The real reason I had New York Times columnist and bestselling author David Brooks on the phone was not, as it turns out, to pester him for his thoughts about our Art District, mostly recently the butt of a few jokes in a Simpsons episode.
No, I was supposed to be quizzing him about The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, his latest book and the topic of tonight’s Dallas Museum of Art  Fresh Ink series special event. And I did do that, I promise – though after reading countless other interviews, the talking points sounded as tired as he did. But as we were wrapping things up, in honor of our Must-Do list, I couldn’t resist asking Brooks for his essential Dallas experience. A restaurant, perhaps? A place?
“Is it too boring to say Cowboys Stadium?” he asked, meaning Texas Stadium, of course. And he dropped the real secret: he’s a Cowboys fan. This native New Yorker called that original Irving eyesore “holy ground,” but admitted to being surprised at how rundown it was. Me too, and I drove past that thing practically every day.
Coincidentally, The Social Animal is more or less about about those things we do every day, albeit not quite so literally and on a different level of consciousness. Brooks created the characters of Harold and Erica and takes them from birth and early childhood to death in order to coherently explaining a ridiculous amount of research in the social and cognitive sciences – the hows and whys of love, work, and his personal favorite, politics. I’m sure he’ll expand on all of this tonight, but for now, here’s pre-chat primer.
What it took to write the brook, or how David Brooks single-handedly kept Dallas-based FedEx-Kinko’s (actually, now FedEx Office) in business:
A lot of it was reading a zillion books, a zillion studies, talking to different neuroscientists. and the big challenge was organizing it all, and I did that thanks to Kinko’s. So I would read a book, mark it up, and then I would Xerox the relevant pages. And I would arrange them in different file folders, so I’d make file cabinets of different folders of different studies.
What all that brain research does to a smart guy who may or may not be afraid of the dentist:
A couple weeks ago I was going to the dentist. And I was in the parking lot of the dentist, and I sent off a really angry email. Which I then regretted for the whole rest of the week .. And then I was back at the dentist’s office, you know, about a week later, and I was again in the parking lot answering some email. And I found myself writing another nasty email, and it occurred to me that I was taking the anxiety from the dentist’s visit, and it was influencing my email.
Why the “happiest story you’ve ever read” gets depressing right around the time Harold and Erica hit middle age:
I didn’t want their [Harold and Erica’s] lives to be one great thing after another … and so even though I think of it as happy in the end, they find each other at the end, but I didn’t want their lives to  be one long walk down milkshake alley or something like that. I wanted to illustrate different things that happen, especially in middle age. And it is genuinely true if you take a look at happiness levels for adults over the course of their lives, people are happiest in the 20s and in their 60s rather than in the 40s and 50s.
Intrigued? All the information you need to attend David Brooks’ talk tonight can be found here. He’s also using his surfeit of research to update a new Times blog with thought-provoking tidbits.
