Myron Magnet (born 1944) was the editor of City Journal from 1994 through 2007 and is now the magazine's Editor-at-Large. The Manhattan Institute's quarterly journal of urban affairs, City Journal focuses on endemic urban dilemmas such as welfare, housing, taxes, and crime from a free-market, conservative perspective, as well as on culture and society.
Magnet has also served as a member of the Board of Editors at Fortune Magazine, a publication for which he also wrote numerous articles after joining its staff in 1980, in addition to publishing essays or op-eds in Commentary, The Washington Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among other publications.
Magnet is the author of several books, and is probably most well-known for writing The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, which President George W. Bush has cited as a book that had a profound influence on his approach to public policy. The central premise of the book is that the dramatic cultural transformation that the United States experienced during the 1960s unintentionally created a vast underclass whose societal maladies we are still being forced to address. 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.
Magnet graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1962. He holds bachelor's degrees from both Columbia University (1966) and the University of Cambridge, as well an M.A. from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has taught at Columbia University and at Middlebury College.
In November, 2008, President Bush awarded Magnet the National Humanities Medal "for scholarship and visionary influence in renewing our national culture of compassion. He has combined literary and cultural history with a profound understanding of contemporary urban life to examine new ways of relieving poverty and renewing civic institutions." [1]