Focus on: David Brooks

Never heard of the guy: he popped up in my NYT email: The Great Forgetting, NYT, 11 April, 2008. {You may need to register with NYT to read it.} Anyone who can trip off phrases such as “…hippocampically challenged” and conjure up this century as Bad Memory Century with: “..supermarket parking lots will be filled with cranky criminal gangs composed of middle-aged shoppers looking for their cars. ” is o.k. by me. The clincher: use of the word lagniappe, which needed looking up. Just a few is o.k.: reading an Antony Burgess novel is something else: if he was alive he might well be converting his books to hypertext DVD to help us out a bit.

Brooks, I see, provided this commencement address he gave to Wake Forest University:

The Hidden River of Knowledge

This is him talking in a Meet the Columnists video at NYT.