Peak David Brooks Sloth

Sloth with a lot on his plate, via Giphy.

As you may or may not know, New York Times columnists have been expected since the Information Era arrived on 42nd Street, I think sometime in 2008 (?), to keep a blog or something like that, and David Brooks has basically never done it though there's a Web page purporting to contain one:

This blog covers the intellectual, cultural and scientific findings that land on David Brooks's desk nearly everyday but don't always make it into his twice-weekly column or his conversations with his fellow columnist Gail Collins.

It doesn't; what it contains is 13 blog posts from spring and summer 2011 followed by 14 "Life Reports" submitted by readers, in November and December 2011, when he tried to get them to do it for him, Tom Sawyer–style, followed by a single post of June 2014 where he responded to reader comments on his idiotic theory that there are two kinds of sports, logarithmic (soccer) and exponential (baseball), and he hasn't been back since.

As for that Conversation with Gail Collins, which began in May 2008 and quickly devolved into an improvised routine in which she emailed him one-liner prompts to which he responded (I figure it took her two hours a week and him ten minutes), it seems to have come to a halt in November 2014.

Collins has now restarted it with an alternative Brooks, Arthur, of the American Enterprise Institute and rumored to be one of David Brooks's spiritual directors on his road, if he's on the road, into the bosom of the Roman Church: as she wrote in its debut,

I miss my old pal David Brooks, but David’s just got too much on his plate to pick up one more project right now. And I get another Brooks! I will refrain from making any water-related jokes.

Now she's sliding into it, in today's dialogue on old Scalia, referring to David as "the previous Brooks", like "the previous incumbent", though he remains as the present Brooks on Tuesdays and Fridays. I don't know if I can convey what it is that seems to me so funny about this; it's the thought that he's too much of an indolent hack to even manage to be wholly himself without some assistance—"Arthur, can I borrow some of your Brooksishness? I'm running a little low."