Lance Morrow

Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow

Lance Morrow is the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His work focuses on the moral and ethical dimensions of public events, including developments in regard to freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and political correctness on American campuses, with a view to the future consequences of such suppressions.

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Lance Morrow is the Henry Grunwald Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His work focuses on the moral and ethical dimensions of public events, including developments in regard to freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and political correctness on American campuses, with a view to the future consequences of such suppressions.

Morrow’s award-winning essays, appearing in TimeSmithsonianThe New York TimesThe Atlantic, and other publications, have offered probing analyses of American culture and politics in the transition from the 20th to the 21st century.

Morrow wrote about every presidential election from Nixon to Obama, wars from Vietnam to Bosnia to the Middle East. Morrow was the author of more than 150 cover stories for Time, including eight Man of the Year articles.

He is currently writing a book about Henry Luce and his magazines’ role in shaping American culture and opinions in the middle third of the 20th century. Morrow is a strong believer in the role of journalism in sustaining freedom and democracy.

The son of an editor of the old Saturday Evening Post and of a Washington columnist for the Knight syndicate, Morrow grew up in Washington. He attended Gonzaga High School, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University. For nine years (1996-2005), he was a University Professor at Boston University, where he taught presidential history and the art of the essay.

The author of seven books, Morrow is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award—the first for his original coverage in essay form of American cultural affairs, the second for his essay that was part of Time‘s special coverage of September 11th.

Morrow’s study of the question of evil, arising among other things from his travel in the Bosnian war zone with Elie Wiesel, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award.  Later, he turned the article into a critically acclaimed book—Evil: An Investigation.

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Seeing Red and Feeling Blue: America’s Rotten National Mood

Lance Morrow

Injury can bring a country together. But this is a compound fracture to the national psyche.

Articles

The Wall Street Journal / February 19, 2021

Free the Mind from Bitterness

Lance Morrow

Americans have become dangerous to themselves. This must be transcended.

Articles

City Journal / January 20, 2021

Infamy and Mythology

Lance Morrow

For Donald Trump, yesterday’s events may prove to be as much one as the other.

Articles

City Journal / January 8, 2021

Christmas in a Dark Time

Lance Morrow

Christmas should speak of the power of love, of forgiveness—a truce, a tenderness. There’s not much of that right now in the noisy, nasty public square.

Articles

City Journal / December 24, 2020

An Unfunny Thing Happened on the Way to 2021

Lance Morrow

Polarization, political correctness and Covid-19 have produced a hostile environment for humor.

Articles

The Wall Street Journal / December 1, 2020

Elite Opinion Is Never Wrong

Lance Morrow

Reality may fail to measure up to cocktail party assumptions, but the chit-chat of the better people rings on, unchanged.

Articles

City Journal / November 13, 2020

Trump’s White House at the End of the Line

Lance Morrow

Not even in the bitterest, most furious days of the late ’60s were Americans as alienated from one another as they are now.

Articles

The Wall Street Journal / November 12, 2020

A Noisy Place

Lance Morrow

Our exhausting and not-yet-settled election of 2020 should remind us that America has rarely been “one nation, indivisible.”

Articles

City Journal / November 4, 2020

FDR, Coronavirus and the Politics of Bravado

Lance Morrow

When Mr. Trump tells his fellow citizens not to be intimidated by the coronavirus, not to let it “dominate” them, he does a perfectly Trumpian thing: He invites them to share in an optative, mind-over-matter metaphysics that is the key to his relationship to the truth and the workings of his presidency.

Articles

The Wall Street Journal / October 9, 2020

Before Reporting Became ‘Journalism’

Lance Morrow

It would be silly to idealize the old journalism, which had its problems, including excessive deference to authority and massive sins of omission in the scope of its curiosity; anyway, it belonged to a different world. But it had this virtue: The work, subduing the ego of the reporter, implied respect for the independent mind of the reader.

Articles

The Wall Street Journal / September 23, 2020

Conventional Wisdom

Lance Morrow

Quadrennial political carnivals have been outdated for at least 60 years.

Articles

City Journal / August 20, 2020

Dawn of the Woke

Lance Morrow

Joe McCarthy was a B-movie monster. Today’s cancel culture is more like a zombie apocalypse.

Articles

The Wall Street Journal / August 2, 2020