His work has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, and TomDispatch. The Fate of the Earth received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other awards, and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Critics Award. He was most recently a Distinguished Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization.

In the 1980s, Schell wrote a series of articles in The New Yorker (subsequently published as The Fate of the Earth), which were instrumental in raising public awareness about the dangers of the nuclear arms race. He has been a persistent advocate for disarmament, and a world free of nuclear weapons.

In 2002 and 2003, Schell was a persistent critic of the invasion of Iraq. He has since commented, "There doesn't seem to be a rush to find the people who were right about Iraq and install them in the mainstream media."

He is the younger brother of Orville Schell, former dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. UC Berkeley Journalism - Faculty - The journalism dean searches for intelligent life in the media and current Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at Asia Society in New York.