Andersen was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and graduated from Westside High School. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he edited the Harvard Lampoon. 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 coined the notable insult "short-fingered vulgarian" for future United States President Donald Trump. He has been a writer and columnist for New York, The New Yorker, and Time. 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. 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. 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, which was a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book of the year, and the New York Times bestseller Heyday, 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 '. Andersen has also published a book of humorous essays, The Real Thing, about "quintessentialism", and co-authored two humor books, Tools of Power, a parody of self-help books on becoming successful, and Loose Lips, 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 ', published in 2006 by Miramax Books. He also wrote Reset, an essay about the causes and aftermath of the Great Recession, and he has contributed to many other books, such as ', and '. In 2017 he published two books, , which explains American society's peculiar susceptibility to falsehoods and illusions, and with Alec BaldwinYou Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year As President, a parody Trump memoir. Excerpts from Fantasyland appeared as a cover story inThe Atlantic, and in Slate. Both books were New York Times bestsellers, and Fantasyland, which the Times Book Review called "a great revisionist history of America," reached #3 on the nonfiction list.
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'".
Books
;Novels
Turn of the Century
Heyday
True Believers
;Humor
The Real Thing
Tools of Power
Loose Lips
Spy : The Funny Years
You Can't Spell America Without Me: The Really Tremendous Inside Story of My Fantastic First Year As President
