once in a lifetime, all expenses paid "potentially life-transforming experience" with one of the world's great newspaper columnists, writes David Cohen.
Entries closed late Thursday for the unique promotion the New York Times has been running, Win a Trip with Nick Kristof, in which at least one lucky student will be chosen to accompany the paper's op-ed commentator - on an overseas trip!
Not just any old trip, either, but one involving exposure to actual people who live in world's poorer regions, as the rugged Mr Kristof himself explained in March:
"Over the next month, I'll be holding a contest to find a university studentor two to accompany me on a reporting trip to the developing world. I'm not sure where yet, and that will depend partly on what's in the news at the time. But to give you a sense of the kind of travel I'm thinking of, the possibilities include a jaunt through rural Burundi and Rwanda in central Africa, or an odyssey from the coast of Cameroon inland to the heart of the Central African Republic."
Don't expect comfort so much as diarrhoea. We'll be on the go from dawn to late at night every day, interviewing anybody from peasants to presidents (usually the peasants are more interesting). We might visit a clinic, an AIDS program, a school, a factory."
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the depth of professional jealousy that exists in some American journalistic circles, not everyone seems to be taking the competition as seriously as Mr Kristof. In an online article published in Slate.com, the writer Michael Kinsley even went as far as
suggesting that the enterprise was really something of a feeble joke.
Has the man no shame?
