The Sidney Awards By DAVID BROOKS

January 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Sidney Awards By DAVID BROOKS

Everything becomes a shorter version of itself. Essays become op-eds. Op-eds become blog posts. Blog posts become Twitter tweets. The Sidney Awards stand athwart technology, yelling stop. They are awarded every year to some of the best examples of long-form journalism and thought.

The first Sidney goes to Michael Lewis, whose essay “The End” appeared in Portfolio magazine. Lewis often writes about people who can see reality clearly while the rest of humanity is lost in a fog of delusion. He describes Meredith Whitney and Steve Eisman, two financial analysts who understood early on that the U.S. financial system had turned into a doomsday machine. Whitney announced early on that Citigroup was in a ton of trouble. Eisman stood up in the middle of a speech by a mortgage company C.E.O. to tell him that his default rates were about to become astronomical.

At the climax of his essay, Lewis has lunch with John Gutfreund, the former chief executive of Salomon Brothers who had been the subject and victim of Lewis’s first book, “Liar’s Poker.”

“Your [expletive] book destroyed my career, and it made yours,” Gutfreund told him. Lewis believes the turning point on Wall Street came when Gutfreund turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into a public corporation, leading to a wave of such transformations.

“No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself 35 to 1 or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine C.D.O.’s. ... No partnership, for that matter, would have hired me or anyone remotely like me. Was there ever any correlation between the ability to get in and out of Princeton and a talent for taking financial risk?”

In “The Unwisdom of Crowds,” in The Weekly Standard, Christopher Caldwell explores the contradictions between common-sense morality and the rules of finance. In a time of economic crisis, common sense tells you to hunker down and save money. But this is the exact moment when a central bank has to lend freely and spend profligately.

As individuals, we hope to be honest and transparent, but financial regulators often work best being opaque and capricious. That way they can serve as lenders of last resort while still keeping firms nervous and cautious.

Fundamentally, Caldwell is asking an uncomfortable question about the morality of capitalism. The system is not just based on hard work. “To be blunt, credit is successfully re-established when financial elites say, ‘When.’ Credit is close to a synonym for the mood of the ruling class. To say an economy is based on credit is to say it is based on animal mysteries. Glamour, prestige, élan, sprezzatura, cutting a figure ... that is what the economy is made of.”

In “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” which appeared in The Atlantic, an anonymous writer, Professor X, describes what it is like to teach an introduction to writing at a small private college and a community college.

The semesters start out with energy and excitement, but then it comes time to write a paper: “Remarkably few of my students can do well in these classes. Students routinely fail; some fail multiple times, and some will never pass, because they cannot write a coherent sentence.”

These students have done very little reading. Professor X’s efforts are heroic but tragic. “In each of my courses, we discuss thesis statements and topic sentences, the need for precision in vocabulary, why economy of language is desirable, what constitutes a compelling subject. I explain, I give examples, I cheerlead, I cajole, but each evening, when the class is over and I come down from my teaching high, I inevitably lose faith in the task, as I’m sure my students do. I envision the lot of us driving home, solitary scholars in our cars, growing sadder by the mile.”

In the March 12 issue of The New Republic, John Judis gave us an early, brilliant explanation of the Barack Obama phenomenon. America has always had an Adamic tradition, Judis noted, a desire to begin anew. As D. H. Lawrence wrote, America “starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth.”

Judis showed how this desire has played out in American literature, from Melville’s Billy Budd to Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, and in politics, from Jackson to Kennedy to Obama. He showed how Obama unconsciously played on the Adamic chords. He concluded on a hopeful but nervous note: “The American instinct to continuously remake ourselves in the image of Adam — to achieve a decisive and final break with history — has periodically proven seductive to voters. And, sometimes, this instinct can produce important, transformative results. Yet the past — in the form of race or war or deeply held partisan animosities — has a way of lingering around.”