Kurt B. Andersen is an American writer, the author of novels and nonfiction as well as a writer for television and the theater.

He was also a co-founder of Spy magazine, as well as co-creator and for its 20-year run host of the weekly Peabody Award-winning public radio program and podcast Studio 360.

Early life and education

Andersen was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Growing up, he lived across the street from Ginni Thomas. He graduated from Westside High School. While a student at Harvard College, he was an editor and vice-president of the Harvard Lampoon. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Rhode Island School of Design and Pratt Institute.

Journalism

Early in his career, Andersen worked as a writer for the Today Show critic and interviewer Gene Shalit. Before, during, and his period of work with Spy (see following), he wrote for Time, including nine years as its architecture and design critic.

In 1986, Andersen, with E. Graydon Carter and Thomas L. Phillips Jr., co-founded Spy. "It's pretty safe to say," author Dave Eggers wrote in the mid-1990s, "that...<blockquote>Spy was the most influential magazine of the 1980s. It might have remade New York's cultural landscape; it definitely changed the whole tone of magazine journalism. It was cruel, brilliant, beautifully written and perfectly designed, and feared by all. There's no magazine I know of that's so continually referenced, held up as a benchmark; and whose demise is so lamented.</blockquote>

In 2006, novelist Christopher Buckley wrote that "Spy didn't capture the zeitgeist—it was the zeitgeist," that it was "deliciously vicious", and "despised by all the right people, primus inter pares, Donald Trump." In Spy, Andersen and Carter in 1988 coined the notable epithet "short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump" for the future U.S. president.

Media critic Jack Shafer wrote in 2009 that Spy was one of "a handful of 20th-century American magazines...whose glory days continue to influence editors." And in a 2017 paper about Spy, Marist College journalism professor and department chair Kevin M. Lerner wrote that "a whole generation of journalists was raised with the Spy attitude ingrained not just into their writing but into their world view," and that "more than anything, Spy invented the painstakingly reported – but still funny – satirical magazine feature. It was as funny as Mad, and as well-reported as The New Yorker."

Andersen co-wrote and co-produced two hour-long prime-time Spy specials for NBC, in 1991 Spy Magazine Presents How to Be Famous, hosted by Jerry Seinfeld, and The Spy Magazine Hit List: The 100 Most Annoying and Alarming People and Events of 1992, hosted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Andersen and his partners sold Spy in 1991; he left the magazine in 1993, and it continued publishing until 1998.

From 1996 to 1999 Andersen was a staff writer and columnist ("The Culture Industry") for The New Yorker, and from 2004 to 2008 a columnist for New York ("The Imperial City").

He became editor-in-chief of New York in 1994, after which its circulation and advertising revenue quickly rose. In early 1996, a New York Times article quoted Andersen, stating that Henry Kravis, the head of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), the financial firm that controlled New Yorks publishing company, asked him to kill a story about a rivalry between Felix Rohatyn and Steven Rattner for control of the Lazard investment bank, and to stop covering Wall Street altogether. Andersen demurred, and was fired five months later.

In 1999, Andersen co-founded an online media and entertainment news website and biweekly magazine Inside. In 2001, he and his co-founders merged Inside with a site and magazine founded by Steven Brill. The merged enterprise was subsequently acquired by Primedia (now Rent Group), but Primedia closed the Brill site in October 2001, and later Inside as well.

From 2001 to 2004, Andersen served as a senior creative consultant to Barry Diller's Universal Television, where he co-created the entertainment and arts channel Trio with Michael Jackson, Lauren Zalaznick and Andy Cohen. From 2003 to 2005 he was editorial director of Colors magazine, and in 2006, with his former colleague Jackson and Bonnie Siegler (and Diller's IAC) co-founded the daily email cultural curation service Very Short List. From 2007 to 2008 he was an editor-at-large for Random House, and in 2011 he served as a guest op-ed columnist for The New York Times.

He had co-created Studio 360, a weekly program covering the arts and culture, which he hosted from its launch in 1999 to its last episode in 2020. and in Slate.

Fantasyland, which the New York Times Book Review called "a great revisionist history of America," reached #3 on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list.

In August 2020, he published Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, which Andersen described as a "companion" to Fantasyland, a "de facto volume two in my history of the fuckening of America." Evil Geniuses examines the coordinated efforts to achieve conservative economic and political changes in the United States from the 1970s through 2020, and discusses how the resulting unfettered laissez-faire approach to capitalism has produced an extreme level of economic inequality and disempowered majority. It reached #7 on the Times nonfiction bestseller list.

The film director Steven Soderbergh initiated conversations with Andersen about Evil Geniuses when it was published, which led to the two of them co-creating Command Z, a satirical sci-fi series starring Michael Cera, Liev Schreiber and Roy Wood Jr. Soderbergh directed the eight episodes, which were released in July 2023 on his web site. All proceeds went to charity, and the series is now freely viewable.

Personal life

Andersen lives in New York City and Cornwall, Connecticut with his wife, author Anne Kreamer. They have two daughters, Katherine Kreamer Andersen and Lucy Kreamer Andersen. At age 32, he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

Works

Books

;Novels

  • Turn of the Century (Random House, 1999)
  • Heyday (Random House, 2007)
  • True Believers (Random House, 2012)
  • You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year As President (with Alec Baldwin) (Penguin, 2017)

;Humor

  • The Real Thing (Doubleday, 1980; Holt, 1982; Bison Press, 2008)
  • Tools of Power: The Elitist's Guide to the Ruthless Exploitation of Everybody and Everything (Viking, 1980)
  • Loose Lips: Real Words, Real People, Real Funny (with Jamie Malanowski and Lisa Birnbach) (Simon & Schuster, 1995)
  • Spy : The Funny Years (with George Kalogerakis and Graydon Carter) (Miramax Books, 2006)
  • Hasta La Vista America: Trump's Farewell Address (Pushkin Industries, 2021)

;Non-fiction

  • Reset (Random House, 2009)
  • Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History (Random House, 2017)
  • Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (Penguin Random House, 2020)

Essays, reporting, and other contributions

  • Andersen, Kurt, You Say You Want a Devolution, Vanity Fair, January, 2012
  • Andersen, Kurt, The Anti-vaccine Right Brought Human Sacrifice to America, The Atlantic, January 25, 2022
  • Andersen, Kurt, ‘Succession’ Nailed the Unreal Way We Live Now, The New York Times, May 29, 2023
  • Andersen, Kurt, Bill Ackman Is a Brilliant Fictional Character, The Atlantic, January 18, 2024
  • Andersen, Kurt, RFK Jr. Was My Drug Dealer, The Atlantic, August 23, 2024

References

  • Official website
  • Studio 360
  • Appearance on The Filter Podcast