David Brooks

David Brooks (born August 11, 1961, Toronto, Canada) is a Canadian-born American journalist and cultural and political commentator. Considered a moderate conservative, he is best known as an op-ed columnist (since 2003) for The New York Times and as a political analyst (since 2004) for PBS NewsHour, a television news program on the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service.

Brooks grew up in New York City and Pennsylvania and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a B.A. in history. He began his media career as a police reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago before he joined the Washington Times in 1984, where he contributed editorials and film reviews. In 1986 he joined The Wall Street Journal, initially editing the paper’s book reviews and briefly serving as a film critic. He then worked from the paper’s Brussels office as an editor and foreign correspondent. By the end of his tenure at the Journal in 1994, he had become an editor of the paper’s opinion page. He became a senior editor at The Weekly Standard magazine at its inception in 1995. He was also a contributing editor of Newsweek magazine. In 2003 Brooks began writing an op-ed column for The New York Times. The following year he became a commentator on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (later called PBS NewsHour).

Brooks was widely regarded as a moderate conservative. Although he agreed with neoconservatives that the United States should use its military might to advance its interests abroad, he supported limited government regulation of the economy and even championed some liberal causes, such as same-sex marriage.

In addition to his news reporting and commentary, Brooks wrote articles for several major magazines, including the The Atlantic Monthly. He was the editor of the anthology Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing (1996) and the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004), The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011), The Road to Character (2015), and The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (2019).