Intellegenter and Idealisticer

"How Adam Tooze beat Chapo Frat House"  How a professor at Columbia "supplanted" the son of a New Yorker editor and his crew. Published in New York Magazine. 

“Is there a word for members of the Adam Tooze fandom,” wondered journalist Brendan O’Connor on Twitter last fall. What to call them? Tooze Boys, Tooze Bros, Tooze Hounds, Tooze Heads, Tooze Dudes, Toozers. (“Tooze Bro,” in my experience, seems to come up most often in relation to online fans, “Tooze Boy” in relation to students. I have heard, secondhand, of a complaint that everyone says “Tooze Bros” and no one says “History Boys.”) The name is contentious, the appeal inarguable. “For the Tooze Bros, what Adam does is he validates the little-boy interest in big machines and great men playing Risk while also embracing all the left-wing, anti-imperial, 21st-century politics we’re supposed to have,” said Ethan Winter, an analyst at the think tank Data for Progress. “That’s very fun.”

The media contingent of Tooze's fan base are readers who relish a chance to "feel marginally superior to Matt Yglesias," as journalist Alex Pareene put it.

The need to be fans and the need to have them. The need to be popular. The desperate need to belong.

In the seven years that he has been tweeting “intensively,” Tooze believes he has managed to avoid significantly offending anyone. For him, the app has provided a cordial and sustaining intellectual community. “Those are my peeps,” he said. Twitter has “become far more important for me than academic seminars.” Lately, he said, the writing he enjoys most is “the short tempos” — the articles, newsletters, and other commentary. He suspects the climate book he is working on now will be the last he writes for some time. Since the beginning of 2022, Tooze has published eight articles in The New Statesman, Foreign Policy, and The Guardian; 40 editions of Chartbook (not including link roundups); and 1,500 tweets. 

Written by a woman; that's how the irony creeps in, small and not enough. It's a puff piece. It it were written by a man it would be unbearable. She mentions his wife's business but not his role as a tour guide. Fans who could afford it would love to be led around Tuscany or Provence by their hero.

The shrinks and the house in the Bahamas are a nice touch. 

The best response to Mearsheimer I've read is the comment by a non-white non-American that his loudest critics have never gotten over his arguments about the Israel lobby.