Everybody's a critic
By Mary Ruth Yoe
Illustrations by Steve Brodner
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Select a critic:
David Brooks, AB'83
Roger Ebert, X'70
Thomas Frank, AM’89,
PhD’94
William Grimes, AM'74,
PhD'82
Dave Kehr, AB’75
Edward Rothstein,
PhD’94
Susan Sontag, AB’51
Michael Sorkin, AB’69
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David Brooks, AB’83
The new kid on the New
York Times op-ed roster has a reputation as a kinder, gentler
conservative. David Brooks, who began his two-columns-a-week post
in September, writes about politics and American culture. The latter
is also the subject of his 2000 bestseller, Bobos in Paradise:
The New Upper Class and How They Got There, in which “Bobos”
is short for Bourgeois Bohemians, Brooks’s term for those
educated elites whose hybrid of capitalist and hippie principles
equate being good with making good.
Education.
On the way to a bachelor’s in history, Brooks wrote a dozen
or so papers on Thucydides.
Turning point.
Brooks, who arrived at Chicago as a liberal, penned an April 5,
1983, Maroon column, “The Greatest Story Ever Told,”
that purported to be a biography of conservative pundit and National
Review editor William F. Buckley Jr., including this scene
from a typical day in the patrician’s life: “In the
afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making
everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended
bouts of name-dropping.” As collegiate parodies go, it was
a success. When Buckley arrived on campus to give a talk entitled
“Reflections on Current Disorders,” he asked if Brooks
was in the lecture audience—he wanted to offer him a job.
But the parodist was in California, preparing
to meet another famously conservative thinker, Milton Friedman,
AM’33, in a local public-television debate, taking a socialist
position against the free-market economist. As Brooks recalled in
the New York Observer, “The show was essentially
me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally
devastated my point, and then me sitting there with my mouth hanging
open, trying to think what to say. That didn’t immediately
turn me into a conservative, but....”
Venues.
Brooks’s c. vitae includes brief stays at the National
Review and the Washington Times as well as nine years
at the Wall Street Journal (as op-ed editor, foreign correspondent,
book review editor, and a fill-in stint as movie critic) and a similar
tenure at the Weekly Standard, which he joined at its start
in 1995.
A contributing editor at Newsweek and
the Atlantic Monthly, he makes regular appearances on National
Public Radio and PBS’s News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
He’s also written for the New Yorker, the New
York Times Sunday Magazine, and the Washington Post.
Generating ideas.
“I carry notebooks around and observe how people behave,”
Brooks told the Chicago Tribune. “I fill up notebooks
and lay them out on the floor. Each pile is a paragraph. And I sit
and I stream them all together. I have no memory. I have to write
everything down. I’ve never had writer’s block. I can’t
think without writing. I can’t think of what I believe in
unless I write it down.”
Sound bites.
From a Times column on Lucky, the self-billed
“Magazine about Shopping”: “It’s so peppy
and chipper it makes going down the Hallmark card aisle in the drugstore
feel like a trudge through Germanic philosophy.” On presidential
hopeful Howard Dean: “Everybody talks about how the Internet
has been key to his fund-raising and organization. Nobody talks
about how it has shaped his persona. On the Internet, the long term
doesn’t matter, as long as you are blunt and forceful at that
moment. On the Internet, a new persona is just a click away.”
Taking criticism.
“Some people like you, and some definitely do not,”
Brooks told the New York Observer. “If you take them
all seriously, you get depressed, because there’s a lot of
people who hate me—because not every reader of the New
York Times is conservative. The worst stuff you don’t
mind, because you know they’re crazy.”
Short list.
Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing, editor
(Vintage, 1995); Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and
How They Got There (Simon & Schuster, 2000); On Paradise
Drive: How We Choose to Live in a Rosier Future (Simon &
Schuster, June 2004).
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