David Brooks is stardust. David Brooks is golden. David Brooks is billion-year-old carbon.

Photo by Julie Larsen Maher © WCS, via National Geographic. Talking about preserving it when our EPA is run by a tool of the agents of pollution and greenhouse gas production is dreary policy and politics, isn't it? Let's make it into a deep-sounding allegory instead!

Verbatim David Brooks, "This American Land":

These days I often ask people what percentage of our nation’s problems can be solved through policy and politics. Most people say that most of America’s problems are pre-political. What’s needed is a revival of values, fraternity and a binding American story.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that David Brooks often asks people what percentage of our nation's problems can be solved through politics and most of the respondents say that most of America's problems are pre-political?

Answer: David Brooks refuses to release his visitor logs, so we can't ascertain for sure.

Today we have some entirely original thinking from David Brooks as 1950s New York intellectual, armed with quotes from Thoreau and Whitman and aiming at the Great American Summary Statement. I'm trying to imagine how stressful it is to have a conversation with him:

BROOKS: Say, Yas, just offhand, what percentage of our nation's problems can be solved through policy and politics, would you say?

YAS: Uh.

BROOKS: I mean, I'd say not that many.

YAS: Well, um, sure. I mean the question would be, what other means are you talking about? What's your no-policy, no-politics approach to national problem solving? Who's in charge?

BROOKS: I don’t know all the ways that revival of spirit can come about, but even in the age of the driverless car and Reddit, I suspect some of the answers are to be found in reconnecting with our ancient ideals and reconnecting with the land.

YAS: Oh. Ah. Reconnecting with the land. To be sure.

BROOKS: So I can chalk you up for revival of spirit, and fraternity, and a binding American story?

Public intellectuals, thought leaders, and um what?

Today's book report from former New York Times columnist David Brooks ("This Age of Wonkery") is on Daniel Drezner's The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas, which just popped out of the lab and into the ideas market on Friday:

In his book, The Ideas Industry,” Daniel W. Drezner says we’ve shifted from a landscape dominated by public intellectuals to a world dominated by thought leaders. A public intellectual is someone like Isaiah Berlin, who is trained to comment on a wide array of public concerns from a specific moral stance. A thought leader champions one big idea to improve the world — think Al Gore’s work on global warming.

Which I think is sidestepping the point Drezner really wants to make: that the traditional "marketplace of ideas" has been transformed in the 21st century into an "ideas industry"—so that the old intellectual village, I guess, where we always used to get together to haggle over the price of the dry goods before repairing to the local for some spiritual liquid refreshment has given way to a Satanic intellectual mill, powered by some previously unavailable energy source, where we must toil in smoke and darkness, whipped into submission.

There are more things in philosophy...

...Than are dreamt of in David Brooks's heaven and earth.

Harold Lloyd, The Freshman, 1925.

The old moral humilist is back from a brief holiday, somewhat refreshed and in some philosophically louche company, that of Christian psychologist Robert C. Roberts (Baylor University) and regulative epistemologist W. Jay Wood (Wheaton College). It's his more or less monthly book report, on a book by Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).

And what, you want to know (don't deny it!), is regulative epistemology (if not a metascientific stool softener)?