(2004-06-09) Issenberg Vs Brooks

Sasha Issenberg [on](http://www.phillymag.com/Article Display.php?id=350) David Brooks. Brooks, an agile and engaging writer, was doing what he does best, bringing sweeping social movements to life by zeroing in on what Tom Wolfe called "status detail," those telling symbols - the Weber Grill, the open-toed sandals with advanced polymer soles - that immediately fix a person in place, time and class... There's just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false... In recent years, American Journalism has reacted to the excesses of New Journalism - narcissism, impressionism, preening subjectivity - by adopting the trappings of scholarship. Trend pieces, once a bastion of three-examples-and-out superficiality, now strive for the authority of dissertations... Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon demographer whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class earned Bobos-like mainstream cachet, nostalgizes an era when readers looked to academia for such insights: "You had Holly Whyte, who got Jane Jacobs started, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Galbraith. This is what we're missing; this is a gap," Florida says. "Now you have David Brooks as your sociologist, and Al Franken and Michael Moore as your political scientists. Where is the serious Public Intellectual-ism of a previous era? It's the failure of Social Science to be relevant enough to do it."