BIO

In addition to being the author of various books, I am a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic and The Washington Monthly; a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution; and a columnist for ESPN.com. My Brookings bio is here. I lecture and occasionally teach college courses.

In prior jobs, I have been a staff writer and then national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, a columnist for NFL.com, an editor of The Washington Monthly, a contributing editor to Newsweek and to U.S. News & World Report, a columnist for the ecumenical website BeliefNet.com, a distinguished fellow of the Fulbright Foundation, a bartender, a bus driver and a used-car salesman.

I was born in 1953 in Buffalo, New York, to parents who were naturalized Americans; both my parents were originally Canadian. My mother, Vimy Hoover Easterbrook, who worked as a teacher in the Buffalo public school system, died in 1976. My father, George, is a retired dentist living near Buffalo. I am a graduate of Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

My brother Frank is a federal appeals court judge for the Seventh Circuit, and a professor of law at the University of Chicago. My brother Neil is a professor of English at Texas Christian University. My sister Nancy is a nurse in Knoxville, Tennessee.

My wife, Nan Kennelly, a graduate of Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, works for the Department of State; we’ve lived overseas in Pakistan and Belgium. Right now we live outside Washington, DC. We have three children: boys born in 1989 and 1995 and a girl born in 1990.