Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome the editor of The Atlantic, Scott Stossel and editor at large for Vanity Fair, Cullen Murphy for a discussion of Stossel's latest work, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind. A riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author's struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.
Scott Stossel has been associated with *the Atlantic* since 1992 when, shortly after graduating from Harvard, he joined the staff and helped to launch *The Atlantic Online*. In 1996, he moved to *The American Prospect* where, over the course of seven years, he served as associate editor, executive editor, and culture editor. He rejoined *the Atlantic* staff in 2002. As a writer, Scott tends to focus on what Lionel Trilling called "the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet." His articles have appeared in a wide array of publications, including *The New Yorker*,* The New Republic*, *The New York Times*, *The Washington Post*, and *The Boston Globe*. Along with writing and editing, Scott has taught courses in the American Studies Department at Trinity College. He currently divides his time between Washington and Boston, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
Cullen Murphy was the managing editor of *The Atlantic Monthly* from 1985 to 2002 and the magazine's de facto editor-in-chief from 2002 to 2005. He is the author of *The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own* and *Are We Rome?* He is currently the editor-at-large of *Vanity Fair*.