Göran Rosenberg was born in 1948 in Sweden, where he studied philosophy, political science, and journalism and where he has been working as a journalist for Swedish Radio and Television and for major Swedish newspapers. He holds an honorary doctorate from Göteborg University. In 1990 he founded the Swedish monthly magazine of essays and opinion Moderna Tider, of which he was the editor until October 1999. He is a regular columnist and essayist in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. Among his books are Friare kan ingen vara: Den amerikanska idén från Revolution till Reagan (An essay on the American idea, Norstedts, 1991), and Det förlorade landet: En personlig historia (The lost land: A personal history, Bonniers, 1996), also published in Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, German (Das verlorene Land, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), and French (L’utopie perdue, Denoël, 2002). The excerpt that follows is from the first section of Det förlorade landet. His essays have been translated and published in Neue Züricher Zeitung, Lettre Internationale, Daedalus, and New Perspectives Quarterly, among other journals. A newer work is Tankar om journalistik (Reflections on journalism, Prisma, 2000). Among his film documentaries are The Black City with the White House, which was awarded the Golden Nymph for best news documentary at the 1990 International Television Festival in Monte Carlo, and Goethe and Ghetto, which won the Czech Crystal at the International Film Festival in Prague in 1996.