Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat
Ross Douthat
Born	Ross Gregory Douthat; November 28, 1979 (age 44); San Francisco, California, U.S.
Occupation	Columnist; author; blogger;
Education	Harvard University (BA)
Subjects	Politics; religion; social commentary; higher education;
Spouse	Abigail Tucker (m. 2007)

Ross Gregory Douthat^[a] (born November 28, 1979) is an American political analyst, blogger, author and New York Times columnist.^[2] He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of topics, including the state of Christianity in America and "sustainable decadence" in contemporary society.

Personal life

Ross Gregory Douthat was born in 1979 in San Francisco, California, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.^[3] As an adolescent, Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family,^[4] to Catholicism.^[5]

His mother is a writer.^[6] His great-grandfather was the poet and Governor Charles Wilbert Snow of Connecticut.^[7] His father, Charles Douthat, is a partner in a New Haven law firm^[8]^[9] and a poet. In 2007, Douthat married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and a writer for Smithsonian.^[8] He and his family live in New Haven, Connecticut.^[10]

Douthat has written that he suffers from chronic Lyme disease, a diagnosis that is unrecognized by mainstream medicine. His symptoms began in 2015, soon after he and his family had moved to Connecticut. This is the subject of his book The Deep Places.^[11]^[12]

He is a reader of fantasy, particularly Tolkien: "The whole reason that modern fantasy, in all its various guises, has proven such a potent genre is precisely because it seems to capture more of reality than its technically-more-realistic competitors. Fantasy re-enchants our disenchanted world, and recaptures something essential to mortal experience along the way: Whether you literally believe in fairies or not, a great fairy tale is truer to the richness of human affairs than many New Yorker short stories." He admires G. K. Chesterton, ("What Ayn Rand is to young libertarians, Chesterton is to teenage Catholic conservatives") and Graham Greene, writing "If Chesterton is the writer to read when you’re becoming a Catholic, then Greene is the writer to read when you realize — as everybody does, except (or maybe especially) the saints — that you’re going to be really, really bad at being one." He names other influential books, "from further back in my adolescence and childhood: The Great Gatsby, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Lolita, Watership Down (the best modern novel about politics), and the collected works of Stephen King."^[13]

Education

Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. Douthat graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University in 2002, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While there he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited The Harvard Salient.^[14]

Career

Douthat is a regular columnist for The New York Times.^[15] In April 2009, he became the youngest regular op-ed writer in The New York Times after replacing Bill Kristol as a conservative voice on the Times editorial page.^[16]^[17]

Before joining The New York Times, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic.^[18] He has published books on the decline of religion in American society, the role of Harvard University in creating an American ruling class and other topics related to religion, politics and society. His book Grand New Party (2008), which he co-wrote with Reihan Salam, was described by New York Times commentator David Brooks as the "best single roadmap of where the Republican Party should and is likely to head."^[19] Douthat's The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success (2020) received positive reviews in The New York Times^[20] and National Review.^[21] Douthat frequently appeared on the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv until 2012.

Douthat has written in support of banning abortion, arguing that science shows that a zygote (a fertilized egg) is a distinct human and that to destroy is to kill a human.^[22]

Published works

Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. New York: Hyperion. 2005. ISBN 978-1-4013-0112-5.
Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream. With Salam, Reihan. New York: Doubleday. 2008. ISBN 978-0-385-51943-4.
Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. New York: Free Press. 2012. ISBN 978-1-4391-7830-0.
To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-4694-7.
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020. (The paperback edition, issued in 2021, is titled: The Decadent Society: America Before and After the Pandemic.) ISBN 978-1476785240
The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery. Convergent Books. October 26, 2021. ISBN 0-59-323736-6

Notes

^ Pronounced /ˈdaʊθət/.^[1]

References

^ Douthat, Ross (July 14, 2008). "Rush Versus Me". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on March 28, 2020. Retrieved March 28, 2020.
^ @DouthatNYT (October 12, 2016). "My birthday, as it happens:" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
^ Lamb, Brian (May 6, 2009). "Q&A with Ross Douthat". Q&A. (c-spanarchives.org). Archived from the original on April 14, 2013. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
^ Sheelah Kolhatkar (March 6, 2005). "A Pisher's Privilege". The New York Observer. Archived from the original on April 9, 2015. Retrieved March 30, 2009.
^ George Packer (May 26, 2008). "The Fall of Conservatism". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on December 19, 2008. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
^ Ross Douthat. "Anne Rice's Christ". Archived from the original on February 7, 2009. Retrieved February 3, 2009.
^ Hoffman, Chris (March 18, 2020). "Q&A with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat". Retrieved May 17, 2020.
^ ^a ^b "Abigail Tucker, Ross Douthat". The New York Times. September 30, 2007. Archived from the original on May 7, 2011. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
^ "John Carmichael (1740–1806) and his wife Esther Canfield (1748–1816) of Sand". 1996 – via Google Books.
^ "Opinion | Your Questions, Answered". The New York Times. January 3, 2019. Archived from the original on January 22, 2019. Retrieved January 21, 2019.
^ Douthat, Ross (October 26, 2021). The Deep Places by Ross Douthat. Crown Publishing. ISBN 978-0593237366. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
^ Hoffman, Chris. "Q&A with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat". Connecticut Magazine.
^ Ross Douthat (March 25, 2010). "The Influential Books Game". The New York Times.
^ Shah, Huma N. (March 13, 2009). "Crimson Alum Replaces Kristol". The Harvard Crimson. Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved November 11, 2018.
^ Patricia Cohen (July 20, 2008). "Conservative Thinkers Think Again". The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 16, 2011. Retrieved September 9, 2008.
^ Calderone, Michael (March 31, 2009). "Douthat enters new Times zone". Politico. politico.com. Archived from the original on January 4, 2010. Retrieved October 20, 2009.
^ Richard Pérez-Peña (March 11, 2009). "Times Hires New Conservative Columnist". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 17, 2013. Retrieved March 25, 2009.
^ Ross Douthat (April 17, 2009). "A Goodbye". The Atlantic. Archived from the original on April 17, 2009. Retrieved April 18, 2009.
^ David Brooks (June 27, 2008). "The Sam's Club Agenda". The New York Times. Archived from the original on April 24, 2009. Retrieved September 9, 2008.
^ Lilla, Mark (February 25, 2020). "Ross Douthat Has a Vision of America. It's Grim". The New York Times. Archived from the original on December 1, 2020. Retrieved December 26, 2020.
^ Sibarium, Aaron (March 5, 2020). "Our Comfortable Decadence". National Review. Archived from the original on September 22, 2020. Retrieved December 26, 2020.
^ Douthat, Ross (November 30, 2021). "Opinion | the Case Against Abortion". The New York Times.