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Alex Beam (born 1954 ) is an American writer and journalist, currently a columnist for The Boston Globe.

Beam grew up in Washington, D.C., as his father Jacob D. Beam was a diplomat. Beam attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where he was Foreign Correspondent for the twice-weekly school newspaper, The Exonian, and graduated from Yale University in 1975. He helped establish a small weekly newspaper in Ludlow, Vermont, The Black River Tribune.

Beam worked at Newsweek and BusinessWeek, where his tenure included Boston and Moscow bureau chief, before joining the Boston Globe. His twice-weekly column for the Globe has appeared since 1987. He was a John Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 1996-1997.

In addition to his journalistic work, Beam is the author of two novels set in Russia, Fellow Travelers (1987) and The Americans Are Coming! (1991), both published by St. Martin's Press. He has also published two works of non-fiction. Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital, which explored the history of McLean Hospital, was published in January 2002. His second non-fiction book, about the Great Books movement, A Great Idea at the Time: the Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, was published in 2008. Both were named Notable Books in the annual list compiled by the New York Times Book Review.

For a time Beam wrote a weekly blog about squash, the sport, for Vanity Fair's online edition.

His son Christopher Beam is currently a political blogger for Slate.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alex Beam", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0