David Brooks (born August 11, 1961) is a Canadian-born American book author and political and cultural commentator. Though he describes himself as a "moderate Republican", others have characterised him as centrist, moderate conservative, or conservative, based on his record as contributor to the PBS NewsHour, and as opinion columnist for The New York Times. In addition to his shorter form writing, Brooks has authored seven non-fiction books since 2000, two appearing from Simon and Schuster, and five from Random House, the latter including The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011), and The Road to Character (2015).
Beginning as a police reporter in Chicago and as an intern at William F. Buckley's National Review, Brooks rose to his positions at The New York Times, NPR, and PBS after a long series of other journalistic positions (film critic for The Washington Times, reporter and op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal, senior editor at The Weekly Standard, and contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly).
Brooks was born in Toronto on August 11, 1961, where his father was working on a PhD at the University of Toronto. Along with his brother, Daniel, David spent his early years living in Stuyvesant Town housing, in New York City. Their father taught English literature at New York University, while their mother studied 19th-century British history at Columbia University. Brooks was raised Jewish, but rarely attended synagogue in adulthood. As a young child, he was enrolled in the Grace Church School, an independent Episcopal primary school in the East Village. When he was 12, his family moved to the well-to-do suburbs of Philadelphia's Main Line area, where he attended Radnor High School, where he competed on the debate team with actor and Back to the Future star Tom F. Wilson. Brooks graduated in 1979 and attended the University of Chicago, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts 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 where he 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.
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.
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, which dismissed the conviction of Scooter Libby as being "a farce" and having "no significance", was derided by political blogger Andrew Sullivan.
In 2004, Brooks's 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 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. 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 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. In 2013, he taught a course at Yale University on philosophical humility.
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 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.
In 2026, Brooks left The New York Times, joining The Atlantic and becoming a fellow at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs.
Ideologically, Brooks has been described as a centrist, a conservative, and a moderate conservative. Brooks has described himself as a former democratic socialist and "a Burkean... [which] is to be a moderate", saying that such was "what I think I’ve become". He said in a 2017 interview that "[one] of [his] callings is to represent a certain moderate Republican Whig political philosophy." In December 2021, he wrote that he placed himself "on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party". In 2024, he said he finds himself "rooting for the Democrats about 70 percent of the time" and that he was "almost all the way to joining" the Democratic Party. Ottawa Citizen conservative commentator David Warren has identified Brooks as a "sophisticated pundit"; one of "those Republicans who want to 'engage with' the liberal agenda". When asked what he thinks of charges that he's "not a real conservative" or "squishy", Brooks has said that "if you define conservative by support for the Republican candidate or the belief that tax cuts are the correct answer to all problems, I guess I don't fit that agenda. But I do think that I'm part of a long-standing conservative tradition that has to do with Edmund Burke ... and Alexander Hamilton." In fact, Brooks read Burke's work while he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and "completely despised it", but "gradually over the next five to seven years ... came to agree with him". Brooks writes that "my visceral hatred was because he touched something I didn't like or know about myself." In September 2012, Brooks talked about being criticized from the conservative side, saying, "If it's from a loon, I don't mind it. I get a kick out of it. If it's Michelle Malkin attacking, I don't mind it." With respect to whether he was "the liberals' favorite conservative" Brooks said he "didn't care", stating: "I don't mind liberals praising me, but when it's the really partisan liberals, you get an avalanche of love, it's like uhhh, I gotta rethink this."