David Brooks

Barbara Lazear Ascher’s husband gave her the news in the most straightforward way. “Looks like pancreatic cancer,” he told her matter-of-factly after the test results came back. She and their friends gave him a wonderful death. They had theme parties with matching drinks. “Dying was intimate,…

Over the last several years, that famous poem has been quoted countless times: “The center cannot hold,” William Butler Yeats wrote, before adding, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” People cited it so often because it was true. But it was not so…

In June a statistic floated across my desk that startled me. In 2020, the number of miles Americans drove fell 13 percent because of the pandemic, but the number of traffic deaths rose 7 percent. I couldn’t figure it out. Why would Americans be driving so much more recklessly during the pandemic…

When it comes to elections, the Republican Party operates within a carapace of lies. So we rely on the Democrats to preserve our system of government. The problem is that Democrats live within their own insular echo chamber. Within that bubble convenient falsehoods spread, go unchallenged and…

Plato and Aristotle disagreed about the imagination. As the philosopher Stephen Asma and the actor Paul Giamatti pointed out in an essay in March, Plato gave the impression that imagination is a somewhat airy-fairy luxury good. It deals with illusions and make-believe and distracts us from reality…

A few months ago, the economic analyst Noah Smith observed that scientific advance is like mining ore. You find a vein you think is promising. You take a risk and invest heavily. You explore it until it taps out. The problem has been that over the last few decades only a few veins have really…