David Brooks Steals His Paycheck
Nothing about science, or much at all in Mr. Brooks latest effort, but as readers of this blog know of my admiration for the plucky uber-class pundit’s ability to spin dross out of gold, I thought I’d try to be the first to suggest that this column is so empty of both thought and style that if I were an Ochs or a Sulzberger, I’d demand my money back.
Seriously, Brooks has achieved a parody of opinion writing. This is what you get from a hung-over freshman who forgot to do the reading. It is to funny as groat clusters are to food. (h/t Firesign Theater.) This is truly is one of those so-bad-it-should-be-in-a-museum efforts. Read it and weep.
I wish I had the wit, stamina or stomach to analyze it more deeply. I don’t, and I confess that I suspect the deficiency may not lie with me.
Image: Cornelis Vroom, “The Highway Robbery,” c. 1625. Source Wikimedia Commons
Explore posts in the same categories: bad writing, Journalism and its discontents, political folliesTags: bad writing, David Brooks, New York Times, The Death of Journalism
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August 29, 2008 at 9:07 am
Wow. That column was so bad and so embarrassing to the profession that even Bill Kristol couldn’t have written it. And I don’t toss that one out lightly.
There was that hullabaloo about the Times rejecting McCain’s column because it wasn’t substantive, but where those editorial standards when his suckling foot soldiers are pouring out pathetic attempts at prose all over the Op-Ed page?
August 29, 2008 at 12:56 pm
I don’t see the problem with the column. Apart from its being vapid and empty of ideas, awkwardly phrased and self-consciously cute, that is. Isn’t this every bit up to the quality of work we have come to expect from David “BooBoo” Brooks?
I think the whole Brooks phenomenon arose from inter-newspaper rivalry. This is the NYT’s way of saying “Ha ha, Washington Post! We can have a columnist even more clueless and self-impressed than Richard Cohen!”
August 29, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Yawn. Couldn’t get to the bottom. The op-ed hole he had to fill was way to large for his sad attempt at satire. Reminds me of the crap Boston Globe sportswriters type up when they run out of things to say.
August 30, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Jeez, now even I am leaving the second O off of ‘too’. Blogging is working without a net. Fortunately, the gravity’s not too (!) strong.
October 3, 2008 at 9:59 am
[...] to flesh out his preconceptions with even the most fragile of veneers of fact or experience? I complained here that he wasn’t even trying anymore, and nothing in today’s effort suggests [...]