At the end of each year, New York Times columnist David Brooks announces his “Sidney Awards,” which celebrate the best long-form journalism published in the previous twelve months. The awards honor and publicize essays that raise important questions about major issues and, as Brooks has put it, “say something profound about the human condition.”
In his “Sidney Awards” column for 2023, which focused on publications from small magazines, including The Hedgehog Review, which he calls a “favorite magazine,” Brooks selected Institute Senior Fellow Talbot Brewer’s essay “The Great Malformation” published in the summer issue. In this essay, Brewer searches deep into the mystery and challenge of parenting—and into the attention economy that has targeted children.
Brooks writes:
Brewer observes that parenthood comes with “an ironclad obligation to raise one’s children as best one can.” But these days parents have surrendered child rearing to the corporations that dominate the attention industry, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and so on: “The work of cultural transmission is increasingly being conducted in such a way as to maximize the earnings of those who oversee it.”
He continues: “We would be astonished to discover a human community that did not attempt to pass along to its children a form of life that had won the affirmation of its elders. We would be utterly flabbergasted to discover a community that went to great lengths to pass along a form of life that its elders regarded as seriously deficient or mistaken. Yet we have slipped unawares into precisely this bizarre arrangement.” In most societies, the economy takes place in a historically rooted cultural setting. But in our world, he argues, the corporations own and determine the culture, shaping our preferences and forming, or not forming, our conception of the good.
Read Brewer’s “The Great Malformation” at The Hedgehog Review.