David Brooks, the Mr. Rogers of the New York Times, has some penetrating thoughts about the “working-class parts of America,” on which he is a well-known expert.

“If we talked as if people had souls, then we’d have a thick view of what is at stake in everyday activities,” writes David Brooks today. At this point he’s basically the nice old man with Alzheimer’s at church that everyone chooses to leave alone as long as he doesn’t hit anyone.

The Global Affairs class New York Times columnist David Brooks has taught at Yale three times in the past three years, “Humility,” will not be offered again next semester, Gawker has learned. In its first iteration, in Spring 2013, the reading list for “Humility” included some of Brooks’ own columns.

David Brooks—a Yale instructor and New York Times columnist who can be found at the Aspen Ideas Festival—prefers to package himself as a reasonable thinker, but he has always been, to one degree or another, depending on the season, a dumb partisan hack. So now that he has finished enough philosophizing about the good life to fill a new book (and allusively air out his squalid midlife crisis), and now that there’s an election looming, it’s time to get back to partisan hackwork.

David Brooks, the sad but harmless sweater-wearing divorced guy who likes to give your kids advice gleaned from inspirational office posters, is—astonishingly—still employed as a prestigious newspaper columnist.

If I had to guess the Big Idea communicated by the Atlantic Ideas Festival in New York City yesterday, it would be: wear a blazer, but not a tie. That seemed to be the key to getting on stage on the Atlantic Ideas Festival.

We are people, and people have lives. Lives involve losses. Losses of friends, of loved ones, of children, of parents. Everybody everywhere feels something about some loss sometime in this interconnected age; maybe even you feel things. Maybe then, also, you can explain what the hell David Brooks is on about in this column.

David Brooks, a man with a national newspaper platform upon which he can reflect and analyze events for potentially millions of readers, is using that rich platform to ruminate on the recent grand jury non-indictments in the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, innocent men who were killed for no reason by police officers.

Well-moisturized Republican David Brooks fancies himself a bit of a social scientist. Not really in the sense of like, doing science. More in the sense of "knowing some guys."

Nearly a year ago, the Washington Post reported the impending divorce of David Brooks and his wife of 27 years, Sarah. But the couple never filed any divorce papers, or moved out of the District of Columbia. And, interestingly enough, they just bought a $1.9 million home in D.C.’s Cleveland Park neighborhood.

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan caused a medium-sized stir on Wednesday after she scolded conservative op-ed columnist and believer in friendship David Brooks for not disclosing that his college-aged son had enlisted as a “lone soldier” in the Israeli army. On Brooks’ side, John Podhoretz, the son of former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, tweeted: “Everybody who thinks David Brooks has to ‘reveal’ his son, who’s 23, has joined the Israeli army can go fuck himself.”

I bet thinking up two new column topics every single week is pretty hard, after a while.

New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks' son is currently serving in the Israeli Army, a fact that might qualify as a conflict of interest if Brooks was writing anything besides simpering pop sociology interspersed with quiet cries for help.

Back in November, the Washington Post reported that New York Times columnist David Brooks and his wife of 27 years, Sarah, were divorcing. The unsourced item, under the collective byline of the “Reliable Source” gossip column, rattled a certain portion of the Acela corridor: Here was a leading conservative pundit, a father of three who has blamed single mothers for the country’s “fraying social fabric,” dismantling his own marriage.

Let's say your job is to make fun of David Brooks. Not your whole job, God forbid. Part of it, though. People expect you to make fun of David Brooks, and they ask you to do it, and you have been doing it for years, because the smugness and wrongness of David Brooks has seemed like an inexhaustible resource.

Here is a column in the New York Times opinion section, by David Brooks, explaining what President Obama should do with the rest of his term, rather than trying to pass any laws to promote his agenda. He should revitalize and modernize the "Whig tradition," which:

Self-loathing New York Times thought-leader David Brooks has an admonition for everyone today: You do not understand this "income inequality" you are all talking about. People assume that just because the very richest people have ever more money, and the much greater numbers of poor people have less money, this constitutes a systemic problem:

"For a little while in my teenage years, my friends and I smoked marijuana," writes David Brooks, the pop sociology professor of choice for Republicans hip enough to drive Audis. "It was fun." Was it, David? Was it really?

"Paul Krugman is off today," wrote the saddest editor in the entire world.

Today, New York Times editor-turned-cranky-columnist Bill Keller's column consists of a long back-and-forth with crusading anti-imperialist Glenn Greenwald. The "must read" portion is not about the NSA, but about Times conservo-nerdlinger David Brooks.