People like David Brooks

David Brooks (born August 11, 1961) is a 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, and 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 middle-income 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 attends synagogue. 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.