[news] 0 = 1 (now fuck me)

David Brooks' column in yesterday's New York Times is about a Tom Wolfe novel in which, I gather, a young woman goes to college and encounters a college culture that Wolfe and Brooks disapprove of. To both writers, this demonstrates something about the moral laxity of modern society. Brooks is prepared to be very smug about this; not having read the book, I can't say if Wolfe is the same. But here's the column's big finish, the three sentences before the last-paragraph wrap-up:

Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone. And they find themselves in a world of unprecedented ambiguity, where it's not clear if you're going out with the person you're having sex with, where it's not clear if anything can be said to be absolutely true.

Those last two clauses are the most godawful use of parallel construction as a rhetorical scam that I've ever seen. And Brooks means it!

(In the name of intellectual honesty, here is the link if you want to read it, but seriously, it's not worth it. If you do, Grimmelmann makes a good point about the column's authoritarian motives.)