Op-Ed Columnist
The Sidney Awards
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 23, 2010
I try not to fall into a rut, but every December I give out Sidney Awards for the best magazine essays of the year, and every year it seems I give one to Michael Lewis. It would be more impressive if I was discovering obscure geniuses, but Lewis keeps churning out the masterpieces.
Josh Haner/The New York Times
David Brooks
Related
Previous Sidney Awards Columns by David Brooks: December 28, 2009 | December 24, 2009
Sidney Awards: The Sidney Hillman Foundation
This year it was a Vanity Fair piece called “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds.” His large subject is the tsunami of cheap credit that swept over the world and “offered entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.”
His specific subject is Greece, a country that plundered its public institutions while spoiling and atomizing itself. The Greek national railroad earned 100 million euros (about $131.4 million) in revenues each year, but had a wage bill of 400 million euros plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The country reported a budget deficit of 3.7 percent a year, but that was inaccurate. It was really about 14 percent of G.D.P.
Lewis’s genius was to show how the moral breakdown spread into one of the most remote institutions on earth, a 1,000-year-old monastery cut off by water, culture and theology that, nonetheless, managed to put itself at the center of the great plundering.
If you go to a college classroom you’ll likely notice that the women tend to dominate the conversation. In an essay called “The End of Men” in The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin gathers the evidence, showing how women are beginning to dominate the information age.
At one clinic where parents are able to choose the sex of their babies, 75 percent choose girls. Three women earn college degrees for every two earned by men. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are predominantly filled by women.
Rosin describes studies showing that corporations that have women in senior management perform better than male-dominated competitors. She visits admissions officers who are hunting for qualified boys. At a support group for men behind on their child support, the leader writes “$85,000” on the board. “That’s her salary,” he barks. Then he writes “$12,000” and shouts: “This is your salary. Who’s the damn man? Who’s the man now?”
In Fortune, Beth Kowitt had an eye-popping piece called “Inside the Secret World of Trader Joe’s.” The funky, gourmet grocery chain is actually owned by the secretive Albrecht family from Germany. Many of the products are made by large corporations — the pita chips are made by a division of PepsiCo and the yogurt is actually made by Danone Stonyfield Farm.
The company has brilliantly seized on the growing sophistication of American food tastes. It offers a much more limited selection than its rivals, thus reducing the anxiety of choice. It has an efficient supply chain (the Tasty Bite Punjab Eggplant that sold for $3.39 at Whole Foods in Manhattan sold for more than a dollar less at the Trader Joe’s in Stamford, Conn.). It fosters community and makes shopping a form of belonging.
You may know James Franco as the actor who played Peter Parker’s best friend in the Spider-Man movies, or the lead character in the mountain-climbing movie, “127 Hours.” While pursuing a full-time acting career, he earned a bachelor’s degree at U.C.L.A. and then enrolled simultaneously in four graduate programs — New York University for film, Columbia for writing, Brooklyn College for writing and Warren Wilson College for poetry. He’s also pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Yale and taking classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. His fiction has been published in Esquire (his first book-length collection was published by Scribner). His first solo art show was at the Clocktower Gallery in New York City.
Sam Anderson superbly captures the everythingness of Franco’s life in a New York Magazine piece called “The James Franco Project.” It is a story of manic labor masking the man’s enigmatic core.
Last year, William Deresiewicz delivered a countercultural lecture at West Point. He told the cadets how to combat the frenetic, achievement-obsessed system in which they were raised. That speech was subsequently published in The American Scholar as “Solitude and Leadership.” It’s about how to be a leader, not an organization man.
Darin Wolfe wrote a piece in American Scientist, called “To See for One’s Self,” about the decline of the autopsy. Autopsies frequently reveal major diagnostic errors and undiscovered illnesses, yet the number of autopsies performed each year is plummeting. Medical training no longer relies on this hands-on exercise. Doctors are afraid of information that might lead to malpractice suits. Medicare won’t pay for them. A form of practical inquiry is being lost.
Everybody’s worried about the future of print journalism, but this has been an outstanding year for magazines. On Tuesday, I’ll offer more suggestions for holiday reading.
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