David Brooks

The book, a paean to consumerism, argued that the new managerial or "new upper class" represents a marriage between the liberal idealism of the 1960s and the self-interest of the 1980s.

David Brooks (born August 11, 1961) is a Canadian-born American conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times.

He has worked as a film critic for The Washington Times, a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, in addition to working as a commentator on NPR and the PBS NewsHour.

Brooks was born in Toronto, Ontario, where his father was working on a PhD at the University of Toronto.

He spent his early years in the Stuyvesant Town housing development in New York City with his brother, Daniel.

His father taught English literature at New York University, while his mother studied nineteenth-century British history at Columbia University.

Brooks was raised Jewish but rarely attended synagogue in his later adult life.

As a young child, Brooks attended the Grace Church School, an independent Episcopal primary school in the East Village.

When he was 12, his family moved to the Philadelphia Main Line, the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia.

He graduated from Radnor High School in 1979.

In 1983, Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in history.

His senior thesis was on popular science writer Robert Ardrey.

As an undergraduate, Brooks frequently contributed reviews and satirical pieces to campus publications.

His senior year, he wrote a spoof of the lifestyle of wealthy conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who was scheduled to speak at the university: "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping."

To his piece, Brooks appended the note: "Some would say I'm envious of Mr. Buckley. But if truth be known, I just want a job and have a peculiar way of asking. So how about it, Billy? Can you spare a dime?"

When Buckley arrived to give his talk, he asked whether Brooks was in the lecture audience and offered him a job.

Upon graduation, Brooks became a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a wire service owned jointly by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times.

He says that his experience on Chicago's crime beat had a conservatizing influence on him.

In 1984, mindful of the offer he had received from Buckley, Brooks applied and was accepted as an intern at Buckley's National Review.

According to Christopher Beam, the internship included an all-access pass to the affluent lifestyle that Brooks had previously mocked, including yachting expeditions, Bach concerts, dinners at Buckley's Park Avenue apartment and villa in Stamford, Connecticut, and a constant stream of writers, politicians, and celebrities.

"Brooks was an outsider in more ways than his relative inexperience. National Review was a Catholic magazine, and Brooks is not Catholic. Sam Tanenhaus later reported in The New Republic that Buckley might have eventually named Brooks his successor if it hadn't been for his being Jewish. 'If true, it would be upsetting,' Brooks says."

After his internship with Buckley ended, Brooks spent some time at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University and wrote movie reviews for The Washington Times.

In 1986, Brooks was hired by The Wall Street Journal, where he worked first as an editor of the book review section.

He also filled in for five months as a movie critic.

From 1990 to 1994, the newspaper posted Brooks as an op-ed columnist to Brussels, where he covered Russia (making numerous trips to Moscow); the Middle East; South Africa; and European affairs.

On his return, Brooks joined the neo-conservative Weekly Standard when it was launched in 1994.

Two years later, he edited an anthology, Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing.

In 2000, Brooks published a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There to considerable acclaim.

"Collins was looking for a conservative to replace outgoing columnist William Safire, but one who understood how liberals think. 'I was looking for the kind of conservative writer that wouldn't make our readers shriek and throw the paper out the window,' says Collins. 'He was perfect.' Brooks started writing in September 2003. 'The first six months were miserable,' Brooks says. 'I'd never been hated on a mass scale before.'"One column written by Brooks in The New York Times dismissed the conviction of Scooter Libby as being "a farce" and having "no significance" was derided by political blogger Andrew Sullivan.

In 2004, Brooks' book On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense was published as a sequel to his 2000 best seller, Bobos in Paradise, but it was not as well received as its predecessor.

Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and taught an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006.

According to a 2010 article in New York Magazine written by Christopher Beam, New York Times editorial-page editor Gail Collins called Brooks in 2003 and invited him to lunch.

The book was excerpted in The New Yorker in January 2011 and received mixed reviews upon its full publication in March of that year.

It sold well and reached #3 on the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list for non-fiction in April 2011.

Brooks is also the volume editor of The Best American Essays (publication date October 2, 2012), and authored The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement.

In 2012, Brooks was elected to the University of Chicago Board of Trustees.

He also serves on the board of advisors for the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

In 2013, he taught a course at Yale University on philosophical humility.

In 2019, Brooks gave a TED talk in Vancouver entitled 'The Lies Our Culture Tells Us About What Matters – And a Better Way to Live'.

TED curator Chris Anderson selected it as one of his favourite talks of 2019.