This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2013, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
If you have read this (of course you have):
— Engaged or detached? — David Brooks | New York Times/sltrib.com Let's say you are a young person beginning to write about politics and policy. You probably have some idea of what you believe, but have you thought about how you believe it? That is to say, have you thought about where you will sit on the continuum that stretches from writers who are engaged to those who are detached? ...
— And/or this:
— The story of our time — Paul Krugman | New York Times/sltrib.com ... What has happened now, however, is that the drive for austerity has lost its intellectual fig leaf, and stands exposed as the expression of prejudice, opportunism and class interest it always was. ...
Then you should read this:
— David Brooks and the Role of Opinion Journalism — Jonathan Chait | New York Magazine The latest offensive, or counter-offensive, in the passive-aggressive Cold War between David Brooks and Paul Krugman has taken the form of an entire Brooks column not very subtly lambasting Krugman as a tired partisan hack while justifying his own work as thoughtful, elevated, and intellectually independent. It's unfortunately muddled and self-serving in a way that obscures some pretty important questions about how political commentators ought to do their job. ...
And this:
— Krugman's war — Clive Crook | Bloomberg View/sltrib.com Could I say a word about Paul Krugman? A recent blog post by the eminent economist and New York Times columnist struck me as out of the ordinary, even for him. Krugman was responding to critics who accuse him of seeing everybody who disagrees with him as either a fool or a knave. He says that's not right: Many of those who disagree with him are sociopaths. ... These days, when I read his column or his blog posts (such as one on April 29, which boasted that he's more popular on the Web than celebrity gossip), I sometimes feel as though I were watching Albert Einstein on the Cooking Channel. Is this, I wonder, the best use of his gift? ...