Fun Fact: "Nothingburger" Was Also The Name Of One Of Those Exotic Sammiches...

Every Republican who went on the record yesterday using the "nothingburger" talking point will probably be hard to book today.

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) July 11, 2017

...that made David Brooks' unnamed (and possibly imaginary) high-school-degree-only neighbor's-babysitter he's trying to make "friend" run into the street and throw herself in front of a taco truck.

I was braced by Reeves’s book, but after speaking with him a few times about it, I’ve come to think the structural barriers he emphasizes are less important than the informal social barriers that segregate the lower 80 percent.

Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.

Which, in turn, caused "David Brooks" to trend at #1 on Twitter --

-- on a day when, among other things, Donny Junior mixed up two big-boy words -- "exonerate" and "implicate" -- and made the already-absurd job of his daddy's phalanx of stooges and shit-slingers super, duper ludicrous.

Funny old world.


UPDATE:  And just in time for the bulldog edition, The Restaurant at the End of the SAT Vocabulary List notes that its menus come with, y'know, translations (h/t @BilliardLentil) --

Employee at D.C. sandwich shop that intimidated David Brooks' friend notes the menu has translations on it https://t.co/VoOM6dlxyO

— Andrew Beaujon (@abeaujon) July 11, 2017

-- which, if you've been working this beat for awhile, should sound remarkably familiar.  From Sasha Issenberg in 2004:

David Brooks: Boo-Boos in Paradise

Wayne-bred David Brooks is the public intellectual of the moment. But our writer found out he doesn’t check his facts.

“In Montgomery County we have Saks Fifth Avenue, Cartier, Anthropologie, Brooks Brothers. In Franklin County they have Dollar General and Value City, along with a plethora of secondhand stores,” Brooks wrote. In fact, while Franklin has 14 stores with the word “dollar” in their name — plus one Value City — Montgomery County, Maryland, has 34, including one that’s within walking distance of an Anthropologie in Rockville.
...

Brooks, however, does more than popularize inaccessible academic work; he distorts it. Barone relies on election returns and public-opinion data as the basis for his research; Frey looks to the census. But Brooks takes their findings and, regardless of origin, applies to them what one might call the Brooks Consumer Taste Fallacy, which suggests that people are best understood by where they shop and what they buy.

Unfortunately, as with the Red/Blue article, many of the knowing references Brooks deftly invoked to bring Patio Man to life were entirely manufactured.

I LOOKED AT ANOTHER of Brooks’s more celebrated articles, an August 2002 piece in the conservative magazine the Weekly Standard in which he discerned a new American archetype he dubbed “Patio Man...

Unfortunately, as with the Red/Blue article, many of the knowing references Brooks deftly invoked to bring Patio Man to life were entirely manufactured...

Before publishing, Mr.  Issenberg contacted Mr. Brooks to get his reaction.  Here are a couple of excerpts

“That was partially to make a point that if Red Lobster is your upper end … ” he replied, his voice trailing away. “That was partially tongue-in-cheek, but I did have several mini-dinners there, and I never topped $20.”...

I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being “too pedantic,” of “taking all of this too literally,” of “taking a joke and distorting it.” “That’s totally unethical,” he said...

A reminder:  this was 13 years ago.

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