Silly David Brooks. In his Times column today, Brooks condemns Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings for being so childish as to print illuminating, on-the-record words from Stanley McChrystal and his aides. Why can't Hastings be as cautious as David Brooks?

In what is perhaps a brilliant meta move, today's David Brooks column on how aggregation is the new taste is actually composed entirely (and without citation) from ten years of embittered blog posts, fifty years of William F. Buckley essays, that one Adbusters feature, and a healthy dose of Marshall McLuhan: "On that date," Brooks says of June 29, 2007, "media displaced culture." (It is actually astounding that the column does not explicitly say "the medium is the message," though if it did Brooks might have to move back the date of this profound cultural shift to 1964 instead of pinning it to the release of the iPhone). See, now instead of respecting the old hierarchy of art we just collate and appraise and discard pieces of culture depending on ever-shifting trends and buzz. Also we blog. It's not a bad column at all, except that we cannot figure out why the hell it's under David Brooks' byline. Are people really trying to sell him on some hot new indie band? Did he get caught up in the Black Kids hype? [NYT]

Friedman's oblivious egomania, Dowd's insouciance to basic norms of logical argument, Kristof's admirable ambulance chasing: all such other Times op-ed superpowers pale in comparison to David Brooks's truly awe-inspiring, magisterial laziness. Like a frat boy funneling a brew, he sits waiting for ideas to trickle down and, when he's had his fill, spits out a rank, frothy mess whose resemblance to last week's rank, frothy mess he takes as affirmative proof of his unfalsifiable claims about life and stuff. Today, he pretends to write about music. Why?