See How They Run...

NYT opinion writer Lindsay Crouse -- who specifically focuses on "gender, ambition and power" in her columns -- writes today about an American tennis player who improved her game and focused on winning a recent match:

Naomi Osaka doesn’t usually follow pretournament chatter before she hits the court, but last month was an exception. One evening she heard a former rival of hers, Caroline Wozniacki, analyzing the lineup for the Miami Open on TV and predicting who would advance.

Wozniacki’s picks assumed that Osaka would lose her next match.  The assessment was fair, given Osaka’s struggles lately...Wozniacki is a professional peer — a player Osaka has both beaten and been beaten by. And she delivered her assessment with bluntness, not cruelty. Critiques from our rivals land differently — and can serve as motivation. You know their standards and, more important, you know they’re probably right: Your performance isn’t where it belongs.

Crouse concludes that honest competition and rivalry improved Osaka's performance -- she made it to the finals in that tournament --  more than the well-meaning positive feedback and sympathy for the pressure Osaka no doubt faced performing at the game's highest level.  

In the end, Osaka acknowledged the "negative feedback" of honest criticism raised her game and gave her something to aspire to agan:

“It feels kind of good to chase something,” she said. “That’s a feeling that I have been missing."

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Longtime columnist David Brooks too, admits today some rethinking about his support of the global economy that assumed nation states would fall into place behind Western values once economic prosperity spread via globalism

First:  he thought when the Cold War ended and international trade grew, that there would be no more rivalries and the world would admire and follow countries like America as global leader. If they would "just like us" already, they could be like us, imitating us:

The idea was that as nations developed, they would become more like us in the West — the ones who had already modernized...It was sometimes assumed that as people “modernized” they would become more bourgeois, consumerist, peaceful — just like us. It was sometimes assumed that as societies modernized, they’d become more secular, just as in Europe and parts of the United States. 

Second: he acknowledges that the cultural values of our educated Western elites don't work so well in practice in providing stability and individual freedoms for the majority of the world's citizens, who prefer to work close in communities with like-minded others who share their values, goals and aspirations for their communities or countries.

Many Western consumers don’t want trade with China because of accusations of forced labor and genocide. Many Western C.E.O.s are rethinking their operations in China as the regime gets more hostile to the West and as supply chains are threatened by political uncertainty.

Third:  Brooks publicly repents for pushing the failed idea that the elites naturally will lead, and followers will abandon their own values because economic prosperity matters more than preserving traditional cultural values.

As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge wrote in a superb essay for Bloomberg, “geopolitics is definitively moving against globalization — toward a world dominated by two or three great trading blocs.” ...

Sure, globalization as flows of trade will continue. But globalization as the driving logic of world affairs — that seems to be over. Economic rivalries have now merged with political, moral and other rivalries into one global contest for dominance. Globalization has been replaced by something that looks a lot like global culture war...

Looking back, we probably put too much emphasis on the power of material forces like economics and technology to drive human events and bring us all together. ... The fact is that human behavior is often driven by forces much deeper than economic and political self-interest, at least as Western rationalists typically understand these things.  

Finally, he admits being clueless to where any of this is taking the world, but promises to go forward using his newfound understanding and humility and confidence to promote politically liberal values as the world's new future unfolds:

I’ve lost confidence in our ability to predict where history is headed and in the idea that as nations “modernize” they develop along some predictable line. I guess it’s time to open our minds up to the possibility that the future may be very different from anything we expected.

Better late than never...

I don't know how well-read or respected David Brooks is in the public intellectual world anymore (his own values and cultural mores have shifted in recent years, some say owing to his marriage to a younger Christian woman who has introduced her beliefs  into his personal life as his new wife).  But his column today is worth reading and digesting; ... and laboring through his clunky newspaper style that appears to be untouched by any editors owing to his significant number of years at the paper.

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I wish Brooks' maturing voice had been represented in another conversation in the paper today, with three young but racially diverse Times columnists, and a moderator who works 'to bring in' their diverse voices on America's cultural issues.    I'm not exactly sure what this is -- it reads as a gaggle of Democratic activists, led by Ezra Klein of Journolist fame -- brainstorming on how they can get the D team a win politically today -- rather than a group of trained journalists honestly evaluating current events.  

The bias is glaring:

Jane, I want you to jump in, because G.O.P. strategy aside, these laws are having real-world consequences, as Ezra said, that will be hard to undo. It wasn’t so long ago that same-sex marriage was legalized in this country, and it seemed that things had turned a corner. Why do you think this is the issue the G.O.P. are trying to mainstream, and where do you think it’s going?

Jane Coaston: Well, I mean it’s because we live in hell.

Lol. She was kidding. It's not that bad for the gay folk in country, really...

Jane Coaston: I know that I’m probably the only extreme sports fan on here. But I feel like sometimes when we’re talking about Democratic strategy, it’s like, if only they would run the offense we think they should run, they would win. I actually don’t know what Democrats should do or what would be best. There’s what I would want them to do, and I don’t know if it would work.

History professor Jamelle Bouie:

And so I think one lesson to take away from this, should Joe Biden get another Supreme Court nomination, either in the next two years or if he serves another term, is that for as much as it’s clear that Democratic Party elites and people at the highest echelons of this stuff very much believe that a Supreme Court nominee must be someone with a lot of judicial experience, etc., etc., they should also be looking for people who would actually excite the public, who would get people interested and excited about what’s going on in the court. Those are the sorts of nominees they should be looking for and putting forth and putting in public. Even if that nominee may fail, the mere fact of generating that enthusiasm is an important thing. 

Klein gets the final word in the conversation:

There’s a very big difference between strategically trying to win over a population and just trying to punish a country because it at a certain point just feels like we need to keep punishing... And, look, I want to punish Putin and those behind this war in every way that is possible. And I broadly support the sanctions, despite the tremendous pain they’re causing, because I do think that they are creating pressure in the long-run for Putin to end this. But I don’t know that doing things that actually target Russian citizens — without any obvious mechanism for pressuring the regime — makes a lot of sense... 

So I worry that our view of this has, without anybody noting it, kind of flipped. And we may not be creating the incentive system that we had hoped to. 

Their discussion is also in audio form.  I'm not sure if reading the transcript of two young columnists and a podcaster (who also seems to occasionally write a column but is not formally a columnist?), still growing into their political strategies, is quality reading necessarily, but if you want a preview of how the Dems are hoping to win against all odds in future domestic elections using their media helpers led by well-networked guys like Klein -- and push the gay cultural issues, painting all Republicans as out-of-touch haters -- this too is worth your time.

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The newest hire as the Times adds to their columnist roster is a married gay woman (pronouns: she/hers) who was once at the Times, and has used various platforms as stepping stones to advance her career.  She's back, and more in your face than ever...

I, for one, would love to be in a conversation with this one discussing the difference between Daddies and donors, and how many Americans raising young children often have no trouble at all accepting lesbian couples and their children in their own child's 3rd grade class, say, (as discussed in the conversation above), so long as their own family structures are respected as well, and the  more liberal beliefs are not imposed on everyone, labeling as bigots those who believe in science and refuse to pretend there is no difference between the two.  Not all other parents want to do a detailed dive and early-on explain why Heather has Two Mommies, but no Daddy.  (Kids naturally ask! And she does have a biological male who fathered her, even if he's not a present "Daddy".)

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A good start to the Spring season overall.  Let's see if they can keep pace, and continue re-examining their past beliefs and acknowledging things in reality don't always play out as you predict they will -- or openly advocate for -- in a newspaper.