Mark Hertsgaard is an American journalist and author who is the environmental correspondent for The Nation. He was formerly a cultural reporter for New Yorker magazine. His best-known work as an author is On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, which described the way the Reagan White House "deployed raw power and conventional wisdom to intimidate Washington's television newsrooms". He has also written for magazines and newspapers such as Vanity Fair, Time, Harper’s, The Guardian and Le Monde, and for the website Salon.com.
Life
Hertsgaard received a B.A. from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 and was one of the founders of the Baltimore City Paper. According to his fellow Johns Hopkins alumnus Russ Smith, he worked in the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC after graduation. While compiling a feature article for The New Yorker in 1993, Hertsgaard broke the news that the three surviving members of the Beatles were due to issue previously unreleased music from the group's career, as part of their multimedia Anthology project, in addition to reuniting to work on new recordings. At this time, he was granted rare access to the band's EMI recording archives in London, gaining an insight that informed his 1995 book A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles. Writing in 2000, Nick Bromell, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the founding editor of Boston Review, described A Day in the Life as "the best single book on the music of the Beatles". During the 1990s, Hertsgaard's attention turned to the ecology of the Earth. He embarked upon a seven-year global tour to investigate the issue of environmental degradation. The journey spanned four continents, 19 countries and hundreds of interviews. This resulted in the book Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future, which was reviewed favorably in The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine. Hertsgaard also wrote climate change adaptation, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, titled Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth. From 2011 to 2013, he was Schmidt Family Foundation Fellow at New America Foundation researching the linked challenges of climate change, food security, poverty and ecological agriculture. During a Mother's Daysecond line parade in New Orleans in 2013, Hertsgaard was shot and wounded along with 19 other people at the corner of Frenchmen Street and North Villere in the city's 7th Ward.
