Kurt Andersen

Kurt Andersen (born August 22, 1954) is an American writer and host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360, a production of Public Radio International.

Not to be confused with Curt Anderson.
This article is about American author and radio host. For the German general, see Kurt Andersen (general).
Kurt Andersen
Born (1954-08-22) August 22, 1954
Omaha, Nebraska, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
EducationWestside High School
Harvard College
OccupationNovelist, radio host, essayist
Spouse(s)Anne Kreamer
Children2

Journalism

Andersen was born in Omaha, Nebraska,[1] and graduated from Westside High School.[2] He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he edited the Harvard Lampoon.[3] In 1986 with E. Graydon Carter he co-founded Spy magazine, which they sold in 1991; it continued publishing until 1998. While writing for Spy, Andersen (with Carter) coined the notable insult "short-fingered vulgarian" for future United States President Donald Trump.[4] He has been a writer and columnist for New York ("The Imperial City"), The New Yorker ("The Culture Industry"), and Time ("Spectator"). He was also the architecture and design critic for Time for nine years.

In 1996, Bill Reilly fired Andersen after two and a half years from his position as editor-in-chief at New York, citing the publication's financial results.[5] Andersen attributed the firing to his refusal to kill a story about a rivalry between investment bankers Felix Rohatyn and Steven Rattner that had upset Henry Kravis, the principal of the publishing firm's ownership group.[6]

In 1999 he co-founded an online media news web site and biweekly magazine called Inside, which he and his co-founders sold to Primedia; Primedia closed the site in October 2001. From 2001 to 2004 he served as a senior creative consultant to Barry Diller's Universal Television, and from 2003 to 2005 as editorial director of Colors magazine. More recently, he co-founded the email cultural curation service Very Short List, was a guest op-ed columnist for The New York Times and editor-at-large for Random House.

He co-created Studio 360, a weekly program covering the arts and culture, which he has hosted since its launch in 2000. It is broadcast on 240 U.S. stations, and distributed as a podcast as well.

Literary works

Andersen is the author of three novels, including Turn of the Century (Random House, 1999), which was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book of the year, and the New York Times bestseller Heyday (Random House, 2007), which won the Langum Prize for the best American historical fiction of 2007. Random House published his third novel, True Believers, in the summer of 2012, and it was named one of the best novels of that year by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. His short fiction has been published in anthologies such as Stories: All-New Tales (HarperCollins, 2010).

Andersen has also published a book of humorous essays, The Real Thing (Doubleday, 1980; Holt, 1982; Bison Press, 2008), about "quintessentialism", and co-authored two humor books, Tools of Power (Viking, 1980), a parody of self-help books on becoming successful, and Loose Lips (Simon & Schuster, 1995), an anthology of edited transcripts of real-life conversations involving celebrated people. Along with Carter and George Kalogerakis he assembled a history and greatest-hits anthology of Spy called Spy: The Funny Years, published in 2006 by Miramax Books.

He also wrote Reset (Random House, 2009), an essay about the causes and aftermath of the Great Recession, and he has contributed to many other books, such as Spark: How Creativity Works (HarperCollins, 2011), and Fields of Vision: The Photographs of John Vachon (Library of Congress, 2010).

In 2017, he published two books, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, which explains American society's peculiar susceptibility to falsehoods and illusions (Random House, ISBN 978-1-4000-6721-3), and with Alec Baldwin You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year As President (Penguin, ISBN 978-0-5255-2199-0), a parody Trump memoir. Excerpts from Fantasyland appeared as a cover story inThe Atlantic ,[7][8] and in Slate.[9][10] Both books were New York Times bestsellers, and Fantasyland, which the Times Book Review called "a great revisionist history of America,"[11] reached #3 on the nonfiction list.[12]

Personal life

Andersen lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife, the author Anne Kreamer. In a 2019 talk for CSICon Andersen ended his lecture by saying "Make America Reality-Based Again" to which someone in the audience asked how to make that happen. According to Skeptical Inquirer Magazine editor Kendrick Frazier, "Andersen at first seemed lost for how to respond but then did. '"We hope for the best ... call B.S. on B.S. ... Maybe we can not be as squishy as we have been. ... Maybe we can stop it from becoming worse'".[13]

Bibliography
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Books
Novels
Humor
  • The Real Thing (Doubleday, 1980; Holt, 1982; Bison Press, 2008)
  • Tools of Power (Viking, 1980)
  • Loose Lips (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
  • Spy : The Funny Years (Miramax Books, 2006)
  • You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year As President (with Alec Baldwin) (Penguin, 2017)
Non-fiction

Essays, reporting and other contributions
  • Andersen, Kurt (Mar 2018). "How to talk Trump". Dispatches. Lexicon. The Atlantic. 321 (2): 27.
gollark: What paste limit?
gollark: Anyway, the only features I actually particularly want are the scraping API, autosave and lack of captchas, and I just don't care enough to pay £50.
gollark: $49.95 for lifetime apparently.
gollark: Something like that?
gollark: If I had a problem with the UI I would just... write some CSS, or something?

References
  1. "Omaha's Culture Club". The New York Times. Retrieved June 3, 2014.
  2. "1970 Westside High School YEARBOOK - Omaha, NE". classmates.com. Retrieved Oct 25, 2015.
  3. "bio - Kurt AndersenKurt Andersen". Retrieved 2 March 2017.
  4. Kelly, Jon (March 7, 2016). "How Donald Trump Became the Short-Fingered Vulgarian". Vanity Fair. Retrieved October 4, 2017..
  5. Weber, Bruce. "Bill Reilly, Magazine Publishing Executive, Dies at 70", The New York Times, October 20, 2008. Accessed October 23, 2008.
  6. Pogrebin, Robin. "When a Magazine Is Too Brash for the Bottom Line", The New York Times, September 29, 1996. Accessed October 23, 2008.
  7. Andersen, Kurt. "How America Lost Its Mind". The Atlantic (September 2017).
  8. "New and Notable". Skeptical Inquirer. Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. 42 (1): 58. 2018.
  9. Andersen, Kurt (5 Oct 2017). "America's Gun Fantasy". Slate.
  10. Andersen, Kurt (2 Feb 2018). "How the GOP Went Crazy". Slate.
  11. "Fake News: It's as American as George Washington's Cherry Tree". Retrieved 2018-08-19.
  12. "Best Sellers - September 24, 2017 - The New York Times". Retrieved 2018-08-19.
  13. Frazier, Kendrick (2020). "From Fantasyland America to the Fabric of Space and Time". Skeptical Inquirer. Committee for Skeptical Inquirer. 44 (2): 8–17. Our fantasyland tendencies have been there since the beginning, but in recent decades Anterden lamented, they have made a horrible swerve. Is the swerve permanent or just a phase? It is too early to tell. - Frazier recounting Andersen at CSICON
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