"In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart." READ MORE

Hey, David Brooks wrote a column about me! I am one of the 20% of American men of "prime" working age who does not have a job. And apparently we are destroying America by not "getting up and going to work." Oh yes: "In 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work." READ MORE

"Along the way he offers banal observations as if nobody had ever thought of them before. He reveals that women menstruate and men do not." READ MORE

Lots of people loved president Obama's speech calling for civility Wednesday night. It was a great speech. (Except the line about "jumping in rain puddles in heaven.") And in that spirit, and because I think it's good to note when people you often disagree with say something you do agree with, I very much like what David Brooks writes today: "The truth is fragmentary and it’s impossible to capture all of it. There are competing goods that can never be fully reconciled. The world is more complicated than any human intelligence can comprehend." READ MORE

"Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well." That's David Brooks, going out on a crazy limb. (He goes out on some others, which we're not even going to address. This one is maddening enough.) For starters. Barbados has a population well under 300,000, and Haiti has a population of over 10 million? Haiti is almost 11,000 square miles and Barbados is 167? This is a question of manageability. More importantly, Barbados has been stunningly smart in occupying the middle ground between neighboring tax haven islands and the highly-regulated (and/or more greatly taxed) larger neighbors in the Americas. READ MORE

Sarah Palin: "Known as the Festival of Lights, Hanukkah commemorates the eight-day miracle that took place when the Temple in Jerusalem was rededicated. Though there was only enough consecrated oil for one day, the flame miraculously burned for eight – just long enough to prepare more. This beautiful story is rich with life lessons for members of all faiths. With hope and dedication nothing is impossible, and the Almighty never abandons those who seek the light." READ MORE

David Brooks is off to the sexting races today. He is claiming, in essence, that since we kids today do not date within the circles of our church socials and Maypole parties or whatever, and that we have no "social scripts" for getting sex and romance, and so bad things happen, and we are all sexting each other and constantly trading up for better sex parties and getting all degraded. This has some truth to it! There's two places where he goes hideously wrong. For starters: "Over the past few decades, these social scripts became obsolete. They didn't fit the post-feminist era." Yeah, your complaint about the uses of technology by no means had to be hung on feminism! His other huge mistake is one of omission. His repressive nostalgia (WELL?) for what he calls the "'Happy Days' era" is a seriously rejiggered recollection, which he is certainly old enough to have, about a society in which one could not discuss, say, abortion, STDs, cancer, divorce, infidelity, sex roles, social roles or homosexuality. (So maybe it is feminism's fault! How dare they end the silence!) Would we trade all the gross and misguided New York mag sex diary nihilism in the world for a return to socially-enforced silence? Actually hell no!