The column cites Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce, whom I often find useful, to tell readers what most already know: if you want a job after college, major in a STEM field, nursing, or accounting; don’t major in the humanities. Bruni then trots out the pet anecdote of Silicon Valley and Tom Friedman:

The thing is, today’s graduates aren’t just entering an especially brutal economy. They’re entering it in many cases with the wrong portfolios. To wit: as a country we routinely grant special visas to highly educated workers from countries like China and India. They possess scientific and technical skills that American companies need but that not enough American students are acquiring.

Everyone in Silicon Valley knows this is bullshit. H1B workers are cheaper, full-stop. That’s why companies go through the hassle of recruiting them. There are 1.8 million unemployed engineers in this country. They can’t compete with cheaper imported or outsourced labor. Studying engineering may be a more secure path to post-graduate employment, but it doesn’t insulate one from the growing global talent pool. More importantly from a policy perspective, we don’t have a shortage on engineers. What we have is a shortage of cheap engineers.

The policies Bruni advocates here are designed to nudge students to STEM degrees, especially engineering. Make science and math cool beginning at the elementary level. Tie student aid packages to particular areas of study. Align local college curricula to the needs of local employers. These ideas betray a worldview in which some types of knowledge are more valuable than others because they are more marketable. This is why I’ve resisted calls to emphasize the marketability and utility of humanities degrees – that’s ground on which we cannot win. Instead, we must make the more fundamental assertion that knowledge of the humanities is valuable even if it is not marketable.

Presumably, Bruni knows this. I doubt he pursued his B.A. in English at Chapel Hill with a career in mind.

It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry the gospel into those parts of the world, to help on the coming of the fullness of the Gentiles, and to raise a bulwark against the kingdom of Antichrist which the Jesuits labor to rear up in those parts.

– John Winthrop in the 1629 petition to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony

Two-thirds of the way through, Bruni makes a key point: “Catholicism is as much ethnicity as dogma.” Among those who study the history of Catholic culture in America, this is no great insight. We’ve known for some time that the way Catholic communities understand themselves and, perhaps more importantly, the way they are interpreted and represented by non-Catholics mirror strategies of representation of racial and ethnic otherness. Lyman Beecher worried about a Catholic insurrection in the American West because he feared it would place America under foreign authority; his anxieties were not remotely theological. Moreover, in much of its urban history, American Catholicism has been the default position of various ethnic identities rather than an active arbiter of moral decision-making (the extent to which this is true of contemporary Latin American immigrants is, I think, a more complex question). Italians and Irish identified as Catholic no matter how infrequently they attended mass or how devoutly they hewed to Church doctrine.

So the cultural dimensions of Catholic identity are nothing new to the US. What is relatively new, it seems to me, is the appeal someone like Santorum has to evangelical and other socially conservative voters. It’s a fantastic irony that the same voters who gave Santorum victories in Alabama and Mississippi are by and large the children of the white Christian voters who were once deeply suspicious of JFK’s papism. This shift makes somewhat more sense when looking at the Supreme Court, which currently boasts six Catholic jurists (alongside three Jews, making it the first Court with no Protestant members). Four of these Catholic justices are reliably conservative (Kennedy is often the swing-vote). Commentators often note that this is part of a larger alliance between movement conservatives and conservative Catholics: the Evangelical churches rally and get out the vote, the Catholics do the intellectual heavy-lifting on the bench and in the think tanks that shape public policy.

The rise of Santorum – and to a lesser degree Newt Gingrich – indicates that perhaps conservative Catholics see a greater role for themselves beyond the intellectual backwaters of jurisprudence and policy. Maybe there’s an audience for them in conservative politics. As Bruni points out, though, that audience is very much not a Catholic one. Nonsense from Peggy Noonan notwithstanding, few who identify as Catholic support Santorum’s – and by extension their Church’s – positions on these issues. They simply aren’t outraged at the same things the bishops are. My guess is this isn’t new, that given the roles of ethnicity and culture, most American Catholics have never identified their moral concerns with those of their Church (Church here excludes the local parish priest, who as often as not probably disagreed with the bishops and magisteria). Increasingly, there are those who identify with the institutional Church (i.e. Catholic Santorum voters) and those who identify in the more traditionally American way. Bruni’s invocation of “many kinds of Catholic” understates just how much of a minority the first group is.

There’s something to be said here about the reproducibility of our personalities and images, about how the digital age abstracts and commodifies our bodies in the service of late capitalism. These dehumanizing processes become all the more insidious when internalized and re-presented in the performance of the athletic spectacle. We must “make faces” thrice over (when taking the picture, when holding the head, when performing the face live) to have our “selves” seen. Maintaining the self, then, is an increasingly labor-intensive practice.

But seriously, just look at this doofus. He’s awesome.

The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic tumult but also of impressive social cohesion.

–from today’s column by David Brooks.

To be charitable to Brooks, the first half of the sentence is not entirely incorrect. Between 1912 and 1962, there were many great wars and much economic tumult. That much is pretty indisputable and not at all stupid. “But also of impressive social cohesion” — woo, boy, is that a howler. I thought of making a list of all the things you’d have to ignore to think that claim is true. Then I remembered I have other things to do today. So I’ll stick to two:

• I might be whiter than David Brooks, but even I know that Jim Crow was a pretty freaking huge impediment to social cohesion in the early decades of the 20th century. Kinda hard to ignore that one.
• Religious discrimination that saw Catholics (and immigrants from Catholic countries) legally prohibited from equal protection resulted in the Catholic ghettos of urban centers and the popular suspicions of Catholic politicians (Al Smith, JFK, anybody opposing Prohibition). There was social cohesion as long as you went to the right church.

The periodization is, of course, also very interesting. Why Brooks chooses to date the end of social cohesion at the beginning of various important social movements would be curious if his motivations weren’t so transparent. Why does this matter, anyway?

The column is part of Brooks’s larger attempt to promote the recent work of Charles Murray, whose book Coming Apart argues that a breakdown in values among the white working class largely defines the problems that community has had in recent decades. Specifically, Taylor charts how American values have split into two camps – the relatively stable, nuclear families of the upper class and the chaotic social hodge-podge of the economically adrift. The truly amazing inversion Taylor and Brooks make is to invert the normal (at least, normal in academic circles) explanation for the breakdown. Whereas you or I (or Paul Krugman or David Frum or anyone who knows their Marx) might look to the hollowing-out of working class careers and the restriction of opportunity that represents as potential cause for social upheaval, Brooks argues the reverse – that the instability of working-class social life prevents economic advancement. In other words, you can’t get a job because you come from a single parent home; nevermind that you come from a single parent home because one parent was unable to provide for you. It’s a really mind-bottling argument.

(to be fair: This really seems to be mostly Brooks’s pet interpretation. Taylor, as Konczal points out, doesn’t really seem to have a causal explanation for anything.)

In today’s column, Brooks lashes out at the materialists who state firmly that the moral decline of the working class is a consequence, rather than a cause, of its economic decline. He claims such critics “stopped thinking in 1975.” “I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost,” he says, “it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school.” Let’s put aside for the moment the fact that, you know, it does make sense to drop out of high school in some instances (e.g. professional opportunities that do not require even a high school education). The spirit that animates this claim and Brooks’s larger tantrum is just silly. The idea that anyone is reducing the complexity of human agency to a single cause is absurd. Materialists don’t think kids drop out of school because their parents are poor; they do think it makes finishing high school harder. Similarly, I’m sure Brooks doesn’t think the social cohesion he imagines in the early decades of the 20th century was the product of principled commitment to bourgeois ideals; he must concede some of it was in economic self-interest.

As I’ve written before, I’m suspicious of any system of thought that reduces human agency to a set of responses to stimuli, be they economic conditions or social expectations. We’re immensely complex animals. If we want to understand why we do what we do, it’s best not to begin with generalizations about a half-century that have some pretty massive holes in them.

Here’s what we know: Some things are getting better. Some things are getting worse (though, as Krugman uncharacteristically points out, things aren’t as bad as everyone thinks). Anything beyond that is guesswork.

1. It’s always better to be a little bit overdressed than a little bit underdressed.
2. There’s nothing wrong with caring about aesthetics.
3. Remember that your dress isn’t just about yourself, it’s about your respect for the others around you.

– Jesse Thorn’s three essential style tips for young men

Poster Donovan Strain set out to figure out when, precisely, was the nominal good day in Ice Cube’s 1993 hit “It Was a Good Day.” He uses specific references in the song’s lyrics (e.g. “the Lakers beat the SuperSonics”) to work out that the song must be referencing January 20, 1992.

Now that’s how you do research.

As an academic and a college football fan, I’m obviously conflicted. This is one more arrow in the quiver of those who despise the emphasis on athletics in higher education, particularly at large state-funded institutions. Now, I’ve always found those arguments to be premised on ludicrous assumptions about the role of the academy. However, a situation like this one shows certain institutions actually losing money on the pursuit of nominal athletic glory, inevitably (although no one will admit it) at the expense of more worthy pursuits. I think college athletics – even big time, big money college athletics – have a place in the life of the university. I am finding it harder and harder to justify the financial sinkhole that constitutes the traditions of my favorite sport at the same time tenure-lines are being cut and tuitions are skyrocketing. Eventually, something’s going to have to give.

Also, Nebraska has lost its last two bowl games. That makes me dislike the system, too.