Benjamin Schwarz
Benjamin Schwarz is literary editor and national editor of The Atlantic. 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, and he is on the faculty of the English department at UCLA. He won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in book criticism.
Recent articles by Benjamin Schwarz
The Prince of Paramount
A Hollywood legend’s vivid and honest portrait of the studio era.
Books of the Year
Atlantic literary editor Benjamin Schwarz picks the 25 best in a crowded field.
Mad About Mad Men
What’s wrong—and what’s gloriously right—with AMC’s hit show.
Life In (and After) Our Great Recession
What histories of the Depression era tell us about middle-class families in crisis, then and now.
California Dreamers
The latest volume of Kevin Starr’s history chronicles the triumph—and points toward the tragedy—of the Golden State’s Good Life.
Fashion in Dark Times
As the ever-frivolous industry enters a new era, customers are thinking more—a prospect that thrills the best designers.
Hitler's Co-Conspirators
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.
Designers’ Designers
Three books on three couturiers who rank among the greatest America has produced.
Globaloney
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.
Geography Is Destiny
An epochal new book argues that the events of history we think consequential and monumental are, mostly, trivia.
The Reel Thing
An infuriating, idiosyncratic critic can’t help but be elegiac in cataloguing the history of film.
Intolerant Chic
Editor’s Choice: The new “white people” are bigoted, but not the way you think—or they’ll admit.
A Bit of Punctuation
Editor’s Choice: A new book showcases the jewelry of Ted Muehling, whose earnest, untrendy work reaches the height of stylishness.
A Vision in Concrete
Editor’s Choice: Oscar Niemeyer’s work continues to enchant and appall students of architecture and urban planning.
Waste Not, Want Everything
Editor’s Choice: A panoramic new history brilliantly mixes the seismic and the everyday.
Black Saturday
Editor’s Choice: How the Blitz saved Britain.
California Cool
Modernism's western rebirth.
Couture Clash
How Dior and Balenciaga fought it out.
Charm Offensive
Editor’s Choice: Womanizer, bribe-taker, statesman—the cynically brilliant Talleyrand inspired an equally colorful biographer.
Toiling in the Dream Factory
Editor’s Choice: Moviemaking in Hollywood’s classical period was colossally complex, backbreakingly difficult, obscenely expensive—and it almost always failed.
Life in the Margins
Editor’s Choice: Finding the private lives of medieval men and women in the pages of their prayer books.
The Other Elizabeth Taylor
Editor’s Choice: The late English writer is overdue for the recognition and readers she deserves.
His Second Act
Editor’s Choice: How Frank Sinatra staged the most spectacular comeback in American cultural history.
Where Mother Saw Best
At home with the modernists.
Stalin’s Gift
Stalin on the Eastern Front.
“Show the Dress”
The history of Vogue
Of Rivals and Revivals
Britain vs. France through the ages.
Becoming Cary Grant
What to read this month.
Walt's World
Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, by Neal Gabler.
Babes in Toyland
The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin; Carried Away, by Rachel Bowlby; Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, edited by Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, and Sze Tsung Leong; Mall Maker, by M. Jeffrey Hardwick; Victor Gruen, by Alex Wall.
The Path of Least Resistance
What to read this month.
Orson Agonistes
Orson Welles: Hello Americans, by Simon Callow; Framing the Early Middle Ages, by Chris Wickham.
Chairs, Rag Mags, Indian Wars
Phaidon Design Classics; A Dash of Daring, by Penelope Rowlands; Yellowstone Command, by Jerome A. Greene.
Fire From the Sky
Among the Dead Cities, by A. C. Grayling.
Modernism, Minimalism, Fundamentalism
Glenn Murcutt: buildings + projects 1962-2003, by Francoise Fromonot; Hariri & Hariri Houses, by Gisui Hariri and Mojgan Hariri; The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, by Amy Hempel; Fundamentalism and American Culture, by George M. Marsden.
Cover to Cover
A guide to additional releases.
Lee and Sherman
Fever, by Peter Richmond; Upon the Altar of the Nation, by Harry S. Stout; Scars of War, Wounds of Peace, by Shlomo Ben-Ami; Barrier by Isabel Kershner.
Another 5001 Nights at the Movies
American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate.
The Not-So-Second City
Chicago Architecture and Design, by Jay Pridmore and George A. Larson; Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives, edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray; Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City.
The Perils of Primacy
When too much power means not enough security.
Passion in Fashion
Sample: Cuttings From Contemporary Fashion, edited by Bronwyn Cosgrave; Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, edited by Valerie Steele; Mao, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday; New Art City, by Jed Perl.
War Without End
The Third Reich in Power, by Richard J. Evans; A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor; Pétain, by Charles Williams; In Command of History, by David Reynolds; Forgotten Armies, by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper.
Another World
The Stripping of the Altars, by Eamon Duffy; The Mind of the Master Class, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese; Crazy Horse, by Mari Sandoz.
He Found It at the Movies
James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, Shorter Fiction and James Agee: Film Writing & Selected Journalism, edited by Michael Sragow; Louis I. Kahn, by Robert McCarter; Tired of Weeping, by Jónína Einarsdóttir; The Chosen, by Jerome Karabel.
Elements of Style
Sinatra, by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan; Chanel, edited by Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton; Edmund Wilson, by Lewis M. Dabney; The Lights That Failed, by Zara Steiner.
Managing China's Rise
Contending effectively with China's ambitions requires a better understanding of our own.
Golden State
The Golden West, by Daniel Fuchs; California Rising: The Life and Times of Pat Brown, by Ethan Rarick; The Singapore Grip, by J. G. Farrell; The Survivor, by John F. Harris; Carry Me Back, by Steven Deyle.
Will Israel Live to 100?
Don't be seduced by the recent hopeful signs: in the long run the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain a problem without a solution.
Eminent Domains
The Sky's the Limit, by Steven Gaines; London 1945, by Maureen Waller; The Command of the Ocean, by N. A. M. Rodger.
The Lost Crusade
Against the Beast, edited by John Nichols; War and the Iliad, by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff; Understanding Dante, by John A. Scott.
Clothes-Minded
The London Look: Fashion From Street to Catwalk, by Christopher Breward, Edwina Ehrman, and Caroline Evans; Harvard Rules, by Richard Bradley; The Glorious Cause, by Robert Middlekauff; The Meaning of Independence, by Edmund Morgan.
An Exquisite Slogger
V. S. Pritchett, by Jeremy Treglown; Born Losers, by Scott A. Sandage; War in the Wild East, by Ben Shepherd.
Cheap at $13,000
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison; Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, edited by David J. Wishart; The Children's Blizzard, by David Laskin; The Encyclopedia of Chicago, edited by James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff; Chicago, by A. J. Liebling; Honored Guest, by Joy Williams.
The South in Black and White
The Rural Face of White Supremacy by Mark Schultz; Israel on the Appomatox by Melvin Patrick Ely; Picturing Faith by Colleen McDannell; Conjectures of Order by Michael O'Brien.
The Glass of Fashion
What to read this month—and what not to.
Wolves, Actors, Jihadis
Vicious, by Jon Coleman; Who the Hell's in It, by Peter Bogdanovich; Imperial Hubris, by Anonymous; Heloise & Abelard, by James Burge.
New & Noteworthy
Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, by Rhys Isaac; Hatchet Jobs, by Dale Peck; The North American Prairie, by Stephen R. Jones and Ruth Carol Cushman; The Crow Indians, by Robert H. Lowie; War Under Heaven, by Gregory Evans Dowd; Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, by David Fromkin; The First World War, by Hew Strachan; Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy, by David Stevenson; The Killing Ground, by Tim Travers.
New & Noteworthy
Inside the Victorian Home, by Judith Flanders; Family Fortunes, by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall; Public Lives, by Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair; The Guardians, by Geoffrey Kabaservice; The Greeks and the Irrational, by E. R. Dodds.
New & Noteworthy
The Reformation, by Diarmaid MacCulloch; The War for Righteousness, by Richard M. Gamble; New Grub Street, by George Gissing.
New & Noteworthy
The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, by Benny Morris; Fidelity, by Michael Redhill; The Making of the Poets, by Ian Gilmour; Alexander Hamilton, by Ron Chernow.
Clearer Than the Truth
Duplicity in foreign affairs has sometimes served the national interest. But the case of Iraq is different.
New & Noteworthy
The Origins of the Final Solution, by Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus; Report From a Parisian Paradise, by Joseph Roth; Dresden, by Frederick Taylor; Burying Caesar, by Graham Stewart; Inside Hitler's Bunker, by Joachim Fest; London: Life in the Post-War Years, by Douglas Whitworth.
New & Noteworthy
Why we review the books we do; Rosamond Lehmann, by Selina Hastings; The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans.
New & Noteworthy
What to read this month.
Notes From a Native Daughter
Joan Didion's decline.
New & Noteworthy
What to read this month.
New & Noteworthy
What to read this month.
New & Noteworthy
What to read this month.
New & Noteworthy
What to read this month.
New & Noteworthy
What to read this month.
New & Noteworthy
What to read this month.
New & Noteworthy
What to read this month.
New & Noteworthy
The best bets in a crowded autumn field.
Men of Letters
The decline of "amateur journalism"
Elegant Common Sense
H. L. Mencken's perfect marriage of style and substance.
California Transformed
The Golden State in the 1940s.
Sheer Data
Sinclair Lewis's great accomplishment was, as E. M. Forster marveled, "to lodge a piece of a continent in our imagination"
A Bit of Bunting
A new history of the British Empire elevates expediency to principle.
The Real War
Stephen Ambrose's GIs are plaster saints engaged in a sanctified crusade.
Going All Out for Chinese
Some of the best Chinese food in the world is being served in Los Angeles's new Sino-suburbs.
Monte Carlo, Mississippi
Tunica County, in the Mississippi Delta, has long been among the poorest places in America. But casino gambling is changing Tunica's prospects. The rich Delta soil is sprouting golf courses, and if all goes according to plan, white retirees will soon be moving in. Meanwhile, blacks, Tunica's majority, are not sharing in the boom and are under financial pressure to leave the land that their labor transformed from a vast swamp.
Around the Big Bend
The magnificently solitary landscape of West Texas is studded with surprises
John O'Hara's Protectorate
His undisguised longing for acclaim still keeps John O'Hara from being the favorite son of the place he defined
Dirty Hands
The success of U.S. policy in El Salvador—preventing a guerrilla victory—was based on 40,000 political murders
The Idea of the South
The American South may be joining the national parade, but writing about the South still tries to establish its distinctiveness
Insidious Weakness
Named for Eugene Debs, and raised in a socialist, racially liberal household, Orval E. Faubus, the governor of Arkansas during the 1957 desegregation crisis, was not the last politician to be hollowed out by ambition
What Jefferson Helps to Explain
A recent article in these pages argued that Thomas Jefferson was so deeply racist that he should be expelled from the American pantheon. But examining the problems this ambiguous figure poses for Americans reveals how the American principles of democracy and equality were entwined with the country's practice of slavery and racism, and helps to explain why America has had such difficulty creating an interracial society
Was the Great War Necessary?
A young historian argues iconoclastically that Britain's entry into the First World War, in 1914, was "the greatest error of modern history," born of neurotic fears projected onto Germany
Why America Thinks It Has to Run the World
The Cold War is over, and America is staggering under a colossal debt and an accumulation of frightening social problems. Yet it continues to spend billions to protect Germany and Japan—two rich nations whose freedom is in no apparent danger. Why? Here is the answer that the foreign-policy elite would give if it dared to speak frankly about the delicate matter of American efforts to assert international economic and political control
The Diversity Myth
The hortatory version of our history, in which America has long been a land of ethnic tolerance and multicultural harmony, leaves us with nothing useful to say to the failed states and riven polities of the post-Cold War world
Picking a Good Fight
An Atlantic Online roundtable on the Kosovo Conflict
Updike: America's Man of Letters
A review of William H. Pritchard's work of criticism
Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation
A review of Jeffrey Meyers's biography of the British dystopian
Test of Courage: The Michel Thomas Story
A review of Christopher Robbins's biography of a world-famous linguist and Holocaust survivor
The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s
A reivew of a gigantic, sweeping history of the Great Powers in the grip of the Great Depression