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David Brooks

New York Times Columnist

David Brooks is a New York Times columnist who writes on politics and culture. Prior to joining The Times in 2003, Brooks wrote for the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard.

Brooks’s books include Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), in which Brooks combined the words bohemian and bourgeois to coin the term ‘Bobo’ in order to describe today’s corporate upper class, the descendants of the yuppies. Brooks argues this marriage between bohemian and bourgeois represents a fusion of the liberal idealism of the 1960s with the self-interest of the 1980s.

Four years later Brooks published On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004). The thesis of this book connects the material drives of the American middle class with its focus on the future. Brooks’s new book is called The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, published in March 2011. The Social Animal deals primarily with what drive individuals' behavior and decision making and how we form our emotions and character.


I think we need tests and we need to apply those tests to individual teachers, to individual schools, to individual students and to individual parents.