David Brooks (commentator)
David Brooks | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 11, 1961 |
| Occupation(s) | columnist, pundit |
| Website | New York Times columns |
David Brooks (b. August 11, 1961) is a columnist for The New York Times.
David Brooks was born in to a Jewish family in Toronto and grew up in New York City in Stuyvesant Town. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a degree in history. Brooks served as 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, and a commentator on NPR and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
He has written a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. Brooks also writes articles and makes television appearances as a commentator on various trends in pop culture, such as internet dating. He has been largely responsible for coining the terms bobo, red state and blue state. His newest book is entitled On Paradise Drive : How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense.
Before the Iraq War, Brooks had argued forcefully on moral grounds for American military intervention, echoing the belief of neoconservative commentators and political figures that American and British forces would be welcomed as liberators. However, some of his opinion pieces in the spring of 2004 suggested that he had tempered somewhat his earlier optimism about the war.
David Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and he taught an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006. [1]
Brooks in the political spectrum
Brooks describes himself as being originally a liberal. In 1983, for example, he wrote a parody of conservative pundit William F. Buckley, Jr. :
- 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. (University of Chicago Maroon, April 5, 1983.)
Buckley admired the parody and offered Brooks a job with National Review. A turning point in Brooks's thinking came later that year in a televised debate with Milton Friedman, which, as Brooks describes it, "was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point."[2]
On August 10, 2006, Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled "Party No. 3". The column proposed the idea of the McCain-Lieberman Party, or the fictional representation of the moderate majority in America.
Social views
Though he opposes what he sees as self-destructive behavior like teenage sex and divorce, Brooks is not a culture warrior in the traditional sense. His view is that "sex is more explicit everywhere...except in real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious" by "waiting longer to have sex...[and] having fewer partners." He sees the culture war as nearly over, because "today's young people...seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right." As a result, he is optimistic about the United States' social stability, which he considers to be "in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair." (New York Times, April 17, 2005, 4-14.)
Brooks also broke with many in the conservative movement when, in late 2003, he came out in favor of same-sex marriage in his New York Times column. He equated the idea with traditional conservative values: "We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.... It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage." (New York Times, November 22, 2003, A-15.)
Philadelphia Magazine controversy
In April 2004, Sasha Issenberg of Philadelphia Magazine set out to retrace the journey through Franklin County, Pennsylvania, that Brooks described in the article "One Nation, Slightly Divisible" published in 2001 in the Atlantic Monthly. [3] [4] Issenberg uncovered several inaccuracies and distortions in Brooks's article. For example, Brooks wrote "On my journeys to Franklin County, I set a goal: I was going to spend $20 on a restaurant meal...I'd scan the menu and realize that I'd been beaten once again. I went through great vats of chipped beef and 'seafood delight' trying to drop $20. I waded through enough surf-and-turfs and enough creamed corn to last a lifetime. I could not do it." Issenberg discovered that, to the contrary, "I lunched at the Chambersburg Red Lobster and quickly realized that he could not have waded through much surf-and-turf at all. The `Steak and Lobster' combination with grilled center-cut New York strip is the most expensive thing on the menu. It costs $28.75."
When confronted with these inaccuracies, Brooks accused Issenberg of being "too pedantic" and of "taking all of this too literally".
Partial bibliography
- On Paradise Drive : How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004) ISBN 0-7432-2738-7
- Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) ISBN 0-684-85377-9
See also
External links
- "Meet David Brooks", New York Times biographical video interview
- New York Times columns
- Brooks participates in extended political discussion with Andrew Rosenthal, Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, New York Times video, July 17, 2006
- David Brooks: The end of integration?, International Herald Tribune , July 6, 2007
- David Brooks: Why liberals are turning on their favorite conservative
- Everybody's a Critic
- Weekly Standard's biography
- Blog exploring and expanding on the works of David Brooks
- David Brooks interviewed by Brian Lamb on Booknotes
- 2004 Philadelphia Magazine article about accuracy of David Brooks's observations
- David Brooks in conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Video
- David Brooks at IMDb
- David Brooks and the deceitful tactics of the Beltway pundit by Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com