whoa...

I just stumbled across this blog post, in which Matt Yglesias pushes back against a David Brooks column complaining about how technology has ruined romance by presenting a passage from Brett Easton Ellis's pre-Internet and texting book The Rules of Attraction. It's a pretty good pushback, if you leave aside the fact that Yglesias kind of bricks the layup by picking a segment that depicts a rape rather than a seduction, which I chalk up to him being too lazy to look further into the book (if I recall correctly, the excerpt in question comes within the first couple chapters) to pick one of the countless other exchanges that would have been more suitable to the point. But what really caught my attention was this lead-in statement:

Here’s his depiction of the the “sanctified . . . choice of an erotic partner” in 1985, when Brooks was 24 and there was no SMS or World Wide Web:

Hold the phone. David Brooks is only 48 years old? According to the infallible Wikipedia, yep. I would have pegged him at least a decade over that. I guess his apostasy vis a vis the conservative CW on same-sex marriage and Barack Obama makes a little more sense to me now.