Here at The New Yorker

As might be expected, Jill Lepore's essay on the Constitution and its interpretation is real gem of a thing. Well written, insightful, analytically sound, and, in general, designed and implemented to illuminate a fundamentally important set of issues.  Yeah "The New Yorker."

On the other hand, in the same issue, for reasons that remain unclear, David Brooks perfects the art of making up stuff and writing at an undergraduate level. In this case the construct is

the Composure Class rose once again. Its members didn’t make their money through hedge-fund wizardry or by some big financial score. Theirs was a statelier ascent. They got good grades in school, established solid social connections, joined fine companies, medical practices, and law firms. Wealth settled down upon them gradually, like a gentle snow.

If these people exist as such an obvious class that he ought to be able to develop some verifiable statistical categories that show who, how many, what import, etc.  He can't, of course, because that would take work and rely on facts and Brooks hates facts like Ebert hated social revolution. So he makes stuff up:

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.

Ha, Ha, see if he can make stuff up he can make fun of the stuff he makes up and then his investigation of a non-existent, so far as he can show, "class," and I think he mean sociological category in stead of class, becomes comic sociology.  As by the way a cyclists thighs:

So having made up and mocked a "class" of people and having misstated the effects of riding a bicycle, Brooks offers a brief and more or less useless discussion of modern notions of the conscious and unconscious mind, and he concludes that

[t]he cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

As by way of further illumination, Brooks makes up a member of the class he made up and discusses how nature and nurture played a role in creating him, making up all the influences and effects along the way.  It's just great.  If you take an series of abstractions, contentment class, cognitive revolutions concerning nature and nurture, and then apply them to a further abstraction, Harold the imaginary member of the made up class, you can prove nearly anything you'd like.

Not content with making stuff up and then applying it to made up situations and people, Brooks offers such stunning insights resulting from his discussion of nature and nurture as this:

Harold insisted that he was a tiger who had been born on the sun. His parents tried to get him to concede that he was a little boy born in a hospital, but he would become grave and refuse. This formulation, “I’m a tiger,” may seem like an easy thing, but no computer could blend the complicated concept “I” with the complicated concept “tiger” into a single entity.

Computers, get this, aren't people.  Whoda thunkit.

He offers this brilliant apercue on what American culture is all about insisting that

[t]here’s a debate in our culture about what really makes us happy, which is summarized by, on the one hand, the book “On the Road” and, on the other, the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The former celebrates the life of freedom and adventure. The latter celebrates roots and connections.

Yes, Keroac is all about freedom and adventure and has nothing to do with connections like the comradeship of the road or building communities between and amongst those left who either voluntarily or because of social prejudice are excluded from the dominate connected community.  This is another in a series of examples of Brooks' inability to read and think critically.

One of his better bits of magical, just-so-stories way of thinking, if thinking it can be called:

Erica was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. But she was more guarded and slower to trust than Harold was. That’s in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in that environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family.

Yes exactly, the two made-up people behave exactly the way a bowdlerized version of evolutionary psychology says they would because they are made up people from a made up class in a made up world where David Brooks' understanding of the cognitive revolution determines behaviors and attitudes. No woman on meeting a man for the first time might be "guarded and slower to trust" because of the possibility of, say, sexual assault, could she? Not when the more obvious explanation is what may or may not have happened in dimmest of pasts.

And so on and so forth. Why, I ask plaintively and with a strong feeling of betrayal, did "The New Yorker" see fit to publish this stuff and nonsense.  It's not like Brooks doesn't have a bi-weekly gig with the NYTimes and weekly gabfest in which his content free bloviations about the world as it isn't compete with the reliably flabby views of his competitor that guy from somewhere on the East Coast no one ever pays attention to.