Talk:Ross Douthat

What is a Ross Douthat?

The question on everyone's mind these day's is "What is a Ross Douthat?". This is a very interesting question and one that is very difficult to answer. The reasont this is so difficult to answer is becuase no one know's what the heck a Ross Douthat is? If you have any insight on this subject, please post it. Everyone is asking "What is a Ross Douthat?".

64.246.194.235 (talk) 16:15, 9 August 2010 (UTC)CWD

He is not a conservative

He is stating many 'Right-Wing' Americans Don't Understand Hawaii Is A State. That is classic belittlement of all right wing people.
He also incorrectly stating the question of Obama's birth certificate is only on the right which most of the legal battles against Obama started from left wing people in defense of Hillary
http://media.eyeblast.org/newsbusters/static/2010/06/2010-06-28MSNBCTESDouthat.wmv
--OxAO (talk) 03:34, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Chapo Trap House edition

I added this to the page because it is very relevant, but the wiki text/coding may not be right. Please feel free to add this correctly. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.148.243.91 (talk) 12:45, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

Page Purpose

This page has multiple unsourced claims that I attempted to verify and could not through Googling. It reads more like an personal advertisement than reaching the notability marker, as without unsourced information, it becomes a few sentences of where he worked and a couple of little known books. This page may need to go through AfD, as right now, it's fairly useless. Seola (talk) 19:14, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

I was already to support you with a recommendation that you boldly cut out large sections of the article that were unsourced so I had a quick look and found quite a few references, so was surprised at your comment above. Still, if you believe there are multiple unsourced claims, you should just remove them. It will then be up to others to have the burden of proof should they wish to restore the material you deleted, since this is a WP:BLP and any unsourced material can be challenged and removed.

However, save yourself the time of going to Afd with this, as that will most certainly fail; Douthat is a well known columnist and author that writes regularly for the NYT and appears frequently in other major venues. Delete any unsourced claims here by all means, but Afd is a complete waste of your time. Mathglot (talk) 20:07, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

Connecticut?

"Ross Gregory Douthat was born in 1979 in San Francisco, California, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut."

"His symptoms began in 2015, soon after he and his family had moved to Connecticut." These two competing biographical sentences seem contradictory. Unless we have reached the point where childhood has extended to one's late thirties. _{*SIGHS IN BOOMERISH*} Yoavthestrong (talk) 15:07, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

abortion

Ross Douthat hasn't written in support of support of banning abortion, he's analyzing pro-life arguments. Hedistef (talk) 09:15, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

The Influential Books Game

Someone said Douthat's favorite books ("The Influential Books Game", Ross Douthat, New York Times) were "irrelevant details that seemed to have been added by Ross himself." A lot of rot; I know, because I added it. And an author's influences could hardly be more significant. Why do you think literary biographers cite the books that shaped their subjects? These are, according to Douthat himself, the books that influenced him. That is the heart of the matter, especially for a writer who often writes about literature, as Douthat does. His "tastes in fiction" are relevant because, by his own admission, they have shaped his worldview, and give us a key to understanding it. Charlie Faust (talk) 02:56, 9 May 2024 (UTC) Charlie Faust (talk) 03:10, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Your summary of this is a subtle form of WP:OR. If a reliable independent source discusses his 2010 column on his favorite books, and that source contextualizes why that information is significant, we could summarize that source. It cannot be up to us, as editors, to decide that this one column from 2010 is so important that quotes from it should take up more than half of the section on his personal life. It is not enough to just pick-and-choose which bits of information are encyclopedically significance based on our own personal preference, we need to use reliable, independent sources to contextualize this information for us. Grayfell (talk) 19:31, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

I agree with Grayfell. --ZimZalaBim ^talk 20:20, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Don't know about "encyclopedically significance", do think an author's formative influences are significant. To take a random example, from A. S. Byatt's page we learn "Byatt was influenced by Henry James and George Eliot as well as Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Coleridge, Tennyson and Robert Browning, in merging realism and naturalism with fantasy. She was not an admirer of the Brontë family, nor did she like Christina Rossetti. She was ambivalent about D. H. Lawrence. She knew Jane Austen's work off by heart before her teens. In her books, Byatt alluded to, and built upon, themes from Romantic and Victorian literature. She cited art historian John Gage's book on the theory of colour as one of her favourite books to reread."

That is valuable, as it gives insight into the works that shaped her own writing. Ditto for Douthat. As for a reliable independent source, it's from the paper of record. How's that for a reliable source? Charlie Faust (talk) 02:23, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Well, for one thing, you are comparing a prolific columnist writing about his own taste in novels in a single column, to a novelist who's taste in novels was written about by other people. This is not a helpful comparison, since every article must be evaluated based on the specific set of sources discussing the topic.

For another, the value of this information would be explained and contextualized via a reliable WP:IS. Douthat's column is reliable as a primary source, but it's not an independent source, and it's flimsy for demonstrating why this is significant. WP:BLP article specifically should be cautious of over-relying on such sources for promotional details.

Presumably, he has likes and dislikes towards other columnists and non-fiction writers, as well as movies and music, and perhaps pizza toppings as well. These do not belong merely because they can be supported via one example of his own writing, fourteen years ago. Instead, we use sources to explain to readers why these things matter.

I do not think this belongs at all, but it is the excessive length of these quotes and use of editorializing ellipses is what made this paragraph into hagiography. Grayfell (talk) 03:32, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

"Presumably, he has likes and dislikes towards other columnists and non-fiction writers, as well as movies and music, and perhaps pizza toppings as well. These do not belong merely because they can be supported via one example of his own writing, fourteen years ago. Instead, we use sources to explain to readers why these things matter."

Pizza toppings are a non-sequitur, as he does not write about food, as far as I know. He does often write about literature, and those are, according to Douthat, books that influenced him. (Also, pizza toppings do not generally shape one's worldview, as Douthat says his favorite books did for him.) Don't know about hagiography, either; I'm not sure that Watership Down is, as Douthat claims, "the best modern novel about politics", though I do love that book. But since he often writes about pop culture (including fantasy) as it relates to politics, that is absolutely worth noting.

The page for Roger Ebert (which I have edited and which is a certified "Good Article") features the following: "His college mentor was Daniel Curley, who 'introduced me to many of the cornerstones of my life's reading: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, The Ambassadors, Nostromo, The Professor's House, The Great Gatsby, The Sound and the Fury... He approached these works with undisguised admiration. We discussed patterns of symbolism, felicities of language, motivation, revelation of character. This was appreciation, not the savagery of deconstruction, which approaches literature as pliers do a rose.'" That is absolutely worth noting, as it tells us of works that influenced Ebert's worldview, and since Curley's approach to criticism seems to have influenced his own. Douthat's favorite books are worth noting for the same reason. Charlie Faust (talk) 03:44, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

If this were merely a matter of favorite books, I might agree that it's arbitrary. But it's not, and it isn't. These are, per Douthat, the books that influenced his worldview, and as such are absolutely worth noting. And, I might add, worth noting for any author; the page for William H. Gass has his list of the twelve most important books of his life, and rightly, for the excellent reason that it gives insight into his influences. Charlie Faust (talk) 04:32, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Again, please note the need for reliable independent sources, not a primary source. Also be aware that WP:OTHERCONTENT applies here; just because some other article might have similar content is not a sufficient argument. --ZimZalaBim ^talk 13:17, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Are those articles outliers? Not really. The page for Roger Angell informs us: "His style of baseball writing was inspired, he said, by John Updike's article on Ted Williams's farewell to fans at Fenway Park, 'Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu'. Angell said 'John had already supplied my tone, while also seeming to invite me to try for a good sentence now and then, down the line.'” Again, absolutely worth noting. The page for David Frum informs us: "Marcel Proust is his favorite novelist." Again, worth noting, as he has written about Proust and politics, as Douthat has written about fantasy and politics. An author's formative influences are worth noting, whether they are a film critic (Ebert), a baseball writer (Angell), a speechwriter and commentator (Frum), a Booker Prize winner (Byatt) or "a prolific columnist" (Douthat). And, if I say so, the Ebert article is not just "some article", it's a certified Good Article.

If you want secondary sources, plenty of profiles mention his tastes in literature and how they influence his own writing; see, for example, Mark Oppenheimer, "Ross Douthat's Fantasy World", Mother Jones, which mentions his passion "for G.K. Chesterton, the novelist Anthony Powell, and conservative Catholicism" and how his reading influenced his worldview: "You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you’re reading G.K. Chesterton, then you’re a Catholic.'" See also, Isaac Chotiner, "The Believer", The New Yorker. Charlie Faust (talk) 22:37, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

Whether or not it's outlier is a distraction, at least by itself. Lots of articles have problems, but all articles should provide context from WP:IS instead of the opinions of individual editors.

You could've saved yourself a lot of time by just linking to those sources from the beginning. I've added a mention of Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkein per those sources. I've tried to use those sources to contextualize why this is important. In both of those interviews Douthat indicates that this isn't a particularly novel of uncommon influence for young Catholics, so anything more than this level of detail would misrepresent those sources. Grayfell (talk) 00:20, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

OK, thank you for adding mention of Chesterton, Lewis, and Tolkein per those sources. Charlie Faust (talk) 00:25, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

The Necessity of Atheism Criticism

Douthat is listed as a critic of atheism, and so he is, but you'd have little knowledge of that from the article. Wouldn't it be worth linking to some of his article's on the subject? (For example, the blog entry "Should Tyler Cowen Believe in God?") Charlie Faust (talk) 20:50, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

We would need a reliable secondary source confirming that he is a critic of athiesm. Linking to his own blog wouldn't be appropriate. --ZimZalaBim ^talk 21:23, 11 October 2024 (UTC)