A former senior advisor at the United Nations and the U.S. State Department, and formerly foreign editor (2004-11) at the New York Times Magazine, Scott Malcomson is currently director of communications and senior advisor at the Nicolas Berggruen Institute.

Born in 1961 in California, Malcomson grew up in Oakland and graduated from UC Berkeley, where he first learned journalism while writing and editing for The Daily Californian. Malcomson moved east in 1984 and began writing for the mainstream and alternative press in New York City, particularly The Village Voice. Among the many publications he has written for are The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, Transition, Lettre Internationale, Film Quarterly, Daily Beast, ArtForum, Huffington Post, Colors and The Nation. He has also published several articles in scholarly journals and collections and lectures widely.

Malcomson's writing has tended to focus on foreign affairs, literature, and American history (particularly race). He has worked in Africa and Latin America, the Pacific Islands, China, Turkey and Central Asia, and throughout Europe and North America. He is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime member of PEN.

Malcomson has published four books, all available from Amazon: Tuturani: A Political Journey in the Pacific Islands; Empire's Edge: Travels in Southeastern Europe, Turkey and Central Asia (also available in Turkish); One Drop of Blood; The American Misadventure of Race; and Generation's End: A Personal Memoir of American Power after 9/11 (also available in Chinese).

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we have a chance to see more clearly how they were a turning point in America’s relationship with the world. America became more assertive abroad; its authority and legitimacy as the only superpower became more widely opposed; and the limitations of the U.S.-dominated post–World War II international structures became more evident with each passing year.

The first half of Generation’s End examines the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks through the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As the foreign affairs Op-Ed editor for the New York Times during this period, Scott L. Malcomson witnessed the newspaper’s struggles to deal with the threats to its city and to American security. He captures the confusion and bravery of those times with disarming honesty while also providing insight into the shaping of American (and Times) policy.

The latter half takes Malcomson to Geneva, where in early 2003 he became senior adviser to the new UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Sergio Vieira de Mello. When Vieira de Mello was selected as the UN’s special representative for Iraq, Malcomson counseled him closely, writing strategy memos, speeches, and Op-Eds (including politically sensitive material revealed here for the first time). The killing of Vieira de Mello by al Qaeda in Baghdad, movingly evoked here by Malcomson, brings a measure of closure to a very brief but critical two years that, as George Packer notes in his foreword, “contain all the decisions that would set in motion the larger era.” In an epilogue, Malcomson positions the Obama administration in the context of this formative period.