Myron Magnet was the Editor of City Journal, the Manhattan Institute's quarterly magazine of urban affairs, from 1994 through 2006, and he is now the journal's Editor-at-Large. A former member of the Board of Editors of Fortune magazine, he has written about a wide variety of topics, from American society and social policy, economics, and corporate management to intellectual history and literature.
His book, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass (Encounter Books, 1993) argues that the radical transformation of mainstream American culture that took place in the 1960s brought the underclass into being. Changes in beliefs and values at the top of American society produced catastrophic changes in behavior at the bottom. President George W. Bush told the Wall Street Journal that it was the most important book he'd ever read after the Bible, and Bush strategist Karl Rove calls The Dream and the Nightmare a roadmap to the president's "compassionate conservatism." Hilton Kramer called the book "an indispensable guide to the outstanding question of the day," columnist Mona Charen deemed it "the book of the decade," and the Wall Street Journal remarked that "many writers have addressed this topic [of the underclass] but few have done so with more wisdom or more passion." Dr. Magnet is also the author of Dickens and the Social Order (second edition: ISI Books, 2004), and he is the editor of The Millennial City: A New Urban Paradigm for 21st-Century America; What Makes Charity Work? A Century of Public and Private Philanthropy; and Modern Sex: Liberation and its Discontents.
More than fifty feature articles have appeared in Fortune under his byline, as have articles in City Journal, Commentary, the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, the New York Times, and other publications. He has also appeared on numerous television and radio programs.
Dr. Magnet holds bachelor's degrees from Columbia University and the University of Cambridge. He earned an M.A. from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from Columbia, where he taught for several years, before joining the staff of Fortune in 1980.
Dr. Magnet lives on Manhattan's Upper West Side.