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*Long-Form Journalism
LONG-FORM JOURNALISM....David Brooks today:
Everything becomes a shorter version of itself. Essays become op-eds. Op-eds become blog posts. Blog posts become Twitter tweets. The Sidney Awards stand athwart technology, yelling stop. They are awarded every year to some of the best examples of long-form journalism and thought.
Of the four pieces Brooks chooses to honor, the Lewis and Judis pieces I had already read, and both were good. The Professor X piece I had also already read. I didn't reread it, but I remember thinking at the time that it was more routine gripe than insightful observation. The Caldwell piece was new to me, and it was pretty engaging. Overall, a pretty good bunch of selections.
I remember an old old short story about this, it was a spoof of Reader's Digest condensed books. It starts with the condensed books, and then people want condensed versions of the best of the condensed books. And then they want summaries of that. It ends up with literature becoming so condensed that each day, for sale on the newsstands, is the daily release of the most recent, most condensed literature: a single letter.
What about Gator aid Lite ?
The Caldwell piece has some excellent insights on the financial system. It seems, alas, that the economics profession has forgotten much what Bagehot figured over a century ago.
One might ask why the Weekly Standard, a conservative publication, would publish such a cynical view of banking. I think the answer is that Bill Kristol is a Straussian, and the Straussians are not very enthusiastic about the free market.
For at least the past six months, David Brooks has been going through a transformation from his George W. Bush neoconism to reluctant acceptance of Obama's victory. The result has been inconsistency, which may make it difficult for him to package some of his columns into book form. At some point he may cease his current Mugwamp role as he searches for positions he can take that can withstand criticism.
Charlie:
In the story (by E.B. White), journals like Pith, Core, and Nub -- which reduce a Hemmingway novel to "Bang!" -- briefly get too short, but eventually readers are completely overwhelmed by the flood of reading material that they create a symbolic six-letter word everyday. The first word, and the title of the story, is "Irtnog."
Well, here's what Caldwell writes in his very first paragraph:
But in the name of justice we ought to recall that there was one candidate who did foresee our predicament with considerable accuracy when it still lay far in the future. Ron Paul, in almost every speech he made during the Republican primaries, spoke of bubbles, reckless credit growth, and the "unsustainability" of present policy. So why isn't there more demand for the common-sense solutions he put forward?
What a ridiculous beginning to an article. And who is surprised that it appeared in the Weekly Standard? The statement that Ron Paul was the only one talking about those specific things is grossly false, but what is not false is that hardly any serious economists, then or now, take his "common-sense solutions" seriously. I remember the blank look Bernanke tried to maintain in front of the TV cameras as Ron Paul asked him had anybody considered going back to the gold standard.
It's no disrespect to the writers of today to say that the magazine piece of the year was written in l905, by Mark Twain, called "The Privilege of the Grave," and published for the first time in The New Yorker, in last week's issue.
It's not just good, it's great, and utterly timeless. If you didn't know Twain wrote it over a century ago, you might think it was by David Foster Wallace, or Lewis Lapham, or some similar sardonic wit of our era.
What does a worthless twitter like Brooks know about literature? We all know that Brooks is avid Rush Limbaugh student, so I guess, post-Repug melt down, he's all trying to erase his Karl Rove like liberal hate weekly recording habits.