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This is the podcast for July 4th, 2014. It's not safe for work. Recorded live from just

outside, David Brooks's long, long overdue performance review. It's the professional left

with Drift Glass and Blue Gal.

He's never had a performance review.

Yeah.

In the 10 years he's been at the New York Times.

I understand you listened to the entire Katie Couric Aspen Ideas Festival interview.

I did.

Start to finish.

Because journalism, baby. He has quite a bubble over there. He does. He really does. And there are... We're not going to spend a lot of time on this. This is not a David Brooks podcast today.

David Brooks has a full-time assistant who edits his 800 words to make sure, I don't know, he makes sure the apostrophies are all in the

right places and both sides are included in there. But apparently, it is just soul crushing. The

deadline demands of producing 800 words twice a week are so crushing that it flummoxes him from

time to time. But the degree to which he and Katie Couric revealed pretty much the same,

the way he has coped with people like me and you and a few million others who criticize him.

Remember back in the day when bloggers were going to hold the media to account,

we were going to crash those gates, where Marcos Molitz is his book, we're going to crash them gates, and we're going to hold them to account.. We're going to crash those gates. We're going to crash those gates.

We're going to hold them to account.

And it turns out it's really easy to avoid accountability by simply refusing to read any criticism.

...