The formerliberal pundit-in-residence for the Times' "Week in Review" section, Rich preaches to the choir about American politics and its' current "editor-at-large" at New York Magazine.

Frank earned his first byline in the New York Times when he wrote a piece for the op-ed section as a student at Harvard. The opinion editor of the Crimson while in college, he joined the New York Times in 1980 as the paper's chief theater critic, quickly earning the moniker "The Butcher of Broadway" for the acidity of his reviews and his ability to kill a show. But Rich's opinions weren't uniformly harsh: He also championed the work of a number of emerging playwrights, helping to draw attention to the early work of David Henry Hwang, Tony Kushner and August Wilson.

In 1993, Rich relinquished his theater critic gig to serve as an opinion columnist. He spent nearly twenty years writing long op-ed pieces for the Sunday "Week in Review" section in which he championed the liberal cause du jour, lambasting perennial bogeymen like George Bush, Bill O'Reilly, and Mel Gibson, and extrapolating wildly to prove some overambitious, tenuous thesis about American social or political culture. However, in 2011 Rich left his cushy post with the Times for New York Magazine.

Rich was previously married to Gail Winston. Since 1991, he's been the husband of novelist and fellow Times writer Alex Witchel (who were turned into characters for the 2005 John Malkovich movie Color Me Kubrick). [Image via Getty]