David Brooks

Staff Writer, The Atlantic, and Senior Fellow and Advisor, UChicago Leadership & Society Initiative

David Brooks is a staff writer at the Atlantic and is the inaugural Presidential Senior Fellow at the Yale University Jackson School of Public Affairs, taking up both roles in February 2026. Additionally, Brooks is host of The Permanent Questions, a video podcast on purpose, meaning, and how to live, produced by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale.

For 22 years, he was a columnist for the New York Times and is the author of, among other books, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011), The Road to Character (2015), The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (2019), and How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (2023)

Brooks has been a reporter and op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek and a regular commentator on the PBS NewsHour. Brooks currently serves as chair of Weave: The Social Fabric Project at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C.

He has been a Senior Advisor and Senior Fellow of the University of Chicago Leadership and Society Initiative since 2023.

David helps LSI Fellows understand the world more deeply as they consider where their experience and talents can make a meaningful contribution. What might your next chapter hold? Take the Assessment