Centre News

New York Times columnist and PBS/NPR commentator
David Brooks will deliver the Press Lecture on April 14.
“It goes without saying that Brooks is one of the most
influential opinion-makers in the world,” says Jeff Glor
of CBSNews.com.

Brooks’ most recent book, The Social Animal: The
Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement,
was released this March. Reviewers have called it his
best work yet.

New York Times columnist and PBS/NPR Commentator David Brooks will be on campus on April 14 to deliver this year’s Press Lecture. The convocation, which will be held in Centre College’s Norton Center for the Arts, will begin at 8:30 p.m. and is open to the public.

Brooks has been a columnist for the New York Times since 2003 and also serves as a commentator on PBS’ The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. In addition, he is a frequent analyst on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and the “Diane Rehm Show.” Brooks has also been a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a contributing editor at Newsweek and Atlantic Monthly, and he worked for The Wall Street Journal for nine years.

“It goes without saying that Brooks is one of the most influential opinion-makers in the world,” says Jeff Glor of CBSNews.com. “If you want to know where this country stands, and where it might head next, it’s never a bad idea to dip into David Brooks.”

This March, Brooks released his latest book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, published by Random House. The New York Times reported on March 11 that “readers of his Op-Ed column in The New York Times know that David Brooks is an aficionado of research in the social sciences, especially psychology, and that he believes it has great practical importance. Now he has written a book, ‘The Social Animal,’ in order to assemble the evidence for a certain conception of the human mind, the wellsprings of action and the causes of success and failure in life, and to draw implications for social policy.”

The book has already received numerous rave reviews, often being heralded as his best work yet. Louisville’s Courier-Journal calls it a “provocative and fascinating new book…a novelistic nonfiction hybrid that seeks to do nothing less than revolutionize our notions about how we function and conduct our lives.” The Globe and Mail describes it as “a rich stir-fry of disciplines and approaches, from neuroscience to evolutionary biology to behavioural economics. As a result, there’s all sorts of quotable arcana suitable for discourse at your next gathering of bright young things.” And the New York Public Library declared it “a multilayered, illuminating work grounded in everyday life.”

Brooks is also the author of Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense, both published by Simon & Schuster.

Among the many publications in which Brooks’ work has appeared are The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, the Washington Post, the TLS, Commentary, and The Public Interest. Currently, he serves as editor of the anthology Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing.