Paid to be a Narcissistic Blowhard

Monday, April 13th, 2015

Oliver Burkeman captures David Brooks perfectly, Charles Murray says:

Flawlessly. In the Guardian! Inexplicable.

From that Guardian piece:

David Brooks is aware there’s some irony in the subject matter of his latest book, which is a hymn to humility, and the importance of acknowledging how little we can ever truly know. As a twice-weekly opinion columnist for the New York Times, and a fixture on US television and radio, he is, in his own words, “paid to be a narcissistic blowhard, to volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am”; he is also one of the few conservatives whose views Barack Obama often solicits. Best known to British audiences for his books Bobos in Paradise and The Social Animal, Brooks says he considered calling the new one Humility, with the title in tiny letters and “David Brooks” in huge block capitals. In the event, he called it The Road to Character, which seems unlikely to mollify the army of bloggers who appear to find him insufferably pompous – “the biggest windbag in the western hemisphere”, to quote Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. (New York magazine once described Brooks’s role in American life as “public intellectual/punching-bag”.) This is a pity, because it’s a powerful, haunting book that works its way beneath your skin. And the motive for writing it, far from being a pompous desire to sermonise, was at least partly due to a personal crisis: Brooks’s realisation that his own life of well-paid worldly success, plus regular meetings with the president, was missing something essential inside.

Comments

  1. Anonymous coward says:

    Taibbi describing Brooks as the biggest windbag, in any hemisphere…

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