"Youneverknow" (one word) was designated the most important word in the English language by Joaquin Andujar, a fire-balling major league pitcher and self-described linguist, in response to an off-the-wall-question about his favorite English word by a radio interviewer. And, that excellent word sums up this blogger's reaction to the 2018 Sidney Awards that recently were conferred by David Brooks (known as BoBo Boy in this blog because of his breakout book at the dawn of the 21st century , Bobos in Paradise. As this blogger went through the list of the best long-form essays in a brutal year, he thought — again and again — "Youneverknow." If this is a (fair & balanced) survey of the best non-fiction writing in 2018, so be it.
PS: Look at the Directory below and click on the [bracketed number] to go to that essay; click on "Back To Directory" to return to the top of the page.
Vannevar Bush hypertext — Bracketed numerics — Directory]
[1] Posted December 24, 2018 — BoBo Boy (David Brooks) Unveils The 2018 Sidney Awards, Part I
[2] Posted December 27, 2018 — BoBo Boy (David Brooks) Unveils The 2018 Sidney Awards, Part II
[1] — Back To Directory
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The Sidney Awards, Part I
By BoBo Boy (David Brooks)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
At the end of every year I give out the Sidney Awards to celebrate and recommend great examples of long-form journalism. I do it so that we can step out of the daily rush of events and read things that are broader and more reflective.
This year there were a lot of great essays on the shame culture and the out-of-control viciousness of online life. There were a lot of great essays about our brutal, angry transitional historic moment. And there were a lot of great essays about tigers. Don’t ask me to explain that last one.
The first of the Sidneys, named for the philosopher Sidney Hook, is Helen Andrews’s essay “Shame Storm” in First Things. It is an amazing description of online viciousness. In 2010, Andrews was on a panel about conservatism with her ex-boyfriend, Todd Seavey. Instead of talking about the subject of the panel, Seavey went on a long rant about what an allegedly cruel person Andrews was, all of it televised by C-Span2.
When it was posted on YouTube, the clip got half a million hits in the first 48 hours. The wave of vitriol against Andrews built over time and got more vicious. Andrews couldn’t find a job for 18 months. She eventually escaped to Australia, but when she released a think-tank report there, she was still attacked by an Australian member of Parliament because of the clip. It never goes away.
“The more online shame cycles you observe,” Andrews writes, “the more obvious the pattern becomes: Everyone comes up with a principled-sounding pretext that serves as a barrier against admitting to themselves that, in fact, all they have really done is joined a mob. Once that barrier is erected, all rules of decency go out the window.”
Most of us have certain stereotypes about the European far right — that it’s just a bunch of blood-and-soil racists. But in an essay in The New York Review of Books, “Two Roads for the New French Right,” Mark Lilla shows that there’s a lot more going on. He found a group of Catholic conservative intellectuals who argue that social conservatism is the only viable alternative to neoliberal cosmopolitanism and who are all fans of Bernie Sanders.
They believe that both the European superstate and global capitalism undermine the cultural-religious foundations of European civilization. They are strongly environmentalist, feel that economic growth should be subordinated to social needs, believe in strong social support for the poor and limited immigration. As Lilla notes, they have a very coherent, communitarian worldview. I found the essay uplifting because it shows that in times of political transition, ideas get shuffled and reassembled in new and impressive ways.
In a post called “How This All Happened” for the Collaborative Fund blog, Morgan Housel walks us through 73 years of American economic history. He shows us how many economic phases there have been. And how each phase led to something unexpected.
“If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. If you learned that there have been no nuclear attacks since 1945, you’d be shocked. If you saw the level of wealth in New York and San Francisco, you’d be shocked. If you compared it to the poverty of Detroit, you’d be shocked. If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong.”
In “How Did Larry Nassar Deceive So Many for So Long?” in The Cut [in New York magazine], Kerry Howley blows up the conventional telling of the American gymnastics sex abuse scandal. The story is generally told as a large group of victims finding their voice and “breaking their silence.” But Howley shows that they were telling their stories all along, to every relevant authority. It’s because the abuser, Nassar, had built up an edifice of trust that people couldn’t see the monstrosity that was taking place literally in front of their eyes. Nassar abused many of these young girls while their parents were in the room. He just told them he was doing a medical procedure he called a “sacrotuberous-ligament release.” He might still be doing it today if a police officer hadn’t discovered his hard drives, with 37,000 child porn images on them. It was the hard drives that finally persuaded the world, not the women and their repeated warnings.
Andrew Sullivan has forced me to do something I really don’t want to do — award two separate Sidney awards to the same writer in the same year. But his work for New York magazine this year has really defined the era. His two masterpieces are “The Poison We Pick,” on the opioid crisis, and “America’s New Religions,” on political fundamentalism. If you want to understand America in 2018, those essays are a good place to start. ###
Another batch of Sidney winners will land Thursday.
[See below for the author info about BoBo Boy (David Brooks).]
[2] — Back To Directory
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The Sidney Awards, Part II
By BoBo Boy (David Brooks)
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
In her essay “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” Kate Julian takes a question that seems to have a simple answer (porn) and shows that it has a complex answer. In one striking part of the essay, which appeared in The Atlantic, Julian shows that fewer young people are having the kind of relationships that lead to sex. In 1995, 74 percent of 17-year-old women had had a special romantic relationship in the preceding 18 months. By 2014, only 46 percent of 17-year-olds had ever had a romantic relationship of any kind.
Having lived much of their social life online, many young people expressed concern that they hadn’t developed the skills they needed to read possible partners in live, face-to-face situations. How do you tell if someone thinks you are special or just wants to be friends? In addition, nearly a fifth of Americans aged 18 to 29 believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment.
From The New Yorker, I recommend Dexter Filkins’s “A Saudi Prince’s Quest to Remake the Middle East.” In one essay, Filkins weaves together the Middle East’s geostrategic situation, its economic situation and how each of the major players, from Jared Kushner to Iran, is grasping for something.
It’s all built around a profile of Mohammed bin Salman [MBS], the young Saudi leader. Years ago, MBS asked a Saudi bureaucrat to help him appropriate a property. When the official said no, he received an envelope with a single bullet inside. Last year, MBS replaced Mohammed bin Nayef as crown prince. Bin Nayef had been summoned to the palace and surrounded by guards. His cellphone was taken away and he was forced to stand for hours — in excruciating pain because of an old injury. Just before dawn, bin Nayef agreed to surrender his position.
In “The Constitution of Knowledge,” in National Affairs, Jonathan Rauch argues that the marketplace of ideas is like a funnel. Millions of people float millions of hypotheses every day. Society collectively tests these ideas, bats them around or ignores them, and only a tiny few make it out the narrow end of the funnel, where they are declared useful or true.
But, Rauch says, the funnel is no more. Internet trolls simply overwhelm the system with swarms of falsehood. There used to be an implicit honor code — truth exists, credentials matter, what hasn’t been tested isn’t knowledge — but the honor code has been swept away. Most fringe information used to get ignored. But today, it can’t be ignored because a lot of it is spewed by the president of the United States. Rauch shows that the national conversation had an architecture, which has now been reduced to sand.
It’s hard to write about what religious faith feels like. Tish Harrison Warren does it compellingly in “True Story” in The Point. As a kid she just loved going to church. Then as an adult she learned about the church’s sins — the narcissism, abuse, sexism. But she still became an Anglican priest. The nice side of church, she writes, is the day-to-day goodness, the teenage boy still sweet enough to rest his head on his mother’s shoulder during the sermon, the young man who gives an elderly friend a ride, the way the members see themselves as a community of forgiven sinners.
“Each Sunday during communion, when the members of my church come to the table, I watch their faces. Many tired. Some sad. Some lit up with joy. One kid who has special needs approaches me like he’s won the lottery. His voice rises, ‘Oh boy! Oh boy!’”
Chinese art prices are through the roof. In 2010, a vase with a starting price of $800,000 sold in a suburban London auction for $69.5 million. Coincidentally, Chinese art is now routinely looted from Western art museums. In “The Great Chinese Art Heist,” in GQ, Alex Palmer walks us through these “Mission Impossible”-style robberies. He also captures the nationalist fervor driving the frenzy.
Most of these pieces were looted from China centuries ago by foreign soldiers. The price of each piece is determined partly by quality, but also by how closely it is associated with one of China’s most inglorious defeats. Stealing the items back is nationalist revenge.
I mentioned in my last column [above] that there were several excellent essays this year on tigers. My favorite is “Man-eaters” in The Ringer, in which Brian Phillips explains: “The arrival of a tiger, it’s true, is often preceded by moments of rising tension, because a tiger’s presence changes the jungle around it, and those changes are easier to detect. Birdcalls darken. Small deer call softly to each other. Herds do not run but drift into shapes that suggest some emerging group consciousness of an escape route.”
Sidney nominees are gathered by a completely haphazard, random process. But I couldn’t do it at all without the annual help of Robert Cottrell of The Browser; Robert Atwan, who directs the Best American Essays series; and Conor Friedersdorf, who produces a Best of Journalism newsletter each week. ###
[David Brooks became an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times in September 2003. His column appears every Tuesday and Friday. He is currently a commentator on “PBS NewsHour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He is the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004), and The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011). Most recently he has written The Road to Character (2015). Brooks received a BA (history) from the University of Chicago (IL) and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.]
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