I always knew David Brooks was an asshole ....

He arrogantly thinks his watered-down conservative vision for the future is a 3rd path Democratic vision.

god he sucks

Rewriting history-- no mentions of Native Americans, slavery and robber barron excess

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/opinion/07brooks.html?th&emc=th

Next, Platt takes aim at the American dream. When Europeans first settled this continent, they saw the natural abundance and came to two conclusions: that God’s plan for humanity could be realized here, and that they could get really rich while helping Him do it. This perception evolved into the notion that we have two interdependent callings: to build in this world and prepare for the next.

...

The United States once had a Gospel of Wealth: a code of restraint shaped by everybody from Jonathan Edwards to Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie. The code was designed to help the nation cope with its own affluence. It eroded, and over the next few years, it will be redefined.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/opinion/12brooks.html?src=me&ref=general

Shocking. He attacks public sector unions and their alleged growth since the '50s without any facts supporting his charges. He also offers no facts re his fantasy '50s government.

OK, on second reading he offers a few facts, but they seem to be carefully chosen so as to ignore other ones.

Many of us would be happy to live with a bigger version of 1950s government: one that ran surpluses and was dexterous enough to tackle long-term problems as they arose. But we don’t have that government. We have an immobile government that is desperately overcommitted in all the wrong ways.

This situation, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, has been the Democratic Party’s epic failure.

This is stupid because Little Bush chose tax cuts rather than surpluses, so even Brooks' own party does the same thing.

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands

From his New Yorker article.

was he furiously jacking off as he wrote that?

That shocking expose took a lot of courage! Next up: a hard-hitting look at why Texas barbecue is better than Vermont barbecue.

When I saw the table of contents, my first thought was, nah, this must be some other David Brooks, right? Then I recalled he wrote that one book that people once talked about before he became an OpEd hack, and wondered: would the New Yorker really give this joker (benign though he may be) a platform for his latest branding exercise? (Answer: alas, yes.)

High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands

Steely Dan lyric circa Gaucho.

That's actually the better part of the article.

David Brooks obsessively writes about this supposed "class" that I suspect encompasses maybe 1000-10,000 people in the US?

I wonder if he could name 10. I mean he's a journalist so he should be able to, right?

Like how many couples have actually met at the Clinton Global Initiative?

I like the obvious moves to make sure you know this a LIBERAL rich person, so class warfare is a-okay.

This part, otoh, is some of the worst garbage I've ever read in the New Yorker. It's like sub-sub-Gladwell bullshit:

-----

Harold and Erica got their first glimpse of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble. They smiled broadly as they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in. Harold liked what he saw, from the waist-to-hip ratio to the clear skin, all indicative of health and fertility. He enjoyed the smile that spread across Erica’s face, and unconsciously noted that the end of her eyebrows dipped down. The orbicularis-oculi muscle, which controls this part of the eyebrow, cannot be consciously controlled, so, when the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine, not fake.

Erica was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. But she was more guarded and slower to trust than Harold was. That’s in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in that environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family. She was compelled to choose a man not only for insemination but for continued support. That’s why men leap into bed more quickly than women. Various research teams have conducted a simple study. They hire a woman to go up to college men and ask them to sleep with her. More than half the men say yes. Then they have a man approach college women with the same offer. Virtually zero per cent say yes.

So Erica was subconsciously looking for signs of trustworthiness. Marion Eals and Irwin Silverman, of York University, have conducted research suggesting that women are sixty to seventy per cent more proficient than men at remembering details from a scene. In the previous few years, Erica had used her powers of observation to discard entire categories of men as potential partners, and some of her choices were idiosyncratic. She rejected men who wore Burberry, because she couldn’t see herself looking at the same pattern on scarves and raincoats for the rest of her life. She viewed fragranced men the way Churchill viewed the Germans—they were either at your feet or at your throat. She would have nothing to do with men who wore sports-related jewelry, because her boyfriend should not love Derek Jeter more than her.

She looked furtively at Harold as he approached. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, of Princeton, have found that we make judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness, and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly reliable in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. Erica noticed that Harold was good-looking but not one of those men who are so good-looking that they don’t need to be interesting. He was tall, which tends to inspire confidence; one study estimated that each inch of height corresponds to six thousand dollars of annual salary in contemporary America. Then he walked up and said hello.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks#ixzz1B2d0bDkr

this guy, he is the definition of vacuous ambition

David Brooks obsessively writes about this supposed "class" that I suspect encompasses maybe 1000-10,000 people in the US

Responding to the above quote I butchered:

Brooks probably knows all 10,000 of these people because of the douchey pundit circles he runs in whilst the rest of america wonders what the fuck he is talking about.

I'm going to write a takedown of Brooks called Bobophobia

creepy detached observation and thinly veiled resentment for being found unattractive by the opposite sex

he want to get it on a higher level than everyone else to explain away his punchablity via envy

love how he backs this piece up with SCIENCE

Various research teams have conducted a simple study. They hire a woman to go up to college men and ask them to sleep with her. More than half the men say yes. Then they have a man approach college women with the same offer. Virtually zero per cent say yes.

hold the phone what

oh god i can't wait to sit down with a cozy drink and read this

i want to see the script for that interaction, when the girl has to fess up that it's so not gonna happen

xp

hel-lo, ladies

http://exiledonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/david-brooks1.jpg

for a minute I thought he was branching out into short stories

not very symmetrical there David

smile is fake, just look at that orbicularis-oculi

He was tall, which tends to inspire confidence; one study estimated that each inch of height corresponds to six thousand dollars of annual salary in contemporary America.

this is true, and certainly applies to me, as I am 70 inches tall and make about $420,000 each year.

shit i am underpaid

I pity the poor New Yorker fact-checker who had to handle that article.

author of the study:

http://i51.tinypic.com/2enw8hs.jpg

yeah half the sources for this new yorker article are the sorts of things that other new yorker article http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all was talking about.

As I type, I'm listening to Brooks and that other unctuous bowl of Quaker Oats, E.J. Dionne.

couldn't bring myself to read this and now I know that was the right decision - thanks for saving me the headache, guys.

I basically stopped reading Brooks column in the Times cause he's been doing a lot of ersatz Gladwell-style social psychology & now here he is in the NYer itself.

funny how that works.

I can't wait for the mail on this

"Mr. Brooks argument fails to account for the fact that several studies have indicated, with confidence, that he is a diseased, prolapsed asshole"

"Occasionally, you meet a young, rising member of this class at the gelato store, as he hovers indecisively over the cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate selections, and you notice that his superhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety."

Stopped reading after this....

Stopped reading and started stabbing.

No no I stopped and went to the gelato store.

young, rising member

The intro was like a Burt Stanton post.

I probably already know the answer to this, but why are consumer items on sale the same store or supermarket still coded by class? And usually always by a rich media commentator/pundit/talking head douchebag (i.e. elite) who wants to attack "elites", since as mentioned upthread, class warfare is a-ok when aimed at left-leaning folks. The success of distribution networks from railworks & the Sears & Roebuck catalog to Walmart/Kroeger/insert your supermarket chain here onward.

Bobo does it here, too, with the exaggerated gelato remarks. Two other signposts/dogwhistles: "arugala", "latte." You've been able to get all three of these things in any American grocery store for over a decade. Mcdonalds has used that kind of lettuce in their salads for years. But somehow, if I choose _this_ head of lettuce over _that_ one sitting next to it on the same shelf and costing cents more per pound, _I'm_ somehow now a clueless elitist liberal toff? do these assholes even have _any_ idea how much Walmart rakes in on "organic"-labelled foods?!

He made the Buffalo Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People of 2010:

25) David Brooks
Charges: The Bernie Madoff of American letters, every tortured construct and inaccurate assumption ever set to print by this annoyingly self-described “Bourgeoisie Bohemian” is a fraudulent attempt to justify why his house is more expensive than yours. Brooks couldn’t even wait for the bodies to cool after the Haiti earthquake before writing about how useless it is to send money because those voodoo-lovin’ savages simply can’t be helped.
Aggravating factor: “It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people—maybe just in a neighborhood or a school—with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.”
Sentence: Buried under rubble; cholera.

I can't stop laughing at this:

Haley Barbour: Looks like William Shatner if William Shatner ate a racist butter sculpture of William Shatner.

Ha -- Brooks also made Salon's list of worst journalists.

"Occasionally, you meet a young, rising member of this class at the gelato store, as he hovers indecisively over the cloudberry and ginger-pomegranate selections,
and you notice that his superhuman equilibrium is marred by an anxiety."

Old man yells at cloudberry.

Why is Brooks occasionally meeting these guys at the gelato store anyway is that some sort of code?