Benjamin Schwarz

Benjamin Schwarz is the former literary and national editor for The Atlantic. He is writing a book about Winston Churchill for Random House. More

His first piece for the magazine, "The Diversity Myth," was a cover story in 1995. Since then he's written articles and reviews on a startling array of subjects from fashion to the American South, from current fiction to the Victorian family, and from international economics to Chinese restaurants. Schwarz oversees and writes a monthly column for "Books and Critics," the magazine's cultural department, which under his editorship has expanded its coverage to include popular culture and manners and mores, as well as books and ideas. He also regularly writes the "leader" for the magazine. Before joining the Atlantic's staff, Schwarz was the executive editor of World Policy Journal, where his chief mission was to bolster the coverage of cultural issues, international economics, and military affairs. For several years he was a foreign policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, where he researched and wrote on American global strategy, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and military doctrine. Schwarz was also staff member of the Brookings Institution. Born in 1963, he holds a B.A. and an M.A. in history from Yale, and was a Fulbright scholar at Oxford. He has written for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, and The Nation. He has lectured at a range of institutions, from the U.S. Air Force Special Operations School to the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History. He won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in book criticism.

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Issue June 2013

The Rise and Fall of Charm in American Men

Few possess it, and few want to. Explaining men's ambivalent relationship with an amoral virtue.

Issue May 2013

The Love Life and Cultural Influence of Martin Amis

On the new biography of a literary Lothario

Issue April 2013

Chapter and Verse: The Unknown Prose of a Great Poet

Reassessing the literary legacy of the Lost Generation's Edward Thomas

Issue March 2013

Moscow Under Terror

In 1937, the city was both a world capital of artistic ferment and a slaughterhouse.

Issue March 2013

Indelible Images

Two beautiful new coffee-table books—except one isn’t really a book

Issue January/February 2013

The Real Cuban Missile Crisis

Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong.

Issue December 2012

The Education of Virginia Woolf

Issue December 2012

Books of the Year 2012

The Atlantic's literary editor picks the five best of the crop.

Issue November 2012

The End of Jazz

How America’s most vibrant music became a relic

Issue September 2012

Sex Lives of Novelists

Writing about writers; an atrocity ignored; the most influential book in English

Issue July/August 2012

A Harsh Beauty

Revising the Escorial, plus the wonders of Wonder Bread

Issue June 2012

The Cruel Idealist

LBJ’s better angels, plus the power of Big Oil

Issue April 2012

Night Owls

How nightlife changed Western culture, plus why New Zealand is better than the U.S.

Issue March 2012

The Hitch

The story behind Christopher Hitchens’s March 2012 essay

Issue March 2012

Tales From the Crypt

Two books uncover the romance and adventure of archaeology.

Issue January/February 2012

The Perfect Wife

The nicest star in Hollywood, plus the man who made what Americans looked at

Issue December 2011

The Greatest Gossip

Plus a history of the Bank of England

Issue December 2011

Books of the Year 2011

The Atlantic’s literary editor picks the five best of the crop.

Issue November 2011

Police and Poetry

New York's crime drop; T. S. Eliot's dark days

Issue October 2011

Great American Cynic

Ambrose Bierce’s astringent prose style reflects the severity of his vision.

The Biggest Story in Photos

Picking up the Pieces After the Tornado in Moore, Oklahoma

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