My Weakly Reader

Rudolph Valentino and Agnes Ayres in The Sheik (1921).

Somewhat Shorter David Brooks, "The Sidney Awards, Part 1", New York Times, December 26 2014:

As always, over the past year I looked at a number of magazine articles that I wasn't able to parlay into columns on their own, some of which might as well be listed as the best magazine articles of the year, either because they are or because they're useful for underscoring some little point I wanted to make:

Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic made a powerful "Case for Reparations" for the centuries of violent oppression and ruthless impoverishment of black people in the US (or, as I might more modestly put it, the way they were "handicapped, from residential practices to just plain thievery"). Luckily he didn't really mean reparations.* More like some kind of satisfying symbolic gesture, like me putting his essay on my list.

I agree that rape on campus is a devastating problem, so I'm including one of the many pieces published last year on that, but it just happens to be the one ("The College Rape Overcorrection", by Emily Yoffe in Slate) where the dude was probably innocent.

By way of noting that The New Republic was destroyed by callow and incompetent billionaire Chris Hughes and in no way years ago by non-callow Marty Peretz, Andrew Sullivan, and Leon Wieseltier, I should mention that Hughes did publish an article I liked by Michael Hobbes, "Stop Saving the World: Big Ideas are Destroying International Development", with a humble, Burkean message, as the title suggests.** Pulling out the one example that isn't about international development but American urban teen pregnancy because, you know, that's what I do.

According to Adam Johnson's "Scavengers" in Granta, North Korea is weird.***

According to "Lincoln at Gettysburg" in The National Interest, by the Hoover Institution's Diana Schaub, the only proper noun in the Gettysburg Address is "God".

Dorothy Cumming in The Wind (1928).

*Actually, he really meant reparations:

More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.

And he's right of course.

**Bad TNR editing gave this essay a Brooks-bait title that made it appear to be about something it isn't, like how governments need to stop trying to save the world and start funding little tiny humble and Burkean projects instead of big ones. What it's really about is indicated by Hobbes's original title, sort of preserved in the article's URL, "http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120178/problem-international-development-and-plan-fix-it". My bold.

The editors also insisted on chopping it into two parts, running the fix-it half as a followup article that Brooks doesn't mention, whether he deliberately decided to ignore it or not, "International Development is Broken: Here are Two Ways to Fix It". What Hobbes, an international development hand himself, is really after is NGOs, and not in stopping them but in having government take a much more activist approach in getting value for money out of them: in particular by

• randomized trials so you know what really works before you fund it on a larger scale
• payment for performance—not now many training sessions you give to how many nurses to make how many house visits over the period of the grant, but how much you actually decrease the number of malaria cases, to be paid after the results are in, and 
• joining the data revolution, getting more and better statistics so that programs can be targeted more effectively.

Also he asks us to note that one problem with international development aid is how successful it's already been over the last 70 years or so, making the needs less obvious and less sexy:

Not that we should ignore the Afghanistans and Burundis of the world, but by 2030, up to 41 countries are going to move into the middle-income bracket. Increasingly, their challenge, as ours, will be the distribution of resources, not the creation of them. The development technologies of the future aren’t going to be boreholes and school buildings. They’re going to be labor inspectors, census bureaus, government administrators, state pensions: All the boring stuff that makes our own countries function.

So Brooks has hit the trifecta there: he's missed half the article, he doesn't understand what it's saying, and it disagrees with him on every important point.

***It's about more than that, and too fine to summarize. It's literature, do read it.