The Sidney Awards II By DAVID BROOKS

ecember 29, 2009
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Sidney Awards II By DAVID BROOKS

On Friday, I gave out the first batch of Sidney Awards for the best magazine essays of the year. Frankly, it was disappointing to see how quickly some winners were corrupted by fame. Several have already abandoned their families, accepted spots on reality shows and begun hanging out with Lil Wayne. I’m hoping today’s winners will do a better job of keepin’ it real.

Steven Brill’s essay, “The Rubber Room,” in The New Yorker generated a lot of discussion. It’s about the room where New York City schoolteachers who have been dismissed for incompetence sit for years on end and continue to collect their six-figure salaries for doing nothing. The word Dickensian doesn’t fully describe the madness of a system that cannot get rid of bad teachers.

Brill takes readers inside the room, and describes the arbitration hearings for teachers who want to be reinstated. One hearing, with clear-cut evidence against the teacher, stretches on 50 per cent longer than the O.J. trial.

Few essays are as ruthlessly honest as Bethany Vaccaro’s piece, “Shock Waves,” in The American Scholar. Vaccaro’s brother Robert suffered a brain injury, caused by an I.E.D. explosion in Iraq in January 2007.

Vaccaro describes her first glimpse of him weeks after the explosion at Bethesda Naval Hospital. “Robert was swollen and bloated; his skin was puffy and enamel white. He looked worse than dead and somehow a bit reptilian.” But the real subject of the essay is the injury’s effect on her family. “Now it defines our daily existence. The ongoing process of rehabilitation since his injury has tenaciously enmeshed each one of us, altering our plans, our family structure and interactions, our ideas about life and sacrifice, and most resolutely our belief that if he would only make it back home, everything would be O.K.”

Robert’s injury, she writes, has “allowed him to come so close to being normal, and yet miss it altogether ... He will frequently prattle away with wide-eyed seriousness and then collapse into silly laughter that is sweet and uninhibited but also sad coming from a 25-year-old man.”

After the Israeli incursion into Gaza, the U.N. produced the Goldstone Report, a tendentious and simple-minded account of Israeli tactics. But the report at least produced a sophisticated response, “The Goldstone Illusion,” by Moshe Halbertal in The New Republic.

Here’s a typical problem: Hamas fires rockets from apartment buildings. Israel calls the residents of the buildings to warn them a counterattack is coming. Hamas then escorts the residents to the roof, knowing Israeli drones will not fire on crowded roofs. Israel then deploys a “roof-knocking missile,” a weapon designed to scare people off roofs in preparation for an attack. Halbertal wrestles with the moral boundaries that should guide this kind of warfare.

On the big think front, Josef Joffe has a bracing essay, “The Default Power,” in Foreign Affairs, puncturing the claims that America is in decline. William M. Chace wrote “The Decline of the English Department” in The American Scholar on why fewer and fewer college students major in the humanities.

Jim Manzi’s essay, “Keeping America’s Edge,” in National Affairs, explores two giant problems. First, widening inequality; second, economic stagnation, the fear that without rapid innovation, the U.S. will fall behind China and other rising powers.

Manzi investigates a dilemma. Most efforts to expand the welfare state to tackle inequality will slow innovation. Efforts to free up enterprise, meanwhile, will only exacerbate inequality because the already educated will benefit most from information economy growth.

In her Policy Review essay, “Is Food the New Sex?,” Mary Eberstadt notes that people in modern societies are freer to consume more food and sex than their ancestors. But this has produced a paradox. For most of human history, food was a matter of taste while sex was governed by universal moral laws. Now the situation is nearly reversed. Food has become enmeshed in moralism while the privacy of the bedroom is sacred. Eberstadt asks why, and provides a philosophical answer.

It’s become fashionable to bash Malcolm Gladwell for being too interesting and not theoretical enough. This is absurd. Gladwell’s pieces in The New Yorker are always worth reading, so I’ll just pick out one, “Offensive Play,” on the lingering effects of football violence, for a Sidney award — in part to celebrate his work and in part as protest against the envious herd.

There are, of course, many other essays that, in a less arbitrary world, would get Sidneys. Fortunately there are a few Web sites that provide daily links to the best that is thought and said. Arts and Letters Daily is the center of high-toned linkage on the Web. The Browser is a trans-Atlantic site with a superb eye for the interesting and the profound. Book Forum has a more academic feel, but it is also worth a daily read.