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

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

― goole, Friday, 14 January 2011 20:38 (5 days ago)

this is actually true. Unlike 99% of Brooks' facts/"experiences."

Driftglass--who does the Professional Left podcast--has a blog http://driftglass.blogspot.com/ that seems about 60% devoted to critiquing David Brooks' columns.

Then they have a man approach college women with the same offer. Virtually zero per cent say yes.

That man was David Brooks

and now you know...

the rest

of the story

"Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls."

wise words, no doubt based on painful experience, from his latest column about amy chua

read way too much of the stupid article before looking at the author's name

i tried to finish this. i really did.

Can't we start a Kickstarter fund to round up David Brooks and Caitlin Flanagan, lock them in a shipping container and drop it into the Marianas trench?

*donates ten dollars*

timoreilly Tim O'Reilly
David Brooks wants to be a comedian at #TED2011. Audience is laughing, but I'd have preferred some substance.
4 minutes ago

hodgman hodgman
Brooks describes Park Slope and thinks he's describing america. #TED
5 minutes ago

Bill_Gross Bill Gross
"Ben and Jerry's should make a pacifist's toothpaste. Doesn't kill germs, just asks them to leave." David Brooks @ #TED
5 minutes ago

Why would Ben and Jerry make toothpaste in the first place.

cause you can eat more ice cream if you brush your teeth

Damn corporations are always a step ahead of me. :(

i get conservatives' fascination and disgust with well-off liberals but i'll never get their blind inability to comprehend them in the slightest. it's like they're staring at the sun. they're not that hard to figure out, guys! you don't need david damn brooks interpreting for you.

well even accepting their existence requires breaking w/ their core beliefs - "why would any rich/successful person advocate for higher taxes / bigger government / anything that might work against their immediate interests? that's just not human nature." the only explanation is that they must be literally insane.

Bill_Gross Bill Gross
After Chris apologizes for inviting right-of-center David Brooks, he gets a mild standing ovation in the first session of #TED.
2 minutes ago

Bill_Gross Bill Gross
Now Chris is trying to define what a #Stnading #Ovation is supposed to be for. #TED Also tells us not to stand if we don't want. #NoDuh?
1 minute ago

david brooks broke #TED

well tbf 'we' get similarly weird about poor right-wingers... but the explanation is basically the same. beliefs r funny.

xps

I don't get weird about them, I just think they're venal and hard-of-thinking.

sorta...but I mean, it's lol/sad that most of america votes against their economic interests, but that doesn't destroy my basic economic logic cause I don't believe in a world where people are acting completely on self-interest. there is something of a difference there.

People who act in complete self-interest are generally great big sociopathic drains on the rest of society.

to turn it around, i guess i mean more than just voting behavior. conservatives looking at rich liberals suffer from some kind of total incomprehension. the jokes don't even make sense. the logic of what's 'hypocritical' doesn't make sense. the resentment doesn't make sense, considering their own leaders. the whole thing is bizarre.

you just want to say, no really, believing in civil rights, gay rights, a fair shot for everyone, full bodily right for women, a decent regulatory state, religious ideas kept to the private sphere, a frank and adult culture... people just believe this stuff! even some rich people! it's pretty simple!

tom scocca goes hard http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/scocca/archive/2011/03/01/the-politics-of-entitlement-david-brooks-will-decide-when-it-s-time-for-you-to-die.aspx

Words designed to chill the heart:

David Brooks introduces a new blog in which he hopes to publicize, discuss and evaluate new work in the study of human nature

http://grab.by/9kJ1

why do humans keep punching me

The secret to good writing is to write about things you're passionate about imo

http://brooks.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/the-thrill-of-victory/

I just discovered this old article via a Tom Scocca link. A great point-by-point takedown of the Brooks method. Includes Brooks's whiny rebuttal.

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos_in_paradise/

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/05/03/christopher-tayler/yo-douche-bag/

Jeez

^^^deserves a poll imo

David Aaronovitch performs a great hatchet job on Brooks in the Times today. Final paragraphs:

The result is that the book explains everything and absolutely nothing. What makes the person that is you, as opposed to the person that is your brother or sister or your neighbour, is missing. Do we really pick our partners because of facial symmetry as Brooks avers, or is there something deeper at work? But what can you expect from a book supposedly about the unconscious, but whose index doesn’t even include the words hate, envy, guilt or dreams?

And “murder” appears only once, on page 8. After ploughing through 400 pages of superficial scientism masquerading as wisdom, I felt that was not enough.

god, what a treasure trove of display names

Link?

Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating

I mean, what

I feel like this book could be a career-ender for David Brooks. I mean a man can hope, right?

I’m writing this story, first, because while researchers in a wide variety of fields have shone their flashlights into different parts of the cave of the unconscious, much of their work is done in academic silos.

we need someone out there livin' the life to tell us how shit is really going down.

http://i.imgur.com/lHiZ2.jpg

Like most women, she got lubricated even while looking at nature shows of animals copulating
I mean, what

― 40% chill and 100% negative (Tracer Hand), Friday, May 6, 2011 4:58 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark

studies have shown

^^^ a Reagan quote

much of their work is done in academic silos.

As opposed to the real world of upper class Washington DC suburb Bethesda

I'll admit this made me want to read at least part of the book:

Imagine a man who buys a chicken from the grocery store, manages to bring himself to orgasm by penetrating it, then cooks and eats the chicken.

I didn't link the Times review kingfish, because it's behind a paywall.

the next sentence: "Just imagine it for a second. Isn't that shit fucked up? Damn!"

Oh, NYT, that Times. Ok.

No, London Times is behind a paywall too. Shame, because it's a great review that deserves to be passed around and around the web until it makes David Brooks cry.

can somebody copy/paste here?

My colleague Rachel Sylvester revealed, in The Times this week, that Tory politicians have been reading David Brooks’ new book with avidity. One minister thinks it informs the reader what the Big Society really is. Another believes that it sets the framework for 21st-century Conservatism. A Cabinet minister told Rachel that The New York Times columnist’s effort was “the best description of Cameron-style Conservatism I’ve read”.

My bad self hopes it is true that the book is made compulsory reading for ministers. I can then imagine them attempting to live their lives according to its blizzard of banal insights, such as this one: “Marriage expert John Gottman argues that in a healthy relationship the partners make five positive comments to each other for every negative one.” If you spot George Osborne out and about with Mrs Osborne and he appears to be counting under his breath, you’ll know that it isn’t the deficit he’s calculating, but whether he’s managed to hit the “healthy relationship” comment ratio.

There are no bigger, fatter, more straw-filled Aunt Sallies these days than the idea that most of us somehow believe that Man lives by bread alone. We are supposedly in thrall to the notion of pure homo economicus, so that we require Lord Layard of Happiness or the odd American columnist to tell us, forcefully, that the latest research suggests that there is more to human beings than Gross Domestic Product. Because, of course, bringing up our kids, falling in and out of love, suffering loss and celebrating birth, we didn’t know all this.

Of course we did. If politicians stopped to read a novel every once in a while, or had time to watch the television, they’d realise that their fellow citizens are fully aware of how complicated it is to be human.

This book, written by a celebrated columnist who has a gift for epithet and catchphrase (I liked “sanctimommies” for a certain kind of competitive parent), works by citing some aspect of almost every psychological and neuroscientific study you’ve seen in newspapers for the past 30 years over the course of 400 pages. Perhaps that is the attraction to busy ministers.

Aware that such mass citation would make for an arid, example-strewn waste of a book, Brooks had the idea of creating two characters, Harold and Erica, on to whose conjoined lives the facts and speculations could be stuck, like a forest of Post-it Notes. So two deeply unsympathetic, professional middle-class Americans become the spattered vehicles for a mass of what I can only call semi-scientific stuff.

Some of it seems robust, some obvious, some intriguing, some utterly speculative, some absurd, some nothing more than anecdotal. Some of it leads somewhere, much of it doesn’t.

Surveys, studies, experiments in evolutionary psychology, behavioural psychology and neuroscience do service alongside stories of what Benjamin Franklin did to become a great writer (a celebrity — that’s news to me) and riffs on such revolutionary themes as practice makes perfect.

Although the ostensible theme is the human unconscious mind, what characterises the book is a sunny determinism. If we can only isolate and understand the chemical workings of the body (unconscious because we are not conscious of them) then we have the trick of it.

The result of this approach can only be described as grisly. Take this, from when Erica and Harold’s childless marriage goes through a tough time. Brooks sends himself off on a journey through the mind of a middle-aged woman. He quotes at length from a neuropsychiatrist called Louann Brizendine, who theorises that a middle-aged woman becomes difficult because she starts wanting to please herself. Why? “With her estrogen down, her oxytocin is down too . . . and she’s getting less of a dopamine rush from the things she did before, even talking with her friends. She’s not getting the calming oxytocin reward of tending and caring for her little children . . .” Fortunately, short of offering oxytocin supplements, we already know the answer on how husbands should deal with this. Make sure your positive comment ratio doesn’t fall below 5:1.

The result is that the book explains everything and absolutely nothing. What makes the person that is you, as opposed to the person that is your brother or sister or your neighbour, is missing. Do we really pick our partners because of facial symmetry as Brooks avers, or is there something deeper at work? But what can you expect from a book supposedly about the unconscious, but whose index doesn’t even include the words hate, envy, guilt or dreams?

And “murder” appears only once, on page 8. After ploughing through 400 pages of superficial scientism masquerading as wisdom, I felt that was not enough.

http://dailydish.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e201538e84b1cc970b-550wi

http://dailydish.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451c45669e201538e84b1cc970b-550wi