Myron Magnet was the editor of City Journal from 1994 through 2006, and he is now the magazine's editor-at-large. A former member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine, Magnet has written about a wide variety of topics, from American society and social policy, economics, and corporate management to intellectual history, literature, architecture, and the American Founding.

His book, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass (Encounter Books, 1993) argues that the radical transformation of elite and mainstream American culture that took place in the 1960s produced catastrophic changes in behavior at the bottom of society that gave rise to the urban underclass. 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," while columnist Mona Charen deemed it "the book of the decade." Dr. Magnet is also the author of Dickens and the Social Order (second edition: ISI Books, 2004) and 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.

In addition to his many City Journal and Fortune articles, he has written for Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, National Review, the American Spectator, The New York Times, and other publications. He has also appeared on numerous television and radio programs.

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. President Bush awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2008.