Along with his brother, Daniel, David spent his early years living in Stuyvesant Town housing, in New York City.

When he was 12, his family moved to the well-to-do suburbs of Philadelphia's Main Line area, where he graduated from Radnor High School in 1979.

His senior year, he wrote a spoof of the lifestyle of wealthy conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who was scheduled to speak at the university: "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior.

From 1990 to 1994, the newspaper posted Brooks as an op-ed columnist to Brussels, where he covered Russia (making numerous trips to Moscow); the Middle East; South Africa; and European affairs.

[1][4] In 2000, Brooks published a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There to considerable acclaim.

"[7]One column written by Brooks in The New York Times, which dismissed the conviction of Scooter Libby as being "a farce" and having "no significance",[10] was derided by political blogger Andrew Sullivan.

Brooks is also the volume editor of The Best American Essays (publication date October 2, 2012), and authored The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement.

"[45] Ottawa Citizen conservative commentator David Warren has identified Brooks as a "sophisticated pundit"; one of "those Republicans who want to 'engage with' the liberal agenda".

"[47] In fact, Brooks read Burke's work while he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and "completely despised it", but "gradually over the next five to seven years ... came to agree with him".

... That didn't immediately turn me into a conservative, but ..."[49] On August 10, 2006, Brooks wrote a column for The New York Times titled "Party No.

[50] In a March 2007 article published in The New York Times titled "No U-Turns",[51] Brooks explained that the Republican Party must distance itself from the minimal-government conservative principles that had arisen during the Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan eras.

Alex Pareene commented that Brooks "has been trying for so long to imagine a sensible Republican Party into existence that he can't still think it's going to happen soon.

[53][54] In 2005, Brooks wrote what columnist Jonathan Chait described as "a witheringly condescending" column portraying Senator Harry Reid as an "unhinged conspiracy theorist because he accused the [George W. Bush] administration of falsifying its Iraq intelligence.

[58] Brooks wrote "many of us thought that, by taking down Saddam Hussein, we could end another evil empire, and gradually open up human development in Iraq and the Arab world.

In an August 2009 profile of Brooks, The New Republic describes his first encounter with Obama in the spring of 2005: "Usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don't know political philosophy better than me.

"[48] However, in a February 2016 New York Times op-ed, Brooks admitted that he missed Obama during the 2016 primary season, admiring the president's "integrity" and "humanity," among other characteristics.

[66] Regarding the 2016 election, Brooks spoke in support of Hillary Clinton, applauding her ability to be "competent" and "normal" in comparison to her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump.

[67][68] In addition, Brooks noted that he believed Clinton would eventually be victorious in the election, as he foresaw that the general American public would become "sick of" Trump.

As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious" by "waiting longer to have sex ... [and] having fewer partners".

In 2007, Brooks stated that he sees the culture war as nearly over, because "today's young people ... seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right."

"[77] Brooks had already started in 2017 a project called "Weave", in order, as he described it,[77] to "support and draw attention to people and organizations around the country who are building community" and to "repair [America]'s social fabric, which is badly frayed by distrust, division and exclusion.

"[78] Brooks also takes a moderate position on abortion, which he thinks should be legal, but with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal afterward, except in extremely rare circumstances.

[80] In reviewing On Paradise Drive (2004), Michael Kinsley described Brooks' "sociological method" as having "four components: fearless generalizing, clever coinage, jokes and shopping lists."

Taking umbrage with the first of these, Kinsley states, "Brooks does not let the sociology get in the way of the shtick, and he wields a mean shoehorn when he needs the theory to fit the joke".

[81] This followed the 2004 Philadelphia magazine fact-checking of Bobos in Paradise by Sasha Issenberg that concluded many of its comments about middle America were misleading or untrue.

[7] In 2015, David Zweig expressed the opinion in a Salon piece that Brooks had gotten "nearly every detail" wrong about a poll of high-school students in his recent, The Road to Character.

[86] Sean Illing of Slate criticized the same article, claiming Brooks took arguments out of context and routinely made bold "half-right" assumptions regarding the controversial issue of poverty reform.

[90] In a self-published blog, law professor Ann Althouse argues that in the piece, Brooks "distorts rather grotesquely" by exaggerating the character of Texas solicitor general Ted Cruz (who brought the case to the high court).

[91] In 2018, Brooks wrote an opinion for The New York Times on the generation gap between older and younger Democrats, attributing young Democrats' radicalism to "cultural Marxism... now the lingua franca in the elite academy",[92] for which he was criticized by Ben Alpers of the University of Oklahoma,[93] for mainstreaming a "conspiracy theory"—the history of which he traces in his critique—that dated to the Nazis, and had antisemitic roots.

[96][better source needed] In 2023, Brooks was criticised online following a tweet presented as misleading that claimed an airport hamburger meal had cost $78, and that the exorbitant cost of hamburgers was the reason Americans were dissatisfied with the economy;[citation needed] his critics pointed out that Brooks' high restaurant bill was the result of his ordering multiple scotches along with his meal.