Vol. 161: Goodbye, David Brooks

Leaving the Times for….Yale?

David Brooks, whose New York Times op-ed column brought new meaning to the term “ivory tower journalism,” bid farewell to his readers this month, explaining that he had found “a project and a cause that are worth devoting the final chapter of my career to.” What project and cause might that be? Don’t ask Brooks. The ivory tower journalist doesn’t deign to communicate with the peasants. Even peasants who know better than to end a sentence with a preposition.

So let me answer the question. Brooks has become a “presidential senior fellow” at Yale, where he will facilitate lectures and host a podcast for The Atlantic. Hey, wake up! Not since Nicholas Kristof left the Times op-ed page in 2021 to run for governor of Oregon— a campaign that gripped the nation for at least 15 minutes— has journalism seen such a momentous career change.

For the past 22 years, Brooks has positioned himself as a non-ideological conservative with a relatively open mind, which is good. Unlike most journalists, Brooks reads books, research papers, and longform magazine articles, which is also good. His annual “Sidney” awards (named for the political philosopher Sidney Hook) celebrated outstanding magazine articles you or I may have overlooked. All good.

But engaging with other humans to bounce off his impressionable and often shallow generalizations seemed beyond Brooks’s pay grade. (I often wondered if Brooks had a phone in his office.) The typical Brooks column was one in which he read a book, pronounced it the most brilliant work he’d ever read, and then spent the rest of the column summarizing the contents.

By contrast, the former Times columnist Joe Nocera would read a book, provide a critical analysis of its strengths and weaknesses— and then pick up the phone and engage the book’s author in a meaningful conversation.

Ancestor worship

Here’s one example of a nonsensical Brooks theory that struck close to home for me. In 2013 Brooks asserted, without any supporting evidence, that “Europeans who settled America gave their lives a slingshot shape. They pulled back so they could shoot forward. They volunteered to live in harsh conditions today so their descendants could live well for centuries. The pioneers who traveled West did the same thing. So has each generation of immigrants— sacrificing the present for the sake of the future.”

As the author of a serious book about the opening of the American West in the 1850s (Death of a Gunfighter: The Quest for Jack Slade, the West’s Most Elusive Legend), I was astonished by this sweeping assertion.

Posterity was the last thing on the minds of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who flocked westward during the decade after the California Gold Rush of 1849. Most of them were young single men hoping to strike it rich in the gold fields or escape the drudgery of farm life by moving to a wild masculine environment beyond the constraints of law enforcement, religion, or the domesticating influence of women. (The ratio of men to women in the early West was at least nine to one, and in many places much higher.) Community was a concept they sought to escape, not to build.

With the notable exception of the Mormons who founded Salt Lake City, almost everyone in the early West was too preoccupied with day-to-day survival to worry about their descendants. Even the great entrepreneurs who organized the first wagon trains, stagecoach lines, mail services, and telegraph lines rarely planned more than three months into the future.

These remarkable pioneers did indeed transform the West in an incredibly short time, often at the cost of their lives or their sanity. But they seem to us like visionaries only in hindsight. Had Brooks called me, I would’ve pointed out that he was guilty of ex post facto reasoning. But as I said, I don’t believe Brooks had a telephone in his office. Pity.

An endless source of parodies

So now Brooks is leaving one ivory tower for another. Still, I must confess I will miss his Times column. Not for provoking me— which it rarely did— but for providing me with seemingly endless material for parodies. Try, for example, these:

David Brooks contemplates the great chasm (2012).

History lesson from David Brooks (2013).

On the road with David Brooks (2024).

Enjoy.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com