His name is Myron Magnet. Eight years ago he published a book called “The Dream and the Nightmare,” which George W. Bush has called the most influential book — aside from the Bible — that he’s ever read.
The new president’s chief political strategist, Karl Rove, has declared “The Dream and the Nightmare” a “road map” to Bush’s attitudes on the role of government. Continue reading
Editorial of The New York Sun, December 29, 2006
The year would not be complete if we did not tip our hat to one of the most extraordinary editors in this, or any, town, Myron Magnet. At the end of the year he is stepping down from the editorship of City Journal, which over the past 12 years he has built into a magazine of outsized influence in the political and cultural affairs not only of New York but of all cities. It would not be too much to say that under Mr. Magnet’s editorship City Journal has become the most influential urban magazine in the country and the most beautifully crafted.
Continue reading at The New York Sun …
The Observer, April 21, 2001
Myron Magnet is not a politician and he speaks with the robust confidence of a theorist who knows he will never have to implement the social theories he espouses. From his offices at the influential neo-conservative think-tank, the Manhattan Institute, it is hard not to be beguiled by his argument that the persistent underclass that exists in America and Britain is a product not of failed economic policies and incentives, but of cultural attitudes. Continue reading
ANOTHER SIGN of how much New York has changed: The most influential source of political ideas is a conservative think tank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher’s mentor and Ronald Reagan’s spymaster.
The Manhattan Institute was a speck on the margins of the city’s political landscape when it opened in 1978, promoting the un-New Yorkerish notions of free-market economics, conservative values and the dismantling of the welfare state. Now, 20 years later, it dominates political discussions and helps set the agenda. Continue reading
AMID THE POWERFUL conformist currents of midtown Manhattan, there is something unexpected about Myron Magnet’s sideburns — bushy white whiskers that billow out from his bespectacled face like something out of Dickens. Continue reading