BEST OF '04:

Hookie Awards, Part 2 (DAVID BROOKS, 12/28/04, NY Times)

On Saturday I handed out the first batch of Hookie Awards. These prizes, determined by a rigorously subjective scientific formula, go to some of the important political essays of 2004, and celebrate the legacy of great public intellectuals like Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell and Irving Howe.

So here's the second batch...

MORE (from the Archives):
The Hookie Awards (DAVID BROOKS, 12/25/04, NY Times)

Some people say that the age of the public intellectuals is over, that there are no longer many grand thinkers like Lionel Trilling or Reinhold Niebuhr, writing ambitious essays for the educated reader. It's true that there are fewer philosophes writing about the nature and destiny of man, but there are still hundreds of amazing essays written every year.

In celebration of that fact, and in case you're looking for some mind-expanding holiday reading, I've decided to create the Hookie Awards. Named after the great public intellectual Sidney Hook, they go to the authors of some of the most important essays written in 2004.

I should mention that essays for The New York Times and other newspapers are not eligible for these prizes, and that if you go to the Web site version of this column, at www.nytimes.com, you will find links to the winning essays.

Here is the first batch of Hookie Laureates...

Here are a few we liked that he missed:

ECONOMICS:

The Neoconomists: The Bush administration's other revolutionaries. (Daniel Altman, May 10, 2004, Slate)

Health Savings Accounts great plan for health care (Terry Savage, January 22, 2004, Chicago Sun-Times)

Fear of Hell Might Fire Up the Economy (Kevin L. Kliesen and Frank A. Schmid, July 29, 2004, Regional Economist)

The End Of the Age Of Inflation (Robert J. Samuelson, December 2, 2004, Washington Post)

WHY GOLD? (James Surowiecki, 2004-11-22, The New Yorker)

The 50¢-a-Gallon Solution (GREGG EASTERBROOK, 5/25/04, NY Times)

RONALD REAGAN:

The prisoners' conscience (Natan Sharansky, Jerusalem Post, June 6th, 2004)

Ronald Reagan's creative destruction (Spengler, Jun 7, '04, Asia Times)

THE UNKNOWABLE: Ronald Reagan’s amazing, mysterious life. (Edmund Morris, The New Yorker, 6/21/04)

In Solidarity: The Polish people, hungry for justice, preferred "cowboys" over Communists. (LECH WALESA, June 11, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

Freedom's Team: How Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II won the Cold War. (John Fund, June 7, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

The Intellectual Origins of Ronald Reagan's Faith (Paul Kengor, Ph.D., April 30, 2004, Heritage Lecture)

Reaganism: The Gipper's brand of conservatism is unique to America. (JOHN MICKLETHWAIT AND ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE, June 8, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

GEORGE BUSH:

President Bush has already left a big mark on history (David Shribman, Oct 8, 2004, Concord Monitor)

BUSHSPEAK: The President’s vernacular style. (PHILIP GOUREVITCH, 2004-09-06, The New Yorker)

George Bush and the Treacherous Country (Steve Erickson, 2/13/04, LA Weekly)

Bush Brought a Gift for the Pope (Sandro Magister, www.chiesa)

Ideology vs. Practicality - A Hamiltonian GOP? (Adam Yoshida, September 10, 2004, Insight)

A New GOP? (James W. Ceaser and Daniel DiSalvol, Fall 2004, Public Interest)

GEOPOLITICS:

The Fruits of Appeasement (Victor Davis Hanson, Spring 2004, City Journal)

The Muslim Renovatio and U.S. Strategy (Michael Vlahos, 04/27/2004, Tech Central Station)

The coming of Shia Iraq: After 500 years of Sunni rule, Iraq's election will finally hand power to the Shia majority. (Bartle Bull, November 2004, Prospect)

A World Without Power (Niall Ferguson, July/August 2004, Foreign Policy)

The Politics of the Gang (Lee Harris, 03/02/2004, Tech Central Station)

The Media and Medievalism (Robert D. Kaplan, December 2004, Policy Review)

Gulliver’s travails: The U.S. in the post-Cold-War world (John O’Sullivan, October 2004, New Criterion)

America Unlimited: The Radical Sources of the Bush Doctrine (Karl E. Meyer, Spring 2004, World Policy Journal)

Why Is Bermuda Richer Than Venezuela? (Carlos A. Ball, 06/01/2004, Tech Central Station)

Four Surprises in Global Demography (Nicholas Eberstadt, August 20, 2004, AEI Online)

Hating America (Bruce Bawer, Spring 2004, Hudson Review)

DECENT LEFT?:

A Friendly Drink in a Time of War (Paul Berman, Winter 2004, Dissent)

The Cult of Che: Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries. (Paul Berman, Sept. 24, 2004, Slate)

A DEMOCRATIC WORLD: Can liberals take foreign policy back from the Republicans? (GEORGE PACKER, 2004-02-09, The New Yorker)

The Case for George W. Bush: i.e., what if he's right? (Tom Junod, Aug 01 '04, Esquire)

RELIGION:

The Fire Next Time (Joseph Bottum, Spring 2004, The Public Interest)

The Real Inquisition: Investigating the popular myth. (Thomas F. Madden, 6/18/04, National Review)

The atheist sloth ethic, or why Europeans don't believe in work (Niall Ferguson, 07/08/2004, Daily Telegraph)

The Enemies of Religious Liberty (James Hitchcock, February 2004, First Things)

Our Union’s Jewish State (David Klinghoffer, 3/17/04, The Forward)

The evil that men do (Theodore Dalrymple, 3/20/04, The Spectator)

Bad and bored (Theodore Dalrymple, 9/04/04, The Spectator)

The Future Belongs to the Fecund (James Pinkerton, 09/01/2004, Tech Central Station)

Athens and Jerusalem: Reflections on Hellenism and the Gospel (Dr. John Mark Reynolds, 7/16/04, Orthodoxy Today)

Aquinas for the Democratic Age: a review of Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory, by John P. Hittinger (Robert Kraynak, Spring 2004, Claremont Review of Books)

That Other Church: Let's face it: Secularism is a religion. Let's treat it as such. (David Klinghoffer, 12/21/2004, Christianity Today)

One nation under God: The US is powerful and religious; the EU is weak and secular. Mark Steyn wonders whether it is any coincidence (Mark Steyn, 3/15/04, The Spectator)

A democratic & republican religion (Marc M. Arkin, Summer 2004, New Criterion)

Prince Charles: Could the anti-Enlightenment views of King Charles III destroy the "welfare monarchy"? (Tristram Hunt, June 2004, Prospect uk)

The incoming sea of faith: atheism has been discredited by the collapse of communism and the postmodern need for tolerance (Alister McGrath, 9/18/04, The Spectator)

The Trouble with Libertarianism (Edward Feser, 07/20/2004, Tech Central Station)

HOMOSEXUALITY:

If we wanted to be straight, we would be: Attempts to identify a genetic basis for homosexuality refuse to accept that sexual desire is a social construct (Julie Bindel, December 14, 2004, The Guardian)

Homosexual "Marriage" and Civilization (Orson Scott Card, February 15, 2004, The Rhinoceros Times)

DARWINISM:

Planet with a Purpose: If Earth is an organism getting ever more complex, doesn't that mean humans might have been made for a reason? (Robert Wright, BeliefNet)

The Malthusian Trap (Benjamin Marks, November 23, 2004, Mises.org)

The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories (Stephen C. Meyer, August 28, 2004, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington)

MISC.:

The Perpetual Adolescent: And the triumph of the youth culture. (Joseph Epstein, 03/15/2004, Weekly Standard)

George S. Schuyler and Black History Month(s) (Nicholas Stix, February 23, 2004, Mich News)

The Middle Ages of reason: It was the medieval world that dragged us into the future, not the reactionary Renaissance (Terry Jones, February 8, 2004, The Observer)

Traducing Solzhenitsyn (Daniel J. Mahoney, August/September 2004, First Things)

The Scientist and the Poet (Paul A. Cantor, Winter 2004, New Atlantis)

Remembering the Warsaw Uprising: Sixty years later, a look back at the longest and bloodiest urban insurgency of the Second World War. (Maciej Siekierski, Fall 2004, Hoover Digest)

In Warsaw, a 'Good War' Wasn't (Anne Applebaum, June 2, 2004, Washington Post)

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 28, 2004 8:49 AM