David Brooks is a renowned cultural journalist and essayist who has written a twice-weekly op-ed column for the New York Times since 2003, covering topics ranging from friendship and art to politics and international affairs. He has also been a political analyst on PBS’s NewsHour since 2004, and he has written four books on modern American life and moral character, including Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000), On Paradise Drive; How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2003), The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011), and The Road to Character (2015). “The Moral Bucket List” is a condensed version of The Road to Character. Critics of Brooks’s work, including Corey Robin, Charles P. Pierce, Katha Pollitt, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, have argued it is politically biased, narrow in scope, and insufficiently researched and theoretically nuanced.

Although Brooks began his career as an editorialist and film reviewer, in the 1990s, he became best known for his conservative political commentary. In 1994, he left the Wall Street Journal to serve as one of the founding editors of the neo-conservative news magazine The Weekly Standard, which was financed by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and he was active in the Republican Party into the early 2000s.