The Permanent Questions With David Brooks

Weekly conversations exploring life's fundamental questions with thinkers AI summary

The Atlantic Society & Culture · EN · 10 episodes · latest 2026-11-08

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What it is about

What makes us human? How can I find purpose in life? How can my relationship survive a rough patch? What do I say to a friend who’s suffering? Does any of this mean anything at all? It’s easy to lose sight of fundamental human concerns amid the churn of the news cycle and the demands of every day. Each week on The Permanent Questions, host David Brooks seeks to return them to our attention through thoughtful conversation with the world’s deepest thinkers.

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Copyright © 2026 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.

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Latest episodes

Can Beauty Make Us Good?

2026-11-08 · 1 hr 16 min · Season 1, episode 9

What is beauty? Is it really “in the eye of the beholder,” or is it an objective quality that exists in the world? Is it a mere decorative feature of life, or does it have something important to tell us? These are…
Is Radicalism the Answer?

2026-11-01 · 1 hr 8 min · Season 1, episode 8

As we enter the midterm elections, Americans seem increasingly ready to move on from the Trump era, but there remains great disagreement about what should come next and how we might achieve it. Intellectual historian…
Do Miracles Really Happen?

2026-10-25 · 1 hr 2 min · Season 1, episode 7

Carlos Eire arrived in Miami at age 11 in 1962, a refugee from Castro’s Cuba. Three years passed before his mother could join him, and he never saw his father again. This experience of dislocation profoundly shaped…
What Role Should Politics Play In Your Life?

2026-10-18 · 45 min · Season 1, episode 6

One of the paradoxes of our moment is that the excesses of Donald Trump’s presidency seem to demand our obsessive attention, while Trump himself obviously thrives on that obsession—and all the social division that comes…
Do Human Beings Have Souls?

2026-10-11 · 51 min · Season 1, episode 5

The majority of Americans believe that every human being has an immaterial soul, and they tend to base their sense of human dignity and equality on this belief. Yet the culture at large often operates under the…
Should We Ban AI for Kids?

2026-10-04 · 44 min · Season 1, episode 4

Long before he became famous as the author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt was a social psychologist whose work revolutionized the field. In this episode of The Permanent Questions, taped in front of a live…
What Is the Meaning of Mystical Experience?

2026-09-27 · 1 hr 5 min · Episode 3

What would it be like to wake up one day with the ability to greet the world with warmth, patience, grace, and affection? This is what happens to the main character in the Pulitzer Prize–winner Ayad Akhtar's magnificent…
What Is Humanity’s Place in the Cosmos?

2026-09-20 · 56 min · Episode 2

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…
What Is the Good Life?

2026-09-13 · 1 hr 2 min · Episode 1

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…
Introducing The Permanent Questions with David Brooks

2026-09-04 · 1 min

How do you find your purpose? How do you confront your own mortality? How do you repair a broken community? There are a lot of podcasts about the latest developments in politics and finance, health and wellness,…

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Publisher details

Oldest episode in feed: 09/2026
Typical length: 46 min
Format: Episodic Newest first, episodes stand alone

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