Benjamin Schwarz is literary and national editor of The Atlantic. He also writes a column for “Books and Critics,” the magazine’s cultural department, which under his editorship has expanded its coverage to include popular culture as well as books and ideas, and regularly writes the “leader” for the magazine, usually on topics relating to foreign affairs. Before joining the Atlantic he was executive editor of World Policy Journal. For several years he was a foreign policy analyst at RAND, where he researched and wrote on American global strategy, counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and military doctrine. He was also a staff member of the Brookings Institution. He holds a B.A. and an M.A. in history from Yale, and was a Fulbright scholar at Oxford. Schwarz 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, 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.