Longtime New York Times columnist David Brooks has joined The Atlantic as a full-time staff writer, the magazine announced on Thursday, ending more than two decades of columns at the New York paper that spanned moderate politics and human connections.
Brooks, who will join the magazine in February, had previously worked with The Atlantic as a contributing editor. In a note to staff, editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg said that Brooks’ contributions “have made him known and acclaimed around the world.”
“He is, among other things, America’s best pop sociologist, someone with a reporter’s curiosity and a writer’s grace,” Goldberg wrote.
Brooks will also launch a weekly video podcast in the spring that will “explore the moral, social and philosophical underpinnings of human decency — with a particular focus on the role that institutions play in shaping communities and ideologies.” It will be supported in part by Yale University, which on Thursday named Brooks a presidential senior fellow at its School of Global Affairs.
Brooks had worked at the Times since 2003, where he wrote frequently about conservative ideals but took a marked turn against Donald Trump during the 2016 election. He also documented how humans navigate empathy and emotions, including in books such as “How to Know a Person” and “The Social Animal.” His opinions sometimes sparked controversy, as did his associations with a Facebook-linked group and an appearance at a 2011 dinner that also featured Jeffrey Epstein. Brooks said he didn’t know who Epstein was at the time, and the Times defended his appearance as part of his job.
In a Times note, opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury characterized Brooks as “our resident cartographer of the American soul.”
“David joined the paper at a moment of profound national upheaval, and over the course of more than two decades, he carved out a unique space for a brand of commentary that was as much about sociology and moral philosophy as it was about politics,” Kingsbury wrote. “His columns have often served as a testing ground for ideas that would later reshape the national discourse.”
She included a quote from his fellow columnist Thomas Friedman, who said he couldn’t imagine the Times without Brooks. “David and I have had a running joke all these years that we almost always end up in the same place politically, but we get there by totally different routes,” he wrote. “We arrive at the same conclusion that our future depends on building and proliferating communities built on healthy interdependencies cemented by shared values. This news really leaves me bummed.”
