Claremont Insider: David Brooks Comes to Scripps

Thursday, February 3, 2011

David Brooks Comes to Scripps

New York Times columnist David Brooks will be speaking at Scripps College 7:30pm next Tuesday, February 8.

Brooks will speak at Garrison Theater as part of the Elizabeth Hubert Malott Public Affairs Program. Garrison is located at 231 E. Tenth St. His lecture is titled "The Social Animal Post Election."

Brooks is slowly making the rounds at the 5C's. In April, 2003, he spoke at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum and talked about McMansions and bobos (see below).

Here are the details from the Scripps website:

Book signing to follow in the lobby. Doors open at 7:00 p.m. Priority seating in Garrison Theater will be given to members of the Scripps Community with their Scripps ID. Limited seating will be available to others on a first-come, first-served basis. FMI: (909) 607-9372

David Brooks is a keen observer of the American way of life and a penetrating analyst of present-day politics and foreign affairs. He has become one of the prominent voices of conservative politics in the United States; with his elegance and finely tuned reason and wit, he engages both sides of the debate eloquently. Brooks is one of the New York Times's most widely read columnists and is a regular analyst on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and NPR's All Things Considered.

Brooks was a founding senior editor of The Weekly Standard and has been a contributing editor at Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly. He worked at the Wall Street Journal for nine years in a range of positions, including op-ed editor. He has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Forbes, the Washington Post, and many other periodicals. Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy and taught an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006.

In his Elizabeth Hubert Malott lecture at Scripps College, Brooks will draw from his upcoming new book and the recent elections to paint a thorough and eye-opening picture of today’s political climate. His new book, The Social Animal: the Inner Roots of Character and Achievement, is due out in March 2011. In his previous two books, New York Times best-seller Bobos in Paradise and On Paradise Drive, Brooks describes what he calls “comic sociology”—depictions of how we live and “the water we swim in.” In Bobos in Paradise he coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today’s upper class: those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Brooks has a gift for bringing audiences face-to-face with the spirit of our times with humor, insight, and quiet passion. He is also editor of the anthology Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing.