Kurt Andersen
Novelist/Journalist

Kurt Andersen is the author of the bestselling novel Turn of the Century, which The New York Times called “wickedly satirical” and “outrageously funny” and named one of the Notable Books of the year. The Wall Street Journal called it a “smart, funny, and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age.” Random House is to publish his second novel in early 2007.

He also writes for film, television, and the stage. He co wrote a science-fiction comedy, Warped, for Walt Disney Pictures, and adapted Turn of the Century as a screenplay for the director Curtis Hanson. During the 1990s, he was executive producer and head writer of two prime-time specials for NBC, How to be Famous and Hit List, starring Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and a creator of three pilots for ABC and NBC. He is co-author of Loose Lips, a satirical off-Broadway revue that had long runs in New York and Los Angeles starring Bebe Neuwirth, Peter Boyle, Harry Shearer, and Andy Richter. And he is currently collaborating on Broomhilda, a musical comedy for the stage with lyricist and director Martin Charnin.

He writes a column called “The Imperial City” for New York Magazine and he has previously been a columnist for The New Yorker (“The Culture Industry”) and Time (“Spectator”). He began his career in journalism at Time, where during the 1980s he was an award-winning writer on politics and criminal justice before becoming, for eight years, the magazine’s architecture and design critic.

He is also host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award winning cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International and WNYC and broadcast on 140 stations to 500,000 listeners each week. Recently, he was also host of the interview series Face Time on the Trio channel, and presented a documentary, How Brit Trash Conquered America, on BBC4. He appears regularly as a commentator on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, Nightline, and Charlie Rose. From 2001 through 2004, he served as a creative consultant to Universal Television, helping to shape its cable programming.

As an editor, he co-founded the legendary Spy, which transformed journalism and became profitable after three years. He also served as editor-in-chief of New York magazine during the mid 90s, presiding over its editorial reinvigoration and record profitability. In 1999 he co-founded Inside, an online and print publication covering the media and entertainment industries, and in 2004 and 2005 he oversaw a relaunch of Colors magazine and edited four of its quarterly issues.

At the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in 2004, he curated an exhibit called “Faster, Cheaper, Newer, More: Revolutions of 1848,” and he is a member of the board of trustees of Cooper-Hewitt and Pratt Institute. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was an editor of Lampoon. He received an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, and in 2003, New York magazine named him one of the 100 People Who Changed New York. He lives in New York City with his wife, Anne Kreamer, and his daughters Kate and Lucy.