Kurt Andersen via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other...
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'mātriks / "source" / from "mater", Latin for "mother". We're real mothers for ya!
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Who I Am & Where I Live
- Name: Kurt Andersen
- City: Brooklyn, NY
- Country: United States
- Hometown: Omaha, Nebraska
My Life & Work
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Bio:
Kurt Andersen is a writer. He spent his first 20 years in Nebraska, and most of the rest in New York City. His latest book is Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, a companion volume to Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He’s also the author of the critically acclaimed, bestselling novels True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century.
Evil Geniuses is "a work of towering importance," according to Anand Giridharadas, who in the New York Times Book Review also called it an "essential, absorbing book" in which Andersen "carefully, meticulously, overwhelmingly, argues through facts" but "never loses the texture of actual human beings. He is a graceful, authoritative guide, and he has a Writer-with-a-capital-W’s ability to defamiliarize the known." Fantasyland, according to MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell in 2017, was “most important book that I have read this year," and Stephen Dubner (Freakonomics) said it “presents the very best kind of idea—one that, in retrospect, seems obvious, but that took a seer like Kurt Andersen to piece together,” with “thinking and writing [that] are dazzling, an absolute joy to read and will leave your brain dancing with excitement.” True Believers appeared on the best-novels-of-the-year lists of the San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post, and Booklist called it “an ambitious and remarkable novel” of “spellbinding suspense.”
True Believers appeared on the best-novels-of-the- year lists of the San Francisco Chronicle and Washington Post. Booklist called it “an ambitious and remarkable novel” of “spellbinding suspense.” According to other reviewers it is “the best reverie on the 1960s and their legacy” (Fortune), “emotionally accurate” and “profound” (USA Today), and “a great American novel” (Vanity Fair).
Heyday was a New York Times bestseller that the Los Angeles Times called “a major work.” The New York Times Book Review said there is “something moving in the energy of its amazement.” And the Houston Chronicle (and nine other papers) said it “deserves instant acceptance into the ranks [of] Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, [and] Gore Vidal’s Lincoln.” It was included on several best-books-of-the-year lists, and won the Langum Prize as the best American historical novel of the year.
The New York Times called Turn of the Century “wickedly satirical” and “outrageously funny” and named it a Notable Book of the year, while The Wall Street Journal called it a “smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age.” It was a national bestseller, and Publishers Weekly called it one of the ten best long novels ever
He has also written for film, television and the stage. 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. He has written screenplays for Walt Disney and Village Roadshow Pictures, and pilots for ABC, NBC, HBO and Amazon. He was co-author of Loose Lips, a satirical off-Broadway revue that had long runs in New York and Los Angeles starring Bebe Neuwirth, Harry Shearer and Andy Richter.
He regularly appears as a commentator on MSNBC, and has delivered TED talks. He served as a summer guest Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times, and still contributes regularly to the Times. He has also been also a regular columnist and critic for New York, The New Yorker and TIME.
He was the host and co-creator of Studio 360, the cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International from 2000 to 2020. It was broadcast on 250 stations and distributed by podcast to almost 1 million listeners each week. The show won Peabody Awards for broadcast excellence in both 2005 and 2013.
As an editor, Kurt co-founded the transformative satirical magazine Spy and served as editor-in-chief of New York. He also co-founded Inside, a digital and print publication covering the media and entertainment industries, oversaw a relaunch of Colors magazine, co-founded the online newsletter Very Short List, and served as editor-at- large for Random House.
He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design, taught at the School of Visual Arts, and serves on the boards of Film Streams and the Pratt Institute. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Anne Kreamer.
Contact Information
- Email: kurtandersenemail@gmail.com
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Management/Booking:
AGENTS
Books
Suzanne Gluck, WME
212.903.1169
SGluck@wmeentertainment.com
Broadcast & Podcast
Henry Reisch, WME
HReisch@wmeentertainment.com
Ben Davis, WME
BDavis@wmeagency.com
Speaking/Appearances
Don Walker, The Harry Walker Agency
646.227.4902
DonW@harrywalker.com
TV Writing
Blake Fronstin, WME
310.859.4207
BFronstin@wmeentertainment.com
Bradley Singer, WME
BSinger@wmeentertainment.com
PUBLICITY
Greg Kubie, Penguin Random House
212.782.9038
GKubie@penguinrandomhouse.com
My Media & Markets
- ▶ Twitter: KBAndersen
- ▶ Instagram: kurtbandersen
- ▶ Website: http://www.kurtandersen.com
- ▶ Articles: http://www.kurtandersen.com/selected-journalism
- ▶ Articles 2: http://www.kurtandersen.com/press
My Writing
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Publications:
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
During the twentieth century, America managed to make its economic and social systems both more and more fair and more and more prosperous. A huge, secure, and contented middle class emerged. All boats rose together. But then the New Deal gave way to the Raw Deal. Beginning in the early 1970s, by means of a long war conceived of and executed by a confederacy of big business CEOs, the superrich, and right-wing zealots, the rules and norms that made the American middle class possible were undermined and dismantled. The clock was turned back on a century of economic progress, making greed good, workers powerless, and the market all-powerful while weaponizing nostalgia, lifting up an oligarchy that served only its own interests, and leaving the huge majority of Americans with dwindling economic prospects and hope.
Why and how did America take such a wrong turn? In this deeply researched and brilliantly woven cultural, economic, and political chronicle, Kurt offers a fresh, provocative, and eye-opening history of America’s undoing, naming names, showing receipts, and unsparingly assigning blame—to the radical right in economics and the law, the high priests of high finance, a complacent and complicit Establishment, and liberal “useful idiots,” among whom he includes himself.
Clips (more may be added)
The world's artistry via giant steps through a matrix based in the phenomenon placing most of the 7.8 billion of us within 6 or fewer degrees — steps — of each other ...
... a project conceived and built in the fertile, fecund and atavistic ground zero of Bahia, Brazil initially for the discoverability of this singular region's dispossessed genius.
All explained in the window immediately below. Followed — beneath this window — by scores of magnificent artists, each leading to myriads more artists/categories. Inside this window also may be found our Brazilian record store radio, named by British journal The Guardian as one of 10 of the Best Radio Stations Around the World!
IF YOU CAN'T STAND THE HEAT
Brazil is not a European nation. It's not a North American nation. It's not an East Asian nation. It straddles -- jungle and desert and dense urban centers -- both the equator and the Tropic of Capricorn. It absorbed over ten times the number of African slaves taken to the United States of America, and much of its aboriginal population was absorbed into the general population-at-large. Its people have lived under oligarchy, plutocracy, dictatorships and massive corruption, with elements of these still strongly entrenched today.
But!
Brazil has buzz...not the shallow buzz of a fashionable moment...but the deep buzz of a population which in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- the tough slog through life they've been allotted by humanity's dregs-in-fine-linen, have chosen not to simply pull themselves along but to lift their voices in song and their bodies in dance...to eat well and converse well and much and to wring the joy out of the day-to-day happenings and small pleasures of life which are so often set aside or ignored in the European, North American, and East Asian nations.
For this Brazil has a genius perhaps unparalleled in all other countries and societies, a genius which thrives alongside peeling paint and holes in the streets and roads, under bad organization by the powers-that-be, both civil and governmental, under a constant rain of societal indignities...
Which is all to say that if you don't know Brazil and you're expecting any semblance of order, progress and light, you will certainly find the light! And the buzz of a people who for generations have responded to privation at many different levels by somehow rising above it all.
Raimundo Sodré, in a conversation ranging through New Orleans and Harlem and the South Side of Chicago ... and Appalachia and Irish villages and Russian shtetls and the unofficial symbol of Brazil's Bahian-born national music (the pandeiro) almost certainly having arrived in Brazil in the hands of Sephardic Jews (including conversos) fleeing the Inquisition, once remarked: "Where there's misery, there's music!"
A pandeirista on the roof. And it's not just music. And it's not just Brazil.
