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/enwiki/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)