Now that I am respectably of age, I carry my license and its angstful photograph proudly. I no longer look demurely away from the beer list. I draw on woefully inadequate notions of winemaking to make remarks about growing conditions in various French provinces.

Yet I'm still amused by the authority of that scrappy headshot surrounded by a few lines of text--an authority that might seem misplaced were it not so ubiquitous. This combination of facts and picture have become a widely accepted way to maximize security and minimize trouble.

And a drivers' license is far from the only place this works. Consider this column, for instance. I can't promise facts; but you need only read a few lines of text before, gracing the page, is my grainy glamour shot. Beside it, my name and title proxy for zipcode (60093), hometown (Winnetka), birthdate (Sept. 3).

It's not unlike entering a bar: pleasantries exchanged at the door, identification checked, then the coast is clear and the real business (of providing your daily metaphor) can begin. The Crimson's decision to insert pictures of the editorial writers is, it seems, not simply of human or visual interest. It's a brilliant reminder of the fundamental social contract into which we have entered as writers of opinion, that is to say, facts skewed, perhaps beyond recognition--an anonymity checked by our (newly enlarged) photographs.

Perhaps it's about accountability. We, who have the freedom to skew our stories--needn't you see our faces? Needn't you look into our eyes as we tell you why Bush's tax plan isn't going to work or why we're ready to single-handedly reclaim the Alaskan refuge? Are you checking for falsehood, listening for trembling in our voice?

Or are you interested--curious in the personality behind the words? Perhaps the photographs are simply a sign of the cult of personality with which editorial remarks are typically infused. When we are writing as editorial individuals (for there is no photograph of the Ed Board writing the group's opinion) we are unique in a way that no individual reporter, striving for objectivity, can claim to be. So it seems fair enough to bring our bodies into it.

Though (I warn you) this narrative authority may be misplaced. I have no hope of objectivity and am no font of knowledge; my words are already typecast. My theory precedes my education (putting the Barthes before the course). I am continually dragged down by the undertone.

At the same time, I have found this accountability to be hardly a loss; it gives editorial words a force not always possible in objective writing. The individuated tone becomes confidential, confessional and biased by turns. And what credibility I have is not unconnected to my grainy face mediating the transference of these words, not immediately separable from the formalisms of identity and of recognition.