David Brooks

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For all of history, humans have been fascinated by the heavens above us. We’ve used the stars to navigate Earth, to predict the future, and to understand our place in the larger scheme of things. Changes in our view of the cosmos—from the Copernican revolution that “uncentered” the Earth to the discovery of the Big Bang and the recognition that the universe is expanding—have invariably changed our view of ourselves.

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In the debut episode of The Permanent Questions With David Brooks, David speaks with the philosopher Meghan Sullivan about perhaps the most important question of them all: How should we live our lives? Sullivan is a co-author of The Good Life Method, based on a popular course she teaches at Notre Dame. Leading a good life, she argues, means not just maximizing our positive impact in the world, but cultivating virtue within our own souls.

Many people think that AI is going to gain consciousness and take over the world, but I’ve never been among them. That’s mostly because I believe the human mind contains depths and complexities that AI and its engineers do not fathom and will never match. As the neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote earlier this year, “The more you delve into the intricacies of the biological brain, the more you realize how rich and dynamic it is, compared to the dead sand of silicon.

Roosevelt Montás grew up in a small mountain village in the Dominican Republic. Two days before his 12th birthday, his mother flew him up to New York, where she had found a minimum-wage job in a garment factory. A few years later, when he was a sophomore in high school, some neighbors in his apartment building threw out a bunch of books. One of them was a finely bound volume of Socratic dialogues. Montás snagged it—and Socrates changed his life.

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In this worn, domesticated world of ours, there are few truly pristine wildernesses, remote regions where no man has gone before, places unseen by human eyes and unexamined by human exploration. And so I suppose we should be especially grateful for the undiscovered country that is Marc Andreessen’s soul.

I could have been a tech entrepreneur, but my parents let me go to sleepovers. I could have been a billionaire, but I used to watch Saturday-morning cartoons. I could have been Vivek Ramaswamy, if not for the ways I’ve been corrupted by the mediocrity of American culture. I’m sad when I contemplate my lazy, pathetic, non-Ramaswamy life.
These ruminations were triggered by a statement that Ramaswamy, the noted cultural critic, made on X on Thursday.

Politically, I’m a bit of a wanderer. I grew up in a progressive family and was a proud democratic socialist through college. Then, in the Reagan-Thatcher era of the 1980s, after watching the wretched effects some progressive social policies had on poor neighborhoods in Chicago, I switched over to the right—and then remained a happy member of Team Red for decades. During the era of social thinkers like James Q.

You may think you know stories like this one, but it’s important not to become numb to their evil and horror. Hersh Goldberg-Polin was attending the Nova music festival on October 7 when the Hamas terrorists descended. He and three others rushed to their car and tried to escape by heading north. But the terrorists were shooting drivers on the road, so Hersh and his friends instead sought refuge in a nearby bomb shelter.
More than 25 young people were crammed into a 5-by-8-foot enclosure.

“I was humbled to be awarded an honorary degree by the London School of Economics earlier this week. Thank you so much for this prestigious honour!”— Tweet from Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central BankWhenever I feel particularly humble, I tweet about myself. I have never earned an honorary degree from the London School of Economics, but if I ever did, I’d certainly tweet the hell out of it.

Rachel Bovard is one of the thousands of smart young Americans who flock to Washington each year to make a difference. She’s worked in the House and Senate for Republicans Rand Paul, Pat Toomey, and Mike Lee, was listed among the “Most Influential Women in Washington Under 35” by National Journal, did a stint at the Heritage Foundation, and is now policy director of the Conservative Partnership Institute, whose mission is to train, equip, and unify the conservative movement.

If you are north of a certain age, you might remember where you were when Barack Obama gave his star-is-born keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. I was in a broadcast booth in the mezzanine level up above, with Mark Shields and Jim Lehrer, watching tears run down Lehrer’s face. He turned to me when it was over and all I could say was, “This is why we go into this business.

Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo / Alamy; Paul Spella / The AtlanticIt’s one of the most remarkable poll results of the current moment. From May 29 to June 2, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked voters whether they were more troubled by the actions of the police and the death of George Floyd, or by protests that had turned violent. By a more than two-to-one margin, they said they were more troubled by the actions of the police.