James Taranto is an American journalist. He is editorial features editor for The Wall Street Journal, in charge of the newspaper's op-ed pages, both print and digital. He was formerly editor of its online editorial page OpinionJournal.com. and joined the newspaper's editorial board in 2007. Taranto wrote the daily online column Best of the Web Today, which typically included political, social, and media commentary in the form of conventional opinion writing as well as puns and other forms of wordplay and other recurring themes on news stories crowdsourced from readers. His final column was published on January 3, 2017, after which he became editorial features editor. Before joining the Wall Street Journal in 1996, Taranto spent five years as an editor at City Journal. He has also worked for the Heritage Foundation and Reason magazine. He pursued a degree in journalism at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) but "never bothered to graduate" after "conflict with teachers and professors".