In September 1981 Danner began work at the New York Review of Books as an editorial assistant to editor Robert B. Silvers. In 1984 he became senior editor at Harper's Magazine and, two years later, an editor at The New York Times Magazine, where he specialized in foreign affairs and politics and wrote pieces about nuclear weapons and about the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. Danner joined The New Yorker's staff in April 1990, five months after the magazine published his three-part series on Haiti, "A Reporter At Large: Beyond the Mountains" -- and a few days after the articles were granted the 1990 National Magazine Award for Reporting.

At The New Yorker, Danner began contributing regular essays to the "Comment" section of the magazine, notably on the Gulf War. On December 6, 1993, for the second time in its history, The New Yorker devoted its entire issue to one article -- Danner's piece, "The Truth of El Mozote." That article, an investigation into the notorious massacre in a remote Salvadoran town, was granted an Overseas Press Club Award and a Latin American Studies Association award. In April 1994, Vintage published Danner's book, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. The New York Times Book Review recognized The Massacre at El Mozote as one of its "Notable Books of the Year."

During the mid-1990's Danner began reporting on the wars in the Balkans, writing a series of eleven extended articles for The New York Review of Books, which began with Danner's cover piece, "The US and the Yugoslav Catastrophe" and concluded with " Kosovo: The Meaning of Victory," (New York Review, July 15, 1999). The articles were recognized by the Overseas Press Club as the "Best Reporting From Abroad of 1998." Metropolitan Books will publish an adaptation of these pieces in a volume entitled, The Saddest Story: America, the Balkans and the Post-Cold War World. Danner also co-wrote and helped produce an hour-long television documentary for ABC News's Peter Jennings Reporting series: "While America Watched: The Bosnian Tragedy," which aired on March 30, 1994 (and which was awarded an Emmy and a duPont Golden Baton). He later co-wrote and helped produce a second documentary for the same series, "House on Fire: America's Haitian Crisis," about the run-up to the United States' occupation of Haiti, which aired on July 27, 1994.

Danner's writing has appeared in Aperture, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The Times Book Review, and on The Times Op-Ed page. His 16,000-word essay, "Marooned in the Cold War: America, the Alliance and the Quest for a Vanished World," which appeared in World Policy Journal (Fall 1997) provoked a prolonged exchange of letters and responses from Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, Congressman Lee Hamilton, and Ambassador George F. Kennan. Danner has appeared widely on television and radio discussing international affairs, including on Charlie Rose and The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour on PBS, CNN's PrimeNews , ABC's World News Now and C-Span's Morning Show, among many other programs.

In 1998, Danner began teaching at the University of California at Berkeley as a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights. In 2000, Danner was named Professor on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Berkeley. He currently spends half his year at Berkeley, where he teaches courses on political violence, crisis management in international affairs and writing about wars and politics. In fall 2002, he became founding director of Berkeley's Goldman Forum on the Press and Foreign Affairs, leading a series of debates and discussions on foreign affairs, journalism and politics. In 2002, Danner was named Henry R. Luce Professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College in the Hudson Valley of New York State and in 2007 the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs, Politics and the Humanities. At Bard he teaches courses on literature, intellectual history, foreign affairs and politics.

Danner began writing about the war on terror soon after September 11, 2001 and later began speaking out extensively about the Iraq War, notably in a series of debates with Christopher Hitchens, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, David Frum, William Kristol and others. He reported on Iraq for The New York Review of Books and wrote a series of essays for The Review on the emerging torture scandal that came to be known as Abu Ghraib. In October 2004, he collected these essays and gathered them, together with a series of government documents and reports, into his book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib and the War on Terror.  Torture and Truth was awarded the 2004 Madeline Dane Ross Prize from the Overseas Press Club for best book on current affairs. In May 2005 Danner wrote an essay for The New York Review accompanying the first American publication of the so-called "Downing Street Memo," the leaked minutes of a July 2002 meeting of high-level British officials discussing the coming Iraq War. The essay provoked a number of responses and led to two subsequent essays, all of which were collected, along with relevant documents and a preface by New York Times columnist Frank Rich, 2006 in The Secret Way to War: the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History.

Danner speaks French and some Spanish. He serves on the board of the World Affairs Council of Northern California and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and the Century Association, and is a fellow of the Institute of the Humanities at New York University. Danner divides his time between San Francisco and New York.

-- October 2009