Utopia Limited

Robert Owen's planned community of New Harmony, Indiana, as envisioned by F. Bate, 1838. Wikipedia.

Abstract David Brooks, "The Child in the Basement", January 13 2015:

Summarizes Ursula K. Le Guin's short work "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973), and proposes three interpretations of its allegorical import.

Spoiler alert: all three are fundamentally wrong, as fearless literary scholar David Brooks could easily have learned by checking the story's Wikipedia entry, which cites Le Guin's own account of what she meant.

With nothing he wants to write about or anybody wants to read about and a deadline looming, Brooks is delving into something like surrealist automatic writing here, with the old thought processes minimally engaged, so there's a good deal of purely Brooksological interest in the way it reveals the inner workings of his mind. Readers who are more interested in reality might not be able to bring themselves to care. Everybody should just read "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" if you've never done so—here's a good text and it's under seven pages and you'll never forget it—and feel free to skip my report. No, wait, I'm kidding—