Crooked Timber’s Henry Farrell slams senior liberal intellectual Alan Wolfe as a source of “ideas journalism of all kinds except that kind which actually has ideas” (ouch):

[I]t seems to me that Alan Wolfe doesn’t come in for anywhere near as much flak as he deserves. Not that he’s a [Dinesh] D’Souza, or anything like him, but he is Gertrude Stein’s Oakland in human form, a sort of Lowest Common Denominator of liberal wuffle. Wolfe is the source of relentless waves of book reviews, opinion articles, magazine squibs and monographs; in short, of ideas journalism of all kinds except that kind which actually has ideas. I have a friend whose cure for writer’s block is to pick up the latest Wolfe emanation in the New York Times Book Review or wherever it might be, and use it as a class of a purgative. As he reads it, he gets increasingly furious that this sort of guff can get published by apparently serious journals; this anger serves as a spur to his own creativity. It may be that sometime, somewhere, Alan Wolfe has said something that is both interesting and true; if so, I have yet to see it (readers who believe that they have spotted insightful Wolfe articles in the wild should of course feel free to point to them in comments).

Tell us what you really think! Farrell is not quite as brutal as Matt Taibbi’s Thomas Friedman takedown, though. If you missed it, here’s an excerpt from the most savage review in recent memory:

Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.