Mary Eberstadt

About

Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC. Eberstadt focuses on issues of American society, culture, and philosophy. She has written widely for various magazines and newspapers, including Policy Review, the Weekly Standard, First Things, the American Spectator, Los Angeles Times, London Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Her newest book is How the West Really Lost God: A New Theory of Secularization (Templeton Press, 2013). She is also author of The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death, and Atheism (Ignatius Press, 2010) and Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs and Other Parent Substitutes (Penguin/Sentinel, 2004) and editor of Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys (Simon and Schuster/Threshold, 2007).

Her Policy Review essays include “Mothers in Combat Boots” (February/March 2010), “Is Food the New Sex?” (February/March 2009), “Is Pornography the New Tobacco?” (April/May 2009), “How the West Really Lost God,” “The Scapegoats among Us,” “Eminem Is Right,” “The Child-Fat Problem,” “Home-Alone America,” and “Why Ritalin Rules.” All are available online at www.policyreview.org.

She is also a contributing writer to First Things magazine. Recent essays there include “What Does Woman Want?”(October 2009) and “The Will to Disbelieve”(February 2009). Another recent essay is "My Irving Kristol and Ours" in the October 5, 2009, Weekly Standard at My Irving Kristol and Ours.

Between 1998 and 1990, she was executive editor of the National Interest magazine. From 1985 to 1987, she was a member of the Policy Planning Staff of the US State Department, a speechwriter for former secretary of state George P. Shultz, and a special assistant to Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick at the US Mission to the United Nations. She was also managing editor at the Public Interest. A four-year Telluride Scholar at Cornell University, Eberstadt graduated magna cum laude in 1983.