[1] As of 2018[update], Danner holds the Class of 1961 Distinguished Chair in Undergraduate Education at UC Berkeley[2] and James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard College.

He attended Utica Free Academy, a public high school, and then Harvard, where he graduated, magna cum laude, with a degree in modern literature and aesthetics in 1981.

In 1986, he joined The New York Times Magazine, where he specialized in foreign affairs and politics, writing pieces about nuclear weapons and about the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti, among other stories.

[7] 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 H. Hamilton, and Ambassador George F. Kennan.

Danner began writing about the war on terror soon after September 11, 2001, publishing "The Battlefield in the American Mind" in The New York Times in October of that year.

He began speaking out against invading Iraq, notably in a series of debates with Christopher Hitchens, Leon Wieseltier, Michael Ignatieff, David Frum, William Kristol and others.

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.

[10] In the spring of 2016, Danner began covering the 2016 general election for The New York Review of Books, profiling then Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump on his campaign trail.

[19] After the 2020 election, Danner attended the Trump rally at the White House ellipse on January 6, marching to the U.S. Capitol, and reported on it in his piece "Be Ready to Fight".

[29] In April 2010, Danner delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, entitled "Torture and the Forever War: Living in the State of Exception.

In 2011, while teaching at Al Quds University in Palestine, Danner met Michelle Sipe of Gainesville, Florida, a Victorian Literature professor.