David Brooks Has a New Podcast
Insufferable columnist David Brooks, who swapped his first wife for his much younger research assistant, has a new podcast “The Permanent Questions.” On morality. Because irony is dead.
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I know you’re all waiting for the next exciting David Brooks status alert. How has our favorite scourge of single mothers been enjoying life since leaving the New York Times? Has he tired of lecturing young Yale students on how to fall in love? Or shown up again in the Epstein files? Whatever shall he do next?
The answer: That most predictable of things — a podcast.
Yes, David Brooks has a new podcast — “The Permanent Questions.” The pitch:
What makes us human? How can I find purpose in life? How can my relationship survive a rough patch? What do I say to a friend who’s suffering? Does any of this mean anything at all?
David Brooks found purpose with his much younger research assistant now wife. I’m sure he can tell us many things about what it is to be a wandering dick human on the path to Higher Purpose.
It’s easy to lose sight of fundamental human concerns amid the churn of the news cycle and the demands of every day. Each week on The Permanent Questions, host David Brooks seeks to return them to our attention through thoughtful conversation with the world’s deepest thinkers.
Yes, David is sitting at the table with the World’s Deepest Thinkers. They talk about virtue, happiness, meaning, education, and whether chucking the mother of your children for your much younger research assistant is the foundation of good character.
Ooh! I have a question, David!
When you consider the 23-year age gap between you and Anne Snyder do you pray she doesn’t trade you in for a younger moral philosopher? Someone whose, um, character still, um, lifts?
Stay young and relevant with a podcast. Lecture the world on riding out “rough patches.” I’m sure she’ll take the hint.
The Guardian newspaper asked this pompous windbag about his podcast, because I guess Nigel Farage wasn’t available to talk about his hair care regimen.
I’ve thought this for a long time that there’s a weird market failure in media – that we have a ton of podcasts about politics, tech, business, health, sports, but not enough about the big humanistic questions that get covered in a liberal arts education.
David Brooks would like you to know that he had a liberal arts education. People born in 1961 could get a job with those, back in the day.
And I think that’s part of a wider dehumanization of our culture that all the things that sort of ennoble the human spirit, we are doing less of it, like reading, religious services, conversation, friendship, that sort of stuff.
Or boinking your much younger research assistant while writing a book on Moral Character. #ennobling
I wanted to do it mostly because, personally, I had great teachers in college and they really changed my life, and I wanted to have that kind of conversation again. I thought it’d be fun. Other people would want to have these kinds of conversations. So that was a selfish reason. But then socially, I just think at a time of great technological advance, doing something very humanistic, having conversations like the one we just taped, which was: “Do humans have souls?” I think they do, and the guy I interviewed thinks they don’t, so we just had an argument. But I needed this, and I think the culture needs to ask the big questions again.
Only David Brooks can ask the Big Questions!
Out of 4.7 million podcasts worldwide, only David Brooks is having important, humanistic conversations! NPR, the BBC, legacy media they just want to discuss Kim Kardashian’s spray tan. Meanwhile the World’s Greatest Thinkers remain tragically sidelined. Wallflowers at the Great Banquet of Ideas. Won’t someone please, please invite them on a podcast? I think David Brooks should create a podcast just for them. For all the liberal arts majors born before 1961.
I’ve long believed that American culture as a whole is overpoliticized and undermoralized, which is to say that we follow every little political scandal, whether we’re going to remember it in two days or not. And so the big questions of life, like: how do you sit with someone who’s just lost a child or a spouse? … somehow those are weirdly underaddressed.
Yes, David how do you sit with someone who just lost a spouse? Oh, I know! You write a staggeringly self-congratulatory essay in the New York Times telling your first wife — who changed her name and religion for you — only to be dumped for a much younger researcher assistant, not to “cleave” to your awesomeness.
Remember when you wrote:
The paradox is that the person doing the leaving controls the situation, but greater heroism is demanded of the one being left behind. The person left in the vapor trail is hurt and probably craves contact. It’s amazing how much pain there is when what was once intimate conversation turns into unnaturally casual banter, emotional distance or just a void.
She just lost her spouse. And you told her to be a hero. To suck up your vapor trail. And shamed her grief in the newspaper of record.
My permanent question: Who gave you a platform on morality?
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Its creepy that people like this enjoy stroking their ego in public, and its even creepier that some people enjoy watching. I hope they all can be shamed into obscurity.
Brooks is a joke as a philosopher (moreover a moral philosopher) whereas I think Kate Manne may be the genuine article. Her new book sounds very timely and interesting.
Excerpt from Manne’s Substack: https://katemanne.substack.com/p/the-authority-of-the-body?publication_id=950263&post_id=215517100&isFreemail=false&r=381mk5&triedRedirect=true
In my next book, Imperative, I argue that bodily imperatives just are moral imperatives of the most fundamental kind. Of course, morality goes beyond the body and encompasses social organization too. We need umpteen social practices with norms that are conducive to everyone’s bodily imperatives being satisfied, and these norms have an important derivative moral authority. In part, what emerges, at a practical level, is that a society which puts women in the position of perpetual caregivers is forcing women to play the role of moral under-laborers. Our work is morally vital, yes; it’s also backbreaking.
The only solution to the situation which has emerged not only nationally but globally is political and structural and sweeping: the vital moral labor of caring for the body must be equitably redistributed among both men and women, and supported and guaranteed by a humane social safety net that catches not only the vulnerable but also the endless unheld holders. Such proposals may be intellectually familiar but this book shines a new light on their urgency: half of the human population is being massively overtasked with responding to the most pressing moral demands on all of us.
Morality has its source not in the univocal, booming voice of a masculine god who tells us what to do but in the bodily imperatives of vulnerable people and creatures. It is thus inevitably and ineluctably multivocal: as multiple in its sources as there are bodies, present and future, with imperatives that demand our keen responsiveness. In the social world as it is, women are tasked with the bulk of the moral work that most urgently needs doing. This situation is insupportable, unsustainable, and intolerable. It is the opposite of justice; morality demands it be remedied.
Spot on, HoaC.
Contrast David Brooks with Arthur Kleinmann, a medical anthropologist at Harvard, who at about the same age as Brooks discarded his wife, instead, put his career on hold at its height to care for his wife who developed a rare form of early Alzheimer’s disease. Kleinmann spent almost his entire 60s as her personal caregiver, and afterwards published “The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor.”
We share the same impulse: when presented with a depressing sample of humanity,imagine their diametric opposite.
Wonderful!
I’m incredibly pleased to see more and more women of my generation and those younger stating that “No – I will NOT be thr unsung and unpaid fallback caregiver for anyone older than myself. They need to PLAN for it and it’s not me!” Particularly when dating.
“Oh, you have older relatives? What are your plans for their care, if they need and ask for it?”
The answer determines the future of the relationship.
I think for self protection elders should formulate plans and contracts earlier rather than later. I’ve heard way too many stories of rapacious beneficiaries vulturing their ailing parents’ estates and using undue influence or outright fraud to chase away other beneficiaries. These situations ultimately end up very abusive to the elders in question.
I wholeheartedly agree with that too.
Every time I see his name on a book cover, I remember his vile behavior when he discarded his wife.
Vile beyond words. Not only did his first wife *convert to Judiasm* for him and their family, much later, when he dumped her for his much younger research assistant, *and* then publicly shamed his first wife in the NYT, *and* then continued to pontificate about morality, he then *converted to Catholicism*. In my book this is about strike five. Or, to use an old fashioned word, apostasy.
Yes, I vividly remember how he shamed and mocked his wife. Ugh.
Hes really a good example of how philosophy can be manipulated for ones purposes or job just like any religion. He likes talking about those topics because he knows how to sound well-read but he has no moral compass but himself. Like so many preachers….he doesnt preach a specific church but he preaches false superiority of a similar patriarchical.moralusn The most revealing quote here was the last one — where he seems to grasp the mechanics of the event of cheating or specifically leaving ones spouse— but removes it of all emotional inconveniences. The abandoned partner should just be ‘heroic’ lol while left in a vapor trail of confusion.. The leaving person caused it — the leavee needs to just suck it up.
I’d call what he has an “ego compass.”
No thanks Mr. Brooks. I am NOT taking advice (life, relationship, philosophical, or otherwise) from a misogynist.
He’s such a gigantic asshole. At least there is a little comfort in knowing that besides our valiant Chumplady, commentators from the Democracy party, left side of the political spectrum he is a target of much mockery nd derision. But we here at CL know that these types have no shame.
Reading David Brooks’ pompous, narcissistic nonsense makes me really glad my ex was a bad writer.
https://slate.com/business/2013/12/david-brooks-scant-self-awareness-divorced-pundit-suddenly-not-so-worried-about-family-breakdown.html
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/david-brooks-conversion-story
May Sarah Brooks (nee Jane Hughes) be far happier now than she ever was with this pompous jerk.
https://chumplady.com/david-brooks-has-a-new-podcast/#comment-792200
https://nypost.com/2026/04/20/media/atlantic-writer-david-brooks-who-wed-much-younger-assistant-after-ditching-wife-mocked-for-planned-love-advice-talk-at-yale/
https://medium.com/crows-feet/why-you-probably-shouldnt-listen-to-david-brooks-about-marriage-915d1f64bc41
I’m enjoying these articles about David being a pompous self-serving azz and getting called out on it. He’s a schmuck and worse.
Uhg. A man of very low character at the end of the day.
I love a good joke first thing in the morning.
These people continue to grow and spread like black mold because no one at their table has the balls to call them out- they remind me of a pack of wild dogs all sniffing furiously at each other’s butts and showing their belly to the loudest angriest voice .
Hopefully change is coming along with the Karma Bus.
My cheater ex married a 23 year younger Filipino lady to care for him in his 60s and upward. My Louisiana Ex has joined the Fillipino group at church so that during our international church- wide celebration 2 days ago, he marched under the flag of the Phillipines and stood up front to take a bow with the rest of that culture. Although I watched in my grey 🪨 rock mode..and left the celebration early..I was still thinking BETTER HER THAN ME. It’s a great plan for retirement if you ask me and now that th mask is off…SHE CAN HAVE HIM.
YES he did break my heart before i saw the porn addicted, compulsive S addicted, bipolar, person he really was..he can marry an ostrich for all I care. As for sicko Podcaster spewing their dysfunctional lives
.BOY COTT.
“because I guess Nigel Farage wasn’t available to talk about his hair care regimen.”😆
I am glad folks are seeing through a lot of these gas bags. There are too many of them of all persuasions, that just need to live their icky lives and sit down and shut up.
He gives me the permanent ick.
Hey, I’m 74 and unlike David Brooks, I don’t find it “easy to lose sight of fundamental human concerns amid the churn of the news cycle and the demands of every day.” When your character is grounded in paying attention to those concerns and fundamental values, you don’t lose sight of them when a new person wanders across your field of vision.
Does anyone know what has happened to the first Mrs Brooks? Or the kids? It would be interesting to get their perspective on this POS.
His daughter’s name is Naomi. If it can appear in a 2005 NYT article, I figure it’s okay to share.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/students/pop/articles/29taste.html
One son, the eldest perhaps, is named Zach(ary? ariah?).
https://katebowler.com/podcasts/david-brooks-kate-bowler-never-ever-enough/
His oldest son joined the IDF in 2014 and may still be in Israel.
Also of note – the Epstein files are merely a “QAnon conspiracy” according to David. Because sexual trafficking of minors and adults is such a lark.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/opinion/epstein-trump-conspiracy.html
The first Mrs. Brooks was rather testy about David and his activities, basically guarding her privacy fiercely. Some of that may be due to the nature of their divorce settlement, on top of washing her hands of the creep. Sorry, I found an article that referred to her slamming the door in someone’s face yesterday but I can’t find it today. It exists, somewhere.
He has three children; two sons and one daughter.
Per his 2019 self-serving twaddle he gave himself PERMISSION to write about how hard it was to be so fabulous and how he needed to divorce his wife.
https://www.oprahdaily.com/entertainment/books/a27309105/david-brooks-the-second-mountain-interview/
The saddest thing is that this moral pervert’s new podcast is doomed to success.
People are amazing creatures, they are ready to forgive the idols they worship absolutely everything. No matter what these idols have done.
Ordinary people / philistines have an extremely flexible morals (and there are most of them in the world), they are tolerant of the antics of celebrities, presidents, popular scientists and businessmen they love. But if something like this happens to such a philistine thrmselves, that’s when they start whining and complaining about the offenders, and at the same time about social mores.
Princess Diana was an ordinary h*e (although her husband was no better), but look at what a cult of worship was formed around an ordinary cheater, whose only advantage was her pretty appearance and maintaining a fairy tale, how a simple girl ended up in the royal family. Now FB, IG, etc. are full of heartwarming photos of her children standing near her grave. I wonder if the poor boys asked themselves during her lifetime, where is Mom? While everyone knew she was having fun and sex with Dodi Al Fayed in Paris.
In order for infidelity to become respectable and honored by the popular masses, you need to be noble (the more noble, the better), rich and/or famous.
David Brooks is famous, and this is his pass to a happy future. From his point of view.
Whatever he does in the future, the fans of this “thinker” and moralist will leave him on a pedestal.
Lady Diana was a young, naive woman who was used as a brood mare by a much older and more sophisticated man. I’m not going to defend her cheating, because it was wrong, but I believe she was treated very badly by the (now) King.
He thinks he’s an intellectual original when he’s just another hypocritical windbag: do as I say, not what I do.
Gag.