READING: JOHN WARNER: David Brooks Sucks
What can I say? I do not see how anyone sane can disagree. Shame on the "New York Times" for having given him a sinecure-platform for so long. Shame on Yale for giving him yet another sinecure...
What can I say? I do not see how anyone sane can disagree. Shame on the New York Times for having given him a sinecure-platform for so long. Shame on Yale for giving him yet another sinecure. Shame on the Atlantic Monthly too…
John Warner: David Brooks Sucks <https://biblioracle.substack.com/p/david-brooks-sucks-this-is-who-should>: ‘After 22 years, David Brooks has announced his intention to stop sucking at the New York Times and instead to go suck as a staff writer at The Atlantic and also to suck at Yale University where he will be the first presidential senior fellow in the university’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. He will also be doing a podcast at The Atlantic underwritten by Yale University….
A reason David Brooks sucks related to the first reason: He’s a coward.
Bill Kristol… now sounds like the leader of the Trump resistance, decrying elite failure to confront an authoritarian. Meanwhile, consider Brooks’ response in the aftermath of the murder of Renee Good in his weekly confab with Jonathan Capehart on the PBS NewsHour…. Brooks immediately invokes a classic sociological study in which students at Princeton and Dartmouth were shown film of a football game between the two schools and the students were more likely to record penalty infractions against their rival…. Brooks… distance[s] himself from having to make a judgment and instead mak[es]… a banal observation…. His own opinion?: “As to the events of what actually happened, I’m not going to render a judgment on what happened, because we’re going to have an investigation. I will leave it to them. And I hope Minnesota has full information to do the investigation…” The man sees footage of a murder and can’t manage to say so. It’s almost pathological. To my knowledge and after much searching I cannot find any public comment from David Brooks about the murder of Alex Pretti.
Another reason David Brooks sucks: He makes shit up.
From the beginning, David Brooks has been full of shit, allowed to repeatedly Malcolm Gladwell stray bits of academic research into grand theories of society that get turned into conventional political wisdom…. In 2004, Sasha Issenberg walked through Brooks’ claims in an Atlantic article “One Nation, Slightly Divisible” and found them to be largely inventions not grounded in reality. When confronted by Issenberg, Brooks accused Issenberg of approaching his critique as a dishonest reporter and that Brooks’ work holds up because it “rings true.”… Issenberg captures the crux of the problem: “By holding himself to a rings-true standard, Brooks acknowledges that all he does is present his readers with the familiar and ask them to recognize it…. Essentially, Brooks set out to be Tom Wolfe, but having neither Wolfe’s panache nor his eye, nor the courage to present his work as “this is what I saw and believe” as Wolfe did, Brooks instead substitutes “this is what my research and reporting say is true.” He’s a bastardized version of the New Journalists he idolized. In 2015, David Zweig tried to track down a Brooks reference to a Gallup survey from The Road to Character: “In 1950, the Gallup Organization asked high school seniors if they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2005, and this time it wasn’t 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent.” When Zweig went down the Brooks bullshit rabbit hole he found him quoting a different year to Bill Maher (1998) and a third reference in Brooks’ The Social Animal to the 2nd survey being in the late 1980s. An email to Brooks’ publicist said that despite the study being not by Gallup and not saying what Brooks’ said it said, “the sociological trend is accurate.” Making stuff up and then covering with vague references to research and data is the consistent hallmark of his work.…
I don’t know the man. He could be a great guy, good tipper, kind to animals, always willing to lend an ear to someone who needs it. I don’t even feel any antipathy towards him as a person, but what he’s done, what he represents, and the influence he’s had on our public politics… sucks…
Re DeLong's take on John Warner's indictment of David Brooks (and the institutions that enable him) is so right.
But I'd say there was more to it than Brooks merely sucking. He's done active harm to public discourse for decades, and he is one of the most important "genteel" thinkers whose willingness to accept every GOP move of the moment as the expression of some fundamental law of nature, human or other wise, directly helped turn the American right into its current state.
The Atlantic? Yale? Marriages made in hell says I. David Brooks is the embodiment of everything both institutions treasure most: Sophistry. Sanctimony. Credentialism. God-Bless-Those-Who've-Got-Their-Ownism. Will they be headhunting Thomas Friedman next, d'ya think? Nah, he's too old now. If Charlie Kirk hadn't gone too early to his reward, he might well have wound up on both institutions' rising star recruitment lists.