This is thumb-sucking season in Washington journalism. It is the time when the men who report to the nation the doings and misdoings of its federal government find the springs of factual news all but dried up and are reduced to turning out, in the guise of news, dispatches that in major part are the product of the reporters’ communion with their own imaginative souls. The production of such dispatches is known to the craft as ‘thumb sucking,’ and the products themselves as ‘think pieces.’

Paul W. Ward, “Think Pieces” (The Nation, November 1936)