Mad About Mad Men
What’s wrong—and what’s gloriously right—with AMC’s hit show
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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.
Dashed hopes, less sex, even more Sisyphean labor for women—what the histories of the Depression era tell us about middle-class families in crisis, both then and now
The latest volume of Kevin Starr’s history chronicles the triumph—and points toward the tragedy—of the Golden State’s Good Life
During the fashion boom that began in the 1980s, the relationship between fashion and its customers was the same as the one between art and its rich, often unlovely patrons: all that money sloshing around led to excessive consumption, but it also created a fertile soil in which works of beauty and integrity could develop. Last year that boom ended with breathtaking rapidity and finality. Luckily, a contingent of people at the heart of American fashion has for years been readying for post-crash style.
New histories reveal that the Nazi Regime deliberately insinuated knowledge of the Final Solution, devilishly making Germans complicit in the crime and binding them, with guilt and dread, to their leaders.
Three books on three couturiers who rank among the greatest America has produced
A new report from the country’s top intelligence office predicts a fundamental change in America’s foreign policy—but not the change Barack Obama has promised.
An epochal new book argues that the events of history we think consequential and monumental are, mostly, trivia
An infuriating, idiosyncratic critic can’t help but be elegiac in cataloguing the history of film.
Editor’s Choice: The new “white people” are bigoted, but not the way you think—or they’ll admit.
Editor’s Choice: A new book showcases the jewelry of Ted Muehling, whose earnest, untrendy work reaches the height of stylishness.
Editor’s Choice: Oscar Niemeyer’s work continues to enchant and appall students of architecture and urban planning.
Editor’s Choice: A panoramic new history brilliantly mixes the seismic and the everyday.
Editor’s Choice: When postwar modernism went west, it dropped the angst—and transformed a culture.
Editor’s Choice: How Dior’s and Balenciaga’s competing visions of style and women revived high fashion
Editor’s Choice: Womanizer, bribe-taker, statesman—the cynically brilliant Talleyrand inspired an equally colorful biographer.
Editor’s Choice: Moviemaking in Hollywood’s classical period was colossally complex, backbreakingly difficult, obscenely expensive—and it almost always failed.
Editor’s Choice: Finding the private lives of medieval men and women in the pages of their prayer books
Editor’s Choice: The late English writer is overdue for the recognition and readers she deserves.
