Introduction
Ross Gregory Douthat (/ˈdaʊθət/) (born 1979) is an American conservative political analyst, blogger and author and New York Times columnist. He was a senior editor of The Atlantic. He has written on a variety of conservative topics, including the state of Christianity in America and "sustainable decadence" in contemporary society.
Personal life
Douthat was born on November 28, 1979, in San Francisco, California, and grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. As an adolescent, Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family, to Catholicism.
His mother, Patricia Snow, is a writer. His great-grandfather was Governor Charles Wilbert Snow of Connecticut. His father, Charles Douthat, is a partner in a New Haven law firm and poet. In 2007, Douthat married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and a writer for Smithsonian. He and his family live in New Haven, Connecticut.
Education
Douthat attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. Douthat graduated magna cum laude 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.
Career
Douthat is a regular blogger and columnist for The New York Times. 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.
Before joining The New York Times, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic. His published books are Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (2012), Grand New Party (2008) with Reihan Salam, and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (2005). He frequently appeared on the video debate site Bloggingheads.tv until 2012.
David Brooks called Grand New Party the "best single roadmap of where the Republican Party should and is likely to head."
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. 2013 pbk reprint
- To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism. New York: Simon and Schuster. 2018. ISBN 978-1-5011-4694-7. 2019 pbk reprint
- The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success,Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2020. ISBN 978-1476785240