Eggers, Scocca concludes, is “full of shit,” and with that he is off, for many thousand more words. It is an artful performance, with a number of fine moments. At one point, Scocca quotes me on the deliberate streak of optimism in my work—and he is not wrong in locating in that attitude a subtle self-interest. In being nice to the world, the writer obliges the world to be nice to him. But Scocca has larger ambitions: he wants to argue that the tyranny of niceness is the defining feature of our age, and he wants to make Dave Eggers the poster child for this movement. And it is here, I think, that his essay falters.

Dave Eggers, Tom Scocca, and Why It’s Not Awful to Be Nice : The New Yorker