Mary Eberstadt
Research Fellow

Expertise: American society, culture, and philosophy

Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and consulting editor to Policy Review, the Hoover Institution's bimonthly journal of essays and reviews on American politics and society.

Eberstadt focuses on issues on 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, Newark Star-Ledger, and the Wall Street Journal.

Her newest book is The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death, and Atheism, which will be published by Ignatius Press in spring 2010. She is also author of 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 latest Policy Review essays include “Is Pornography the New Tobacco?” (April/May 2009) and “Is Food the New Sex?” (February/March 2009). Other essays include “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). Other recent essays include “My Irving Kristol and Ours” in the October 5, 2009, Weekly Standard .

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 U.S. State Department, a speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and a special assistant to Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick at the U.S. 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. She is an associate member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.