David Brooks Has a Lot of Nerve
Brooks was recently announced as a speaker at Yale University. The topic of his talk? “How To Fall In Love With Someone.”
When I write about politics, or the pope, or abortion, or immigration, I expect to get a lot of blowback from people who disagree with me.
It comes with the territory, that territory being opinion writing.
I have a thick skin, and forge ahead with my views on everything from papal infallibility to Taylor Swift’s universal and incomprehensible appeal.
Which is why I’m prepared to hear complaints for calling out the hypocrisy spewing from The Atlantic’s David Brooks and his much younger second wife.
Brooks is a man who makes mashed potatoes look ethnic, he is so suburban, preppy and white. I don’t mean “white” as in Caucasian. I mean the color.
He is all shades between Billy Idol’s hair color and eggshell. Which is to say, he is not the sort of person who inspires thoughts of exotic flights of romantic fancy.
He is also someone who, for years, represented the “sane” conservatives that liberals loved to love, the ones who eschewed Tea Party excesses, the ones who made fun of Sarah Palin to prove how misogynistic they weren’t, the ones who hate MAGA and have succumbed to terminal cases of Trump derangement syndrome. In other words, Democrats.
Brooks hasn’t been in the news in a long time, but he was recently announced as a speaker at Yale University. The topic of his talk? “How To Fall In Love With Someone.”
The unwritten subtitle of the talk was “How to Fall in Love With Someone Who Is Your Much Younger Research Assistant Who Is Collaborating With You, a Married Man, on Your Book ‘The Road to Character.’”
I am not particularly impressed by a fellow who believes that one can write a book about character while falling in love with someone who is not called “my wife” and then justifying it sometime later with a spiritual conversion.
The timeline is fairly clear: Brooks married his first wife in 1985. They separated in 2013 and divorced in 2014. He met his second wife — 23 years his younger — while he was still married to his first, and they worked together on his book about ethics. They got married three years after his divorce from his first wife was finalized.
I understand this does not form the basis of a reality show, as in “The Secret Lives of Research Assistants and Their Incredibly White Bosses,” but it does have a bit of an “odeur.”
Even Brooks himself admitted while he did not begin a romantic relationship with his second wife while she was his assistant and while he was still married to Mrs. Brooks 1.0, he could see how people might come away with a different idea.
It’s a bit of a cliché with the older man falling in love with the younger woman, and it has formed the basis of everything from novels like “Sister Carrie” to songs like “Young Girl” and “Go Away Little Girl” by, respectively, Gary Puckett and Donny Osmond.
As someone told me, “love is love” and it is possible to become enamored of a woman who was modeling Pampers when you were consuming your first legal drink.
But the thing that angered me about Brooks is his pretentious claim to understanding morality and character.
A man who ends a three decades long marriage and then takes up with a woman who is almost the same amount of decades younger than him is not a person of the sort of “character” that justifies writing a book about it, and then getting royalties.
It’s all just so incredibly cringey, as the kids say. It’s something I’d expect from a bouncy little 12-year-old with pigtails at an sleepover with her BFFs.
Sadly, on social media, my feed was overwhelmed with the sort of men who have no problem with Brooks’ hypocrisy. Most said judicious things, like “none of us knows what goes on in marriages” and morphed into Pope Francis, he of the “who am I to judge” fame.
Some decided I was jealous because I’m old, and apparently alone with my cat. It will be news to these men I have not yet found a cat willing to enter into an exclusive relationship.
I guess we are just the sort of people these days who think anything goes, and happiness is the most important goal, even if it comes at the expense of others.
If that is what sits at the end of Brooks “character road,” I’ll make a detour.
Copyright 2026 Christine Flowers
