Best-selling author, New York Times columnist and PBS News Hour commentator David Brooks visited Detroit recently to discuss his latest book, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen,” with Zoe Clark, One Detroit contributor and political director for Michigan Public.

The book has been called a practical guide to knowing people better. In a wide-ranging conversation, Brooks talks about how to relate to the people we meet, how to practice aggressive friendliness, why your hometown is a better place to look for happiness than politics, and many other human skills.  

Brooks admits that he is “not the most socially adept human being,” stating that he wanted the book to provide help for those like himself who wished to make more solid and meaningful connections with people in their lives. He believes these abilities are needed now more than ever because people are suffering through what he terms a loneliness epidemic. 

“We live in a society where 54% of Americans say that nobody knows them very well; where the number of people who say they have no close personal friends has gone up by four-fold since 2000; where 45% of high school students say they’re persistently hopeless and despondent,” Brooks said. 

The causes for this emotional dislocation are complex, but the remedies may reside in the way in which we relate to others. 

“We’re in the middle of some sort of relational crisis in society,” Brooks said. “And to me, one of the reasons for that is we just haven’t learned how to be considerate toward each other in the concrete circumstances of life. Like, how do you listen? How do you become a really good conversationalist?”

In addition to his current book, Brooks is the author of “The Second Mountain,” “The Road to Character,” “The Social Animal,’ “Bobos in Paradise” and “On Paradise Drive.” Besides his op-ed columns for The New York Times, he also is a regular contributor to The Atlantic and appears weekly in conversations with Jonathan Capehart on PBS News Hour.