David Brooks: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure, a big think. You look at the journalists: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson. Those people couldn’t publish that stuff today because we’re less freewheeling, we’re more uptight. It seems to me there has been a loss of audacity in the culture, and it’s been replaced by professionalism and commercialism. One of my heroes is an art critic named Kenneth Clark. He goes through the great high points of Western art. Those high points are defined by audacity. You look at the Renaissance — that was audacious. You look at the Russian novels — that was audacious. I think we’re just not at a moment where that kind of self-confidence — which is very hard to manufacture for one person; it takes a whole group — I just think we’re not at that moment. Building AI is audacious, right? Trump, whatever you think of him — he’s clearly audacious. You wouldn’t say the quality has left our culture, so why has it left the novel?…

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