BRIAN LAMB: David Brooks, you've been writing a column in the New York Times since 2003. How's it changed?
DAVID BROOKS: The column has changed quite a lot. You know, it started out as a- when I first started doing the column, I thought I was going to do more of a humor column, which is how I started in life. And then I just- either I wasn't funny enough to generate enough comic ideas, or when the audience is- sort of the audience is further to the left than I am, when they're not rooting for you, it's tough to write humor into that.
And so that changed. And it was also more political. In the last few years, I've gotten a lot less political. Maybe every other column is political, but every other one is not. And that's partly more where my interests have gone. I've learned as a columnist, you have to trust your interest, you have to- what are you passion about that week? What do you want to talk to people about that week? That's what you want to share with the readers, because that's what you're going to be best at.
And I've come to believe personally that religious, cultural, and moral investigations are what I care most about at this stage of my life. And I also think it's most needed in the culture. We have a ton of political commentary.
But to have a moral vocabulary, how to think about moral issues, how to think about your internal life. We just don't have many public figures. We used to have that in the culture, but we don't have that many.
So, I feel I'm serving- filling a bit of a void by talking about moral issues and religious issues and cultural issues a lot more than political issues.
LAMB: One of the things that always got my attention is your Sidney Awards that you give out, and I want to kind of flush through that. I just- this interview today is going to be all over a lot, just reflecting on what you've written and thinking- and your thinking. But what are the Sidney Awards, and when did you start them?
BROOKS: Yes, Sidney Awards are given for the best magazine essays of the year, and they can be in journals or they can be in something like The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or obscure literary magazines. And the idea is they always come out around that Christmas week, between Christmas and New Years. And the idea is that's a good week to step back and not read little, instant stuff, tweets, not even read newspaper articles, but to step back and have the time to read something deeper and something longer, and it's to celebrate those longer pieces.
LAMB: Why are they named after Sidney Hook?
BROOKS: So, they are named after Sidney Hook because he was a reflective philosopher. I was- when I was 23, I think, I was at Stanford. I was a fellow at the Hoover Institution, and we had coffee and cookies everyday at 3:30 in the afternoon. And I could come down, and there was one table where the economists sat around Milton Friedman and another table where the other people sat around Sidney Hook.
And so every day at 3: 30, I got to choose which table I was going to go to to listen to Milton Friedman or Sidney Hook. And I remember one legendary time he explained the problem of evil, which is why does God allow evil to exist, over about three hours. And about four or five of us just sat at the table with our cookies, just listening to him.
And so he to me is an exemplar of a certain sort of person who's passionately engaged in politics but also very reflective and very well-educated. And so if the news is here, Sidney Hook was up here. And so, the idea of the awards is we should get up here occasionally and sort of lift ourselves up from the day-to-day flow events to up here. And so, it seemed to me he was someone worth celebrating, so I named it after him.
LAMB: Now I know you talked for three hours, but what is his basic point on evil and God?
BROOKS: Yes, I wish I could remember the exact point. If he solved it, it's eluded me because I never understood that. And it should be said, Sidney was an atheist. And so, he was just rehearsing the philosophical history of various people like Kierkegaard who have tried to wrestle with this problem: why does an omniscient, beneficent God allow a child to die?
And if he solved that one, then he deserves immortality, because many people have taken a stab at it and failed. But it should be said again, he was an atheist. And while I was there, he had an operation which nearly killed him, and he wrote a piece for the New York Times, if I recall, saying he wish they'd let him die.
And, this was a man who was still full of life. He was quite elderly, but full of life. But he was- accepted that there was no afterlife and was willing to go, and a man of very stark intellectual bravery.
LAMB: I believe I read he was 86. He died in 1989?
BROOKS: Yes, that would be about right, yes.
LAMB: How well did you know him?
BROOKS: I wouldn't say I knew him well. Again, we spent this time at Hoover together, and there were other conferences I saw him at. So I wouldn't say I knew him well. I wrote- I would recommend, if anyone goes on Amazon or Abe or one of these used book sites, that they read his memoirs, which are really good about- if they want to understand life in the 20th century, intellectual life in the 20th century. He was a Marxist. He wrote about leadership. Then he migrated into becoming an anticommunist without really giving up his Marxism.
And so all the currents of the 20th century flowed through Sidney Hook, and he was involved in all the big fights, especially throughout the Cold War.
LAMB: We've got some video of Sidney Hook. This goes back, I'll just check the date on this, 1969, March of 1969, and he was on Bill Buckley's Firing Line. And just watch enough so-we've got a couple of clips-so you can see what he was like.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SIDNEY HOOK: And to say that socialism becomes an instrumentality by which we can further and enrich the democratic way of life.
WILLIAM F BUCKLEY: Well I'm sure you believe in socialism because you believe it will accomplish something good, not bad.
SIDNEY HOOK: Not merely that. That's too vague. Of course, I believe that it is more in harmony with what I define as a democratic way of life.
WILLIAM F BUCKLEY: There was of course, as you know, the theorist who wrote about same time, there's Hayek, saying that one of the functions of a democracy in which socialism is admitted as an alternative economic system is to keep private property perpetually insecure.
Now, for instance…
SIDNEY HOOK: Now who was that?
WILLIAM F BUCKLEY: It seems to be Lord somebody, I forgot his name...
SIDNEY HOOK: Well, at any rate, he was a bad socialist...
WILLIAM F BUCKLEY: In any case- no, he wasn't a socialist.
SIDNEY HOOK: He was a bad socialist because….
WILLIAM F BUCKLEY: No, he was not a socialist. No, on the contrary…
SIDNEY HOOK: Well, and he's a bad thinker.
WILLIAM F BUCKLEY: … but surely his point…
SIDNEY HOOK: He was a confused thinker.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: The last there, he said, "He's a bad thinker." Talk about thinking.
BROOKS: Yes, well first, let me say about that clip. First, you notice it's all white men. So that was not be how we would do an audience. But also the level of Firing Line. Bill Buckley was my mentor. He was really the person who really created my career, and the level of conversation on that show is amazing, and what- I bet you can go online and find that full show.
Buckley did not bow down to an audience. He was going to have a high-level conversation. I once saw a show he did with Noam Chomsky where they went back and forth, and I'm reasonably well-educated, but I couldn't understand a word they were saying. They were just at a high level going at each other, and so that's to be celebrated.
The thing about Sidney Hook represented, I think a lot of- to me, the- we hit a bit of an intellectual golden age between 1955 and '65. And we had a series of writers who were not on the academy. They were not academics, like doing specialized stuff. They were not bloggers. They were a little higher than journalism, lower than professors, but they were doing big, ambitious books that had a huge public effect, and these are people like Rachel Carson, "The Silent Spring," Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Digby Baltzell who wrote about "The Protestant Establishment," Arthur Schlesinger.
And it was a golden age of nonfiction-Daniel Bell-and these were big bestsellers. And the idea was, you would really take some intellectual risks. You were not confined within an academic discipline with certain rigor and the sort of the neutral language. You're really going to hit an issue hard. And big subjects, Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian of this era, had a book he called "The Nature and Destiny of Man." That was the title, and that covers a lot of ground.
And so they were big and they were ambitious, and Sidney Hook was part of that. He wrote a book about the leader in history. That's just a big topic. And they were interesting and ambitious, and they attracted big readerships. You look at the best sellers in those days, they were on those lists.
And, we don't have that as much today. And, I think in part because we're not audacious enough. We're not willing to take risk. We're worried about getting it wrong, and we don't have the learning. And so Sidney Hook really went to- I don't know if he went to City College or not but…
LAMB: He did.
BROOKS: He did, yes. And so they were steeped in really a classical education. They knew the Western Civ, they had done the reading. And so, we- it's rare to find people who have done that.
LAMB: Go back to one of the questions I just asked was thinking. He mentioned thinking.
BROOKS: Yes.
LAMB: Talk about thinking.
BROOKS: Yes.
LAMB: When do you do your thinking, and what would you advise people that maybe not even think that they're thinkers?
BROOKS: Yes. Well, that's, you know, I had one advantage. I went to the University of Chicago, and the joke about Chicago was it's a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas.
And so we were given the great books to read, and I- those two years transformed me. And I do think having- reading is important to thinking, because you're engaging, and then reading people you disagree with. As a columnist, I don't think it's my job to tell people what to think. My job is to give people a context in which to think.
And so they can react to my columns good or bad, if they hate it, they like it, whatever, as long as they are thinking. And so I do think the process of thinking so requires the background reading. You have to be familiar with the big ideas, where the controversies are. You have to see all sides. And you have to take walks.
You know, I- and then just try to think things through and let things bubble up to you. My day, like most writers', is very- is pretty regimented. I write in the morning, sometimes between 7 and 9:30.
LAMB: Do you write at home, or you write in the office?
BROOKS: I generally write at home, just with fewer distractions except the fridge. And- but then I'm burned out, I'm done, because my brain can only work for about three hours of writing. And then it's just fried, and everything else I produce after that will be mediocre. And so I'll sometimes call my friends at 9:30 in the morning and say, "Hey, I'm done for the day. You want to go do something?" They actually have jobs.
But, go for a hike. Go for a walk. And you look at the history, look at the work patterns of great writers, great thinkers, great composers. There's a lot of walking that goes on, and I walk with, you- often with a pad of paper and a pen, and things will just bubble up and occur to me, and I write them down. I have a friend who's a writer-I don't think he'd mind me saying it, Cass Sunstein-who is a prominent writer and he's at Harvard.
I'm told, though I don't know this from firsthand testimony. I'm told that he takes long showers, because in the shower is a great time to think. And so, those kinds of activities, you've got to give yourself the space. But some people, maybe there is somebody out there who can sit at their desks and say, "I will now think through this problem." I'm not one of those people. The feet have to be moving for things to start occurring to me.
LAMB: Go back to the Sidney Award. Do you give anything away?
BROOKS: No, it's all for honor.
LAMB: And, did you think about other people to name it after? I mean, what was that thought process?
BROOKS: Yes, it was like anything. It was just like the first instinct. I needed a name. And actually I think the first years I called them the Hookies, but that didn't work, so I changed it to the Sidneys. And so, yes, I just- you know, it's partly because of my admiration for the public intellectuals of that era, and he seemed like a good example and someone who had been kind to me.
LAMB: Let's watch a little more of him. This was a little later on. This was back in I think 1987.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SIDNEY HOOK: We thought that socialism meant that the ideals of democracy would be extended to all areas of human life. And even today, when someone asks me, "Do you still regard yourself as a socialist?" I said, "Well, if you permit me to define socialism, then I would define it in Deweyan terms as a belief in democracy as a way of life."
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: Deweyan terms, John Dewey, pragmatism.
BROOKS: Right.
LAMB: He says he's a pragmatist, Sidney Hook. What does that mean?
BROOKS: Yes, I've tried to read Dewey many times. He's the worst writer imaginable.
LAMB: Who was he?
BROOKS: John Dewey was an early 20th century philosopher and writer on education and other things. And I confess, I'm not a good person to talk about what he believed, because I've tried to read him many times, and I've just failed. But the thing about him calling himself a socialist, and a lot of the people who are really so deeply committed to ideas, they grew out of that movement.
They might have turned right or they might have stayed left, but they grew out of that because socialism in the early 20th century was an idea that was going to change the world. And it involves study- it was like a secular religion. And he went to City College. In City College, the professors were OK. There was one great professor named Morris Raphael Cohen, but the other professors were OK. The education system was not great.
The students were awesome. And so they'd sit- they wouldn't go to class. They'd go sit in the cafeteria. And in the cafeteria, there were two alcoves, two areas. One called alcove one and alcove two. And everyone there was a Marxist, and they thought Marxism was going to conquer the world. And in alcove one, I think the Stalinists sat, and alcove two, the Trotskyites, a different version, sat.
And they argued back and forth, just eight hours. And the Trotskyites were way smarter than the Stalinists. So the Stalinists, being Stalinists, forbade the Stalinists from talking to Trotskyites because they kept losing the arguments. But if you looked at the people who were Stalinists or Trotskyites in that alcove, some of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century were in that place going to City College.
Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, a whole series of others who I'm now forgetting.
LAMB: Was Podhoretz there?
BROOKS: No, he would have come later. Maybe Nathan Glazer, I'm not sure. But in any case, people have done a book- one of the books about this was called "Arguing the World," and the movie- which became into a documentary which is probably online. But it's about the intensity of ideas, and they really thought that- they were confident that the world was going to turn socialist or communist, and getting that right, figuring out the ideas was like early Christians arguing about Christianity.
And so, it was- there was an intensity of belief that they had.
LAMB: Magazines, why did you- do you give these awards to magazine writers?
BROOKS: I believe in magazines. I believe, you know I work for newspaper now. But I do believe magazines change history. The New Republic, which until its recent destruction was the most influential American political magazine of the 20th century, really did change history. It created progressivism. It created a voice for modern liberalism.
Conservatism barely existed until Buckley formed National Review and gave it a voice. And it's- now we're so individualized, you know, everyone has their own individual Twitter handle or their blog or their column or they're, you know, on T.V. But then it was community, and there was a community, and each community had a point of view. And so commentary had one point of view, dissent had another point of view.
A famous Woody Allen joke that commentary merged with dissent to form dysentery. Couldn't resist that one. And so, but- and so these were communities in a sense of fellow feeling. And I'm- probably the happiest professional period of my life was going to work at the Weekly Standard, where I had a group of my friends and we were part of a common project.
And I do think you change history in groups, not so much as individuals. So magazines are to be celebrated for that.
And then secondly, longer is better. When doing reading, and this- when I read the Sidneys, and I read probably-to get my, say, 10 awards that I give out each year-I'm probably reading 600, 700 magazine articles in the weeks running up.
And I always think, "Why don't I do more of this?" Because a newspaper article, I forget. But a magazine article, it lingers in the brain. And when it comes to reading, longer is better. Books are better than magazines. Magazines are better than newspaper articles. Newspaper articles are better than blogs. Blogs are better than tweets.
And yet, the mind runs downhill. It runs to the tweet, because it's so easy. It's like candy. So you've got to push yourself uphill to the long.
LAMB: I've read that you said that you really can't write much in 800 words, you need 3,000?
BROOKS: That's my natural length. Everyone has a natural length who does writing. And so, my natural length I think is 3,000 to 5,000. I used to write for The Atlantic and The New Yorker a little. And that was- that I felt was my natural length. And even now, when I do a newspaper column, was it- my column is 806 words.
LAMB: 806?
BROOKS: Yes, that's my exact word count. I hit it every single time. And, I'm taking…
LAMB: Is that everybody's, by the way, at the Times?
BROOKS: At the Times, yes, we're all the same.
LAMB: Why 806?
BROOKS: It's just where the page- the space on the page. That's what's in my head. I'm going to write 806. And you're going down one length of column, and so you're- that's what you do, you hit 806. And what it- the writing of the process is you tend to write 1,300 or 1,400, and then you cut till gets to 806. And so the cutting part is a very time-consuming part, trying to figure out what you can take out.
LAMB: So what- you know, I've read in one of your Sidney columns that you advise people to go to three places if they want more of what you're talking about. We're going to put it up on the screen so people can see it: Arts and Letters Daily, The Browser, and Book Forum.
What are those? Why did you pick those, and what do you get on any of those?
BROOKS: Those are aggregator sites. And what they do is they link to longer-form pieces that are out there in the world. And so, my favorite right now, I look at them at all, but The Browser has become my favorite. And so everyday, they'll link to about three or four pieces that have been written somewhere in the English-speaking world.
And you can go on and you get access to just excellent articles. They are consistently excellent articles.
LAMB: Who- Do you happen to know who owns it?
BROOKS: Yes, a guy in Britain whose name- I once had lunch with him, but I'm now forgetting his name, embarrassingly. But it's a British.
LAMB: Is it a for-profit?
BROOKS: They do charge. I pay a little money to have full access. They give you partial access, but I think you pay a very small amount, and you can get full access to all they're offering.
LAMB: Let's put that list back up on the screens, and I can ask you about the others. One of them is Arts and Letters Daily. What's that?
BROOKS: That's a little more- The Browser will do political stuff, economic stuff, and cultural stuff. Arts and Letters Daily is probably a little more academic, and so they'll link to essays that are on Montaigne or essays in literary criticism, but a lot of overlap, a lot of similar sort of "big think" pieces about writers, pieces about art. And that was founded by a guy who died. His name was Dennis Dutton. He died about maybe five years ago, five, 10 years ago. But it's continued, and it's very strong.
LAMB: I read that he patterned it after the Drudge Report, but for- I mean, the impression that you got from his comment was, for smarter people.
BROOKS: Yes, that's it. It's a series of links. I mean he- they'll have summaries of each thing, but it's a series of links to longer pieces.
LAMB: So the third one on the list…
BROOKS: Is Book Forum, which is more, obviously, by the name, more book-oriented. And they'll just follow what the interests are, and what the books of the day are. There- I follow people on Twitter and online by the quality of their links. One of my favorite sites is a site called Marginal Revolution which is by an economist named Tyler Cowen at George Mason University.
He just has an amazing mind and a voracious mind. And so he'll link to all sorts of really good things aside from producing high quality content of his own. And so you find a few of those people, and it's like having your friend say, "Hey, did you see this? Did you see that? Did you see that?" And those people are out there for all of us.
LAMB: And I asked you when we started how you've changed in the time that you've written for the New York Times since 2003. How has column reading changed?
BROOKS: Yes, I feel we have more readers than ever before. We at the newspaper business have a revenue problem. But people are still gravitating toward big authoritative sources, so there's comment of the New York Times and those of us who are fortunate enough to be on it are getting the benefit, there are a lot of reading.
So I do think columnists are still important in starting conversations. I don't think we- it's not like Walter Lippmann, who was this mid 20th century columnist, and he was sort of the Oracle, the grave voice telling you what to think or telling you what people in the administration would think. We're not like that. We're down in the play pen a little more. We're not those people of great stature.
But I do think conversations do get started, and when you hit a good column at the right time, you hear about it for weeks and weeks after.
LAMB: Back in 2014, you told a story-some people may have heard it before-about how you became a conservative. I want to run that and then have you follow up on it.
BROOKS: OK.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
I am actually a native New Yorker. I grew up in Stuyvesant Town here. My family was somewhat leftwing. One of the things- they were sort of hippies in the '60s, and they took me to Central Park to a place called a Be-In where hippies would go to Be.
And one of the things hippies did, they took out their wallets, they threw it in a garbage can, and they set it on fire to demonstrate how little they cared about money and material things. And I was five years old, and I saw the money burning there, so I reached into the fire, grabbed out a $5 bill and ran away.
And that was my first step over to the right.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: How much did your parents care about money?
BROOKS: They didn't care particularly about money. I should say, that was at Redeemer Church, a church in New York which has a faith and works conference. The- first, they violently object when I say they were hippies, and they, to be fair, they're right…
LAMB: Are they still alive?
BROOKS: Yes, my parents are still very healthy and very alive. They were- I think it's more- most accurate to say-for the sake of that story, I truncated it-the event was sort of a hippy event. But they were, in some sense, 1950s intellectuals, which is a culturally kind of conservative, politically kind of liberal but sort of centrist, realistic Cold War Democrats.
And I think they objected to the Vietnam War, and they worked, if I recall, for Ed Koch, and they were big Hubert Humphrey supporters. So I overdraw how a left-wing they were in that little vignette. But I've now forgotten your question.
LAMB: No, I just wanted to- they cared about money, and then…
BROOKS: Yes, yes, no…
LAMB: I was going to ask you, because of that story, do you care more about money than they do?
BROOKS: That's a very good question. So that I wouldn't say they cared about money. My father was a professor. My mother was a professor and then went to work at pharmaceutical companies, and I do not think they were- anyone would say they were materialistic. They- we had books in the home, just a ton of books in the home.
And so, there was a saying, I think from the philosopher Oakeshott, "It takes three generations to make a career." And I firmly believe that. My grandfather on my mother's side was a lawyer but a really good writer. And so he instilled in me the values of writing. My parents were professors of reading, and so those three generations all helped nurture me in writing, and I think that's true whether you're a plumber or a policeman or whatever. You inherit things from the previous generations of your family that become who you are at a very early age, and, you know, I was fortunate to know what I wanted to do at age seven. At age seven, I decided I would be a writer. And it's such good fortune to know at an early age what your calling is.
LAMB: Is writing hard?
BROOKS: Yes, it's miserable. You don't- it doesn't get easier.
LAMB: I want to show you one of the people that you- and actually, I think he came on this network do the call-in show for this reason. It was an article in June of 2014 called "The Case for Reparations," Ta-Nehisi Coates. Let's watch this, and tell us why you picked this for a Sidney Award.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TA-NEHISI COATES: When I talk about reparation, I mean it sounds like a really wordy thing to come to terms with our collective body, but that's what I'm talking about. I mean we're talking about, you know, policies that everyone is proud of. Everybody is proud of, you know, social security. Everybody is proud of the G.I. Bill. Well, I mean, the flipside of that is to come to terms with the fact that some portion of our population was cut out of all that, and then ask ourselves, what's the result of that? What are the consequences?
It doesn't, you know, just end with slavery. It wasn't like, you know, African-Americans were emancipated in 1865 and then the country said, "Yes, OK, welcome into, you know, welcome into the country. You're free to, you know, enjoy the same rights as everything else."
One of the big things we talk about in there is housing policy, redlining specifically. And redlining was not outlawed in this country until 1968, which means they are very much living African-Americans, some of which we talk about in a piece, who went through this process. You know, were disadvantage by American policy.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: By the way, we're linking on our Q&A site to these- to your columns where you write about- there's people who want to catch up with all the awards. Why did you pick this particular article on The Atlantic?
BROOKS: I would say it was easily the most influential article of the year. That was the easiest call imaginable. It went- hit- it just had this huge effect. It would- became one of the most read articles in The Atlantic history, and The Atlantic has been around for hundreds of years, or at least 100 years. And second, it just has an article- it's an article with propulsive force.
When you start reading it, it just drives you along. It's very hard to stop reading this piece. And it- the way The Atlantic did it, it's a multimedia thing. They have- online, they've got a lot of different tools to it. And I think the strength of the article is what Ta-Nehisi talked about, which was the redlining, the discrimination that existed after the Civil Rights Act, after slavery, that still existed and affected people's lives.
Some of it was just stealing stuff from African-Americans, but like the redlining, when parts- some certain neighborhoods are in Chicago say, "all black," property value is dropping; other neighborhoods, white property value is increasing. And the generational wealth effect that has. And it just hits you over the head with a continuous momentum of discrimination.
Now, then he makes the case, and he doesn't make it that strongly. I think this part of the article is weaker, because the case, I think, is weaker for reparations. He mostly talks about reparations as basically a big apology, a big recognition of our history and facing up to our history in a more distinct way.
There's sort of talk about financial reparations. I think once you start thinking about that practically, you run into problems. How are we going to separate African-Americans who had ancestors in slavery from those who came over from Africa in the last 50 years? I think that's a problem.
The second problem, I think politically, it would be very hard if I took- pick X, X or Y very successful African-American business person. It would be hard for me to ask a middle class taxpayer of any other race to subsidize, to give reparations, to give money to an affluent African American. I think that's just politically a very hard thing to do, you know, I don't know. Say Barack Obama, I'm going to ask a lower middle class family in the middle West Virginia, you know, you ought to pay a little more on taxes so Barack Obama can have some more money.
That seems to me a mistake, but it doesn't mean we can't think of policies that will help- aggressive policies that will help heal the inequalities that are the legacy and that are still there. So, hit Ta-Nehisi's point. It just is mind-altering piece.
LAMB: That was in The Atlantic magazine. If you had to pick a magazine that is consistent when it comes to in-depth articles that you find useful, what would you pick?
BROOKS: Yes, I have a great liking for The Atlantic. I happen to be friends with the owner, but I have a great liking for it…
LAMB: David Bradley?
BROOKS: David Bradley. In part because- and there are a lot of great magazines. The New Yorker is a phenomenally good magazine. The New Yorker- and these are the two giants. I think their pieces are a little more narrative and maybe a little more writerly.
The Atlantic is a little more argumentative and thesis-driven. And I think personally, I think I bias toward that. Though, when I give out the Sidney Awards, and I don't do this consciously, I just try to pick the best pieces, but barely a year goes by when- no year has gone by without something from each of these magazines. They're both phenomenal magazine.
Among the smaller ones, Granta is up there.
LAMB: What's Granta?
BROOKS: Granta is more literary magazine. It comes out- I don't know how many times a year, not many. But they just have more literary pieces, less journalistic, more personal essay pieces. It's a very fine magazine. There are other things that are barely heard of, Hedgehog Review, that not a lot of people know, and then there's always New Republic, Weekly Standard.
American Interest I think is a very fine magazine, which is out of Washington. There's another very fine magazine called National Affairs, which is edited by a guy named Yuval Levin. I think I picked there from this year a piece by a woman named Diana Schaub on the Gettysburg Address. And I learned a lot from her. I thought I knew about the Gettysburg Address. I realized- I forgot the exact number, but I think she said that there were only 120 separate words in the Gettysburg Address.
LAMB: Yes, there are 272 overall.
BROOKS: Overall and…
LAMB: As separate word units.
BROOKS: And what she does is she goes through each of those words or phrases and says where they came from and how they evolved and Lincoln's mind, his different uses of those words over the years. "Conceived in liberty." What did Lincoln mean by that when he was 20? What did he mean by that when he was 40? What did he mean by that when he gave the address? And so it's just a very deep dive into that speech, and I found really quite illuminating.
LAMB: Here's another- well, one of the things that you say is that hardly a year ever goes by that you don't give an award to Michael Lewis.
BROOKS: You can't, you know, I try not to give Michael an award, because, you know, I think, "OK, he's gotten a few." But superstars are superstars. And…
LAMB: Let's look at him for a while.
BROOKS: OK.
LAMB: Those who may not know him, I mean he's gotten a lot of attention.
BROOKS: Yes.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MICHAEL LEWIS: So a guy who kind of- I met, who kind of experimented in designing high-frequency trading strategies, but never really put him into practice-he was a professorial type-collided with an old trader who ran a money management firm, who said-this was five or six years ago-"Let's try your- I'll go. Let's go. Let's try- let's go trade with, you know, the thing you dreamed up." And so, the guy says, "I've never done it before, but let's do it."
So they said hook it up. So they're hooked up to doing trades. And they hit the button, "enter," to go. And the thing starts doing maniacal things. I mean it's like losing, "boom!" losing money.
MALE: It's like an IBM commercial, right?
LEWIS: And the 61-year-old CEO, the money manager, first, "Turn it off, turn it off!" And they keep hitting buttons; they can't turn it off. He goes under, and he yanks the plug out of the wall to shut the machine down. But it was just, you know, there is the- I mean, it is sort of like the mark of the Wall Street man: overconfidence. I mean, male overconfidence is responsible for so much trouble in the financial system, and when it collides with technology, it's particularly toxic.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: Well, before you talk about Michael Lewis, male overconfidence, is that true?
BROOKS: That is true. The statistic I know about that is that men drown at twice the rate as women, because men have tremendous confidence in their ability to swim after they've been drinking. And so, overconfidence is an extremely gender-linked trait. I don't if it's cultural or genetic, but it certainly exists.
LAMB: The article you pick was out of Vanity Fair that he wrote. What is it about Michael Lewis that always gets your attention?
BROOKS: So Michael is a very interesting case. He started his career on Wall Street, just for brief time, wrote "Liar's Poker" out of that, and then became a journalist for the New Republic. And I think I got to know him- I first met him, probably, he was writing for the New Republic covering the primaries, but he couldn't really care about the boring, establishment candidates, so he would write about all the weird candidates off on the side. And the prose style- and then he became close to McCain.
And what- it's interesting- so if anybody wants to be a journalist, everyone has their own writerly style and their own interviewing style. And Michael is distinct and instructive on both.
His writerly style is an ease of storytelling, doing something very hard and making it look easy. And he makes it look so easy that people under-appreciate how good he is. And whether the "Flash Boys," which is the book he's describing there, or some of the more famous ones, "The Blind Side" and "Moneyball," he just tells a complex issue in story form, and it's so lucid and transparent, you don't realize the artistry in it, and there's just an ease there.
The other thing that's instructive about him is how you do an interview. Some people do an interview as a confrontation, and there's the kind of interview, not like this one, but you're in private and you're trying to get information. Some people do it as a seduction. Some people do it as an exchange of information. I don't know this from Woodward himself, but Bob Woodward, it is said, he'll give his source of information, and they have to give him something. It's a sort of a trade.
Michael is just about the most charming and good human being it's impossible to imagine. And people just want to be around him, and they'll say anything to get him to hang around. He's from New Orleans originally, and he has New Orleans charm, and so he's just a pleasure to be around, and I think it's his winning personality. People just want to talk to him and tell him stories so he'll hang around. And I think that's how he's able to get a lot of these stories.
LAMB: Talk about your public performance. You used- do you still do PBS on Fridays with...
BROOKS: Yes sir.
LAMB: ... Mark Shields?
BROOKS: I do a segment called Shields and Brooks. My joke is we wanted to call it Brooks Shields. Would have been better.
LAMB: How long is a segment?
BROOKS: It's usually 12 to 14 minutes, which in T.V. time, outside of C-SPAN, is a lifetime.
LAMB: And how long have you been doing it?
BROOKS: I've been doing it since about 2001.
LAMB: You do E.J. Dionne on NPR? When do you do that?
BROOKS: Yes, All Things Considered, also on Fridays, and that's in their first block, which repeats during the show. But I've been doing that for- since the late '90s, and so I have- every Friday afternoon, I have a little routine. I drive over to NPR and I drive down to PBS, and I commune with the catholic liberals from Massachusetts. Both E.J and Mark to fit that category.
LAMB: Right, two columns a week. What day do you read them in the hard copy newspaper, and when do you read them on the web?
BROOKS: Yes, so they come out Tuesdays and Fridays, and as of now, online- they used to come out Monday and Thursday nights, but as of now, they come out on Tuesday and Friday as well.
LAMB: And how often do you go out and speak?
BROOKS: I do some sort of event-sometimes it's going to a conference, sometimes it's speaking before a town audience at some sort of hall, or what you saw there for Redeemer-I would say on average once every 10 days.
LAMB: So, for money?
BROOKS: Sometimes for money, often for not, like Redeemer, there's no money there.
LAMB: Yes. But when you go out and you have all of these public performances, what is your approach? Like, you look at Michael Lewis and his public approach. What do you always try to do when you're in front of an audience to get their attention?
BROOKS: A couple of things. First, never waste a sentence. I've learned that. Never waste a sentence. If you- so my speeches, if I'm giving a speech at a college or someplace, they'll be 45 to 50 minutes. My notes- I'll have 45 or 50 pages of notes.
Every single sentence I utter has a note attached, because I don't want some filler in there- every sentence, every point, and if you have filler, it just gets boring so fast. The second thing, and this comes with experience. You have to learn to trust the audience. You have to lay out onto the audience and let them hold you up. That means you just have to show what you have, show yourself, and they'll hold you up. And sometimes be vulnerable, tell jokes.
And I remember- covering politics, I see a lot of speakers. And I remember watching Mitt Romney give a speech and Ann Romney, his wife, give a speech. And Mitt Romney never threw himself on the audience. He would try to talk to the audience, but there was not the you and me. Ann Romney just naturally threw herself. She naturally opened up. And you can see the difference. Mitt Romney is a perfectly fine speaker, but it doesn't connect as much.
So you just have to be- you have to trust them that they're- you can be vulnerable for them, you can talk to them in a way that is heartfelt to you, and they'll carry you up.
And, you know there are other tricks to public speaking. One of them, which I learned from a brain scientist, is that people really don't keep their attention long on eight minutes, on any one subject for eight minutes. So you've got to switch subjects. And so you just- and audience will accept radical shifts of subjects. You think of a State of the Union speech, the President is covering a whole lot of different subjects. But in our ear, we'll accept those shifts. And so you've got to accept those shifts.
And then there's a normal rhythm to a speech, which typically starts out with humor and then some serious stuff. But you've got to spike it with a little humor in between and then a crescendo. There's a natural rhythm.
LAMB: How do you deal with criticism? And I'll- hold on to that. Show you a clip of Toure on MSNCB back in January 2014, just to ask you about…
BROOKS: Sure.
LAMB: … critical stuff.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TOURE NEBLETT: Brooks has this argument that, "If you smoke weed, it makes you dumber," right? I mean like, I read his article; I feel like that made me a little dumber too. But, you know, look, he talks about, we are "nurturing a moral ecology in which it is getting harder to be the sort of person most of us want to be." I sort of reject that argument, because I know, again, from personal experience…
MALE: Yes.
NEBLETT: … that you can smoke and it can open you up to new perspectives, new ways of looking at world. This is why creative people have been smoking marijuana for centuries, right? And this idea that it's the ruination of society, the ruination of your life, it's just completely baseless. And this idea that you're either all-in or you're all-out is not necessary…
FEMALE: Right, and that's exactly…
NEBLETT: There's a lot of smart people who are lawyers, who are doctors, who are writers, who use it a little bit just as they use wine a little bit.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: What do you think?
BROOKS: Yes. So that article generated a lot of animus. It was designed, obviously, to generate a lot of that. Just on the factual matter, my claim was, and he's wrong about this, so, if you're an adult and you smoke weed, it doesn't seem to have any affect on your brain. If you're a teenager and you smoke it, it definitely does. It definitely lowers your I.Q.
LAMB: How old are your kids?
BROOKS: My youngest is 15; I've got a 20 and a 24-year old. And so, it definitely has a very negative effect on a teenage brain. And so I think that's something to be taken seriously.
As to the effect on creativity, that's controversial. People have studied this and they found you certainly have the illusion that you're more creative when you're smoking, but people have not found much evidence that you actually are more creative, and they do tests and things like that. So that's at least a matter of dispute.
But as for disagreement, that's- what he was talking about, that's what I'm trying to do. And I have a point of view, he has a different point of view, the conversation is that's what you're trying to do. I'm not the last word. I'm throwing out a volley. The word essay in English, it comes from essayer, the French word "to try.: I'm just throwing out a volley, and he can throw a volley back.
And out of that process, people make up their minds or we get to a higher level of understanding. And so that, sort of, criticism I'm honored by. And I think we are all honored when people pay attention to what we say and come back at us.
LAMB: Who- had you ever seen that?
BROOKS: No, no.
LAMB: Did you even know it happened?
BROOKS: No. I don't know. The things people will tell me, there's like, it'll- something will go live on Twitter or something will- there'll be some huge response on some blog or some magazine somewhere. I'm always moving on to the next column. I don't have time to cover what happened in my last column. So I'm amazingly oblivious to all…
LAMB: Well, let me ask you about a personal thing, because, as I was doing research for this, I kept running into the stories, "Is David Brooks divorced or not?" Gawker did a piece on you, critical, because you've talked about divorce. So, I'm going to ask you now, are you divorced or not?
BROOKS: I am divorced, yes.
LAMB: And…
BROOKS: And I don't want to personally, I don't want to legally talk about it, but yes, I am divorced.
LAMB: Why do you- what had you written about? You had written that you were against divorce.
BROOKS: No, I don't think I'd written against divorce. I'd certainly written pro marriage, and I do believe in marriage, and mine didn't work out, and I desperately want to get married again to somebody. I totally believe in marriage. And I think one of the things I write in general about marriage is how it is the most important decision in your life, and, you know, here's a little autobiography- I finished a book yesterday. I'm writing a book, and I literally sent- hit the send button yesterday. And…
LAMB: Name of the book?
BROOKS: … the name of the book is "The Road to Character." It's about 10 people who've led really impressive inner moral lives and offer example- lessons on how to do that.
LAMB: Known people?
BROOKS: Yes, there are people ranging from George C. Marshall to Dorothy Day to Samuel Johnson. And they all had a great sense of their own weakness. And when we think of the outside world, the climb to success is a struggle against the world. But to build in strong inner character, it's a confrontation with yourself. You have to figure out what your own weakness is, and you got to take the parts that are weakest in you and make them the strongest.
LAMB: How did you pick those 10?
BROOKS: Because they all exemplified this one strain, what I would call moral realism.
LAMB: How long did it take you to pick them?
BROOKS: The book took five years to write. It slowly accumulates. And so it accumulated over that time, and I learned so much. My belief in writing a book is you should only write it if the process of writing it will be worth it. And this was easily the most life-altering thing I've ever worked on.
LAMB: Published in April?
BROOKS: Published in April from Random House.
LAMB: Let's go back to the Sidney Awards. There's a third one that we have, and how would- so you've done since 2004, 10 a year, so you're talking 11 years of 10, so you have a hundred and some.
BROOKS: Right.
LAMB: Here's Hanna Rosin. She wrote up a piece, this is a TED Talk she made actually, a piece called "The End of Men." Let's watch a little bit of this and get your comment.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HANNAH ROSIN: It used to be that you were a guy who went to high school who didn't have a college degree, but you had a specific set of skills, and, you know, with the help of a union, you can make yourself a pretty good middle class life. But that really isn't true anymore. This new economy is pretty indifferent to size and strength, which is what's helped men along all these years.
What the economy requires now is a whole different set of skills. You basically need intelligence, you need an ability to sit still and focus, to communicate openly, to be able to listen to people and to operate in a work place that is much more fluid than it used to be. And those are things that women do extremely well, as we're seeing.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: A couple of things in there. Listen. What have you found about people on listening?
BROOKS: It is actually this is not a skill I have. I have a friend whose name is Pete Wehner, who's also a writer. All my friends are writers, maybe. He's here in town. And we'll talk about a subject, sometimes a personal subject-he's a close friend-and sometimes that subject in the world. And what strikes me about Pete is that there's a normal rhythm to, "Oh we're talking about this, and then we move on to something else." Pete lingers.
And so, if I say something that happened to my life, he'll ask a few questions. And in my mind, the timing is, "OK. We've- he's asked me three questions about that. We're going to move on to something else." Pete will then ask another four or five questions.
And so he has great facility to linger, and when your mind- the attention wants to wander, he stays with it. I mean, he stays with the subject. And that's a phenomenal capacity for listening.
LAMB: Well, how would you grade people, most people, on listening?
BROOKS: Most people, including myself, are bad, are just bad. We, we're thinking about what are we going to say? We're not really present for the person, or our mind is just wandering. And we're not hearing the nuance. And then we're forgetting, and I forget so much.
You know, there are a couple of people that leap to mind who are really good- who are almost professional listeners. And I would put you in that category. You are- that's what you do. And the other person who's been in a similar role with me was Jim Lehrer, who has interviewed me many, many years on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
And what's interesting is that, in the job that you have, people don't appreciate how much the questioner sets the whole frame of the conversation, sets the emotional tone, the rhythm, everything, it's so important. And people like- our 14 minutes, 12 to 14 minutes segments. Some people, they have a set of questions written down, and they're going to ask you those questions no matter what gets- what you say. Some people, their questions go in a circle.
With Lehrer, he could listen. And he would pick out in your answer the two words that were the most important, and then he would give them to Mark. And it would just, you know, I'd say, "That's utterly ridiculous," and then I'd give a bunch of reasons, and he'd turn to mark and say, "utterly ridiculous?" And that ability to, live on TV, ask a question and hear what's crucial, it's a very rare skill. And so, I think that made him just phenomenally good.
LAMB: What about her other point there? Well, she made many, but sit still and focus.
BROOKS: Yes, that's also a problem for a lot of us. And this is why I say read long. The ability to have patience, and we're just in a world, you know, there's all this talk about technology and what it's doing to us. And I think most of fears are wrong. I don't think Facebook is making us lonely. I don't think it's destroying social trust. But the one thing I do think technology is doing is shortening our attention span.
And so we've been sitting in the studio for about 30 minutes, and I guarantee you, this is the longest period on this day I will stop without checking my phone. I check my phone constantly.
Somebody said if you want to drive a mouse crazy, give it an irregular pattern of rewards, like you give it a treat one minute, then you wait eight minutes to give it a treat, then you wait 15 minutes and give it a treat, and it's the irregular pattern of rewards that'll just- you become addicted.
And the phone is like that, whether it's a text message from my friends or an e-mail, I always think the next one is going to be really great, and I'm constantly checking. And I'll be writing every few minutes, and I'll check. And it becomes a weird addiction. I do think it's having an effect…
LAMB: How do you- do you relate to your kids by the phone?
BROOKS: We text each other…
LAMB: Text?
BROOKS: … a lot, and a lot of friends, we text, we text a ton.
LAMB: And what do you see in your three kids about the change in long form or thinking or reading that you could comment on?
BROOKS: Yes. I wouldn't separate them from myself. We all spend way too much time looking at vines, which are these little videos.
LAMB: Six-second?
BROOKS: Yes, right. Or looking at, you know, cat videos or, you know, I have friend who just- she just loves dancing children. And if there's a video with a weird, dancing kid, she's up in uproar, she's sends me, "I'm up in uproar."
So, I saw a video of a kid in Tibet who was meditating with his dad, and he was trying fall asleep because he was just tired, and so he's meditating and sort of jerking around like that. And so I spend a way too much time watching that.
And I think a lot of young people these days are, you know, they're on Reddit, they're on 4chan, which are sort of very user-generated sites where people are sharing things that are interesting or vulgar, and it's just a waste of time. And I don't- I wouldn't want to totally limit it, because it's fun. You need some relaxation. But I think it's just a waste of time.
LAMB: Since you were 15 years old, you have followed this person.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
(MUSIC)
BRUCE SPRINSTEEN: Can you feel the spirit? Can you feel the spirit now? Can you feel the spirit? Can you feel the spirit now?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LAMB: Bruce Springsteen over in Europe, and you actually went over to Europe, what year, to follow him around?
BROOKS: Yes. Well, I went- well, went to two concerts with my friend, Jeff Goldberg, also a writer, and two other friends Etsell Steemie (ph) and Phil Selosteenie (ph), and we went over there to Madrid and to- and Southern France. We saw two concerts. And in part because I have listened to his voice more than probably any other voice outside of a family member over the course, since I've been 15, I listen to him constantly.
LAMB: Why?
BROOKS: His music moves me, his lyrics move me, his world view, he's way to the left than me. But there's an epic quality, there's a romantic quality to his writing, there's a love of the underdog, and he emotionally is open and emotionally opens you up. And so, I've always loved him for that.
The Madrid show was one of the best. He's probably 61 now. The Madrid show was three hours and 50 minutes of energy like you're seeing. And the- one of the odd moments to me was, I'm sort of off on the side, and he's singing a song called "Born in the USA," which came out probably in the '90s.
And so, there are 65,000 Spaniards, and they're singing along with him. "I was born in the USA. I was born in the USA." And I wanted to shout down, "No, you weren't. You guys were not born in the USA." And what's- it's a testimony to the power of particularity.
So, Springsteen got- he had two, first to albums which were not successful though they were very good. Third album, "Born to Run," was gigantic, and he was on the cover of Time in Newsweek at the same time. It was just a gigantic, one of the classic albums of all time.
The trajectory for him would have been to go big, to do frankly what Taylor Swift has done, to become ubiquitous and to move out of his roots and just become a big pop star. That would have been the normal record company trajectory. He got into legal difficulty, but then he took an artistic turn. So instead of going big, he went back into his roots. He went more New Jersey small town, more darker vision. "Darkness on the Edge of Town" was the album that came out of it. And it was returned to the particular ground he knew well.
And what struck me was that decision was brave but also artistic genius, because people will react to your own particular environment than an artist creates. They'll enter that world with you. People enter the Tolkien world. They enter the Harry Potter world. They'll enter Tolstoy's world.
And they want a particular world, George Eliot, "Middlemarch," and they'll go there with you. And so, I was with all these Spaniards and French people, and the things from New Jersey, Route 9, The Stone Pony Bar in Asbury Park, they knew all that, and they had entered that world with him, and it's really a lesson for anybody doing creative work, or maybe in life in general, to stay rooted in that spot.
And, he puts on the best rock performance show ever.
LAMB: So we've done music and we've done magazine writing and column writing and talked some about books. What's the most influential movie you've seen in the last couple of years?
BROOKS: You know, I used to be a movie critic, and that somewhat numbed me on movies. So I barely see them anymore, because I had to see 10 a week and they became a work, and I was writing them down. I began to see them through the eyes of producers, which meant that I saw financial decisions.
And so I was in love with movies for the first 30 years of my life. I'm just not in love with movies anymore. And the movies- I love certain movies. My favorite movie of all time is a John Ford western called "The Searchers," starring John Wayne, in which Wayne plays a racist. It's a very complicated movie. It's basically a western version of the Oresteia Trilogy. It's about a guy who is savage, John Wayne's character is savage, because they need that to preserve law and order.
But because of that, he's shut out of domestic society, and he sort of sacrificed himself for the social order. So that's- John Ford movies are very fun to watch, but they're also deep about America.
LAMB: Let's go back to where we started. Here's another clip of Sidney Hook and we'll talks some more about the Sidney Awards.
BROOKS: OK.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SIDNEY HOOK: But today, people say, "No, that's not enough," when you must believe not merely- you must oppose not merely discrimination. You must be in favor of reverse discrimination. You must judge people on the basis of their membership in groups, and I say, "No, we always oppose that." Liberals have opposed that.
Roy Wilkins, who is Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, seized on a phrase that Justice Harlan, in a dissenting decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, said. He said, "Justice should be color blind." Now, that's the liberal position. To my astonishment that today, the current chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people has said, "to believe that justice should be color blind is stupidity."
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BROOKS: So now, I'm thinking I should- if giving Ta-Nehisi Coates' The Case for Reparations a Sidney Award is an ironic statement, because Sidney obviously was objecting to affirmative action there. And, The Case for Reparations is an acknowledgement of race and a piece of legislation built on a racial category.
LAMB: He changed his mind on some things in his life when you read about him, and you have too. What are your biggest changes that- when it comes to ideology?
BROOKS: Yes, I started out on the left in college. And then I went to the right. I worked with National Review. I worked at the Washington Times. I worked with the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. I worked at the Weekly Standard. And a lot of that was trying on different things. And it took me a long time to figure out what I believed, and I just had to try on different clothing.
And now I think I have two guiding stars in what I believe, and I think I'm more or less consistent to them now, though I don't fit into a normal conservative-liberal pattern.
One of my guiding stars is Edmund Burke, an Irish philosopher and a British politician who's- the key phrase for him is "epistemological modesty." That is to say, the world is really complicated. We really should be suspicious we understand it. And therefore, when we're doing work in government or anything else, we should just be very cautious, and we shouldn't get arrogant about the supposed power of our reason.
And so that's a conservative belief in caution and a great belief in the wisdom of tradition in general and that reform and change should be constant, steady, and slow. You should have change but it should be constant, steady and slow.
My other leading figure in my life intellectually is Alexander Hamilton ,and Hamilton was a great believer in mobility and social mobility. He was a poor boy whose mom died when he was young, and he rose very fast to become a war hero in the revolution then a very successful lawyer and a very successful treasury secretary.
And so, his life is one of tremendous ascent and he wanted to create an American economy that would make it possible for poor boys and girls like himself to rise and succeed and he fought Jefferson who wanted to keep a more oligarchic society. And so, that tradition led to the weak party and then it led to the early Republican Party.
And so that modesty but a belief in social mobility are the two lone stars. And I think they make me probably a leftwing Republican but certainly a more- a moderate conservative, something like that. And that kind of barely exited in America today but that's where I am.
LAMB: When Gail Collins of the New York Times hired you, what specifically did she expect you to represent?
BROOKS: She swears that they didn't have any category I wasn't- there's no assignment of what I was supposed to write about. Obviously, I was a certain sort of conservative. I think I hope a conservative that New York Times will use could stand. I come from New York. I'm culturally I'm a little more the same as a lot of the readers but on to the right and but the times is- gives us great freedom.
We do not have- we have copy editors and we have people who edit but we don't have any reviews. We don't have- we're not told what to write about. We are free agents. We are lone wolves and we can do whatever we want.
LAMB: One of my- the audience on our Q&A site, we have the ability for them to go in and read your columns. They can do this through Google too on the Sidney Hook Awards. Last- a good question, we're about out of time. What book would you recommend that you've read in the last- I don't know, I don't care when to somebody that wants to get into this world of thinking?
BROOKS: Well, the one, I would read an essay by Isaiah Berlin called the "Hedgehog and the Fox" about a true story and about two ways of thinking of the world, the hedgehog knows one thing, the fox knows many things. If you're religious, a book I'm a fan of right now is a book called "My Bright Abyss" by a poet named Christian Wiman, a beautiful book on what faith looks like.
It's a dense book but a very beautiful book. And then I would go back and read George Orwell, Orwell's essays, not the novels, not animal farm and all that but the essays. There are collections of his essays, one called "Shooting the Elephant," one called "Such were the Days." They're about- they're personal essays but they're about political issues and he was one of the greatest political essayists of all time.
LAMB: David Brooks has been our guest. You can read his new book called "The Road to Character" coming out April the 14th, Random House.
BROOKS: Available on- or pre-order on Amazon even now.
LAMB: And also in the New York Times twice a week and thank you for talking about the Sidney Awards.
BROOKS: Thanks. It's always a pleasure, Brian.