America: How We Got Here
Kurt Andersen is the author of the just released NY Times bestseller Evil Geniuses. He contributes to Vanity Fair and The New York Times and was the host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award–winning public radio show and podcast. He also writes for television, film, and the stage. Andersen co-founded Spy magazine, served as editor in chief of New York, and was a cultural columnist and critic for Time and The New Yorker. He graduated from Harvard College, where he was an editor of The Harvard Lampoon.
Overview
Purchase Professor Andersen’s new book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, HERE
It used to be called the New World. Now the man who runs the country wants to make it great…..again. Sometime between then and now, renowned writer Kurt Andersen argues that America lost one of its defining traits: openness to the new, and a tendency to try the untried and explore the uncharted. In culture, it fell into a “mass nostalgia” that became something of a “cultural listlessness,” a slowing of the rate at which life looked, felt and sounded new — Americans from the 1950s and 1970s appearing as if from different planets, but Americans from the 2000s and today looking not all that dissimilar. In this class, Kurt Andersen will be questioned by his sister, Syracuse University Professor Kristi Andersen.