Kurt Andersen

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America argues that the last fifty years of American economic life were not weather but a plan: that from the early 1970s a coordinated effort by business groups, funders and lawyers rewrote tax, antitrust, labour and campaign-finance rules in favour of capital, and that the culture went nostalgic at the same time and stopped noticing. Random House published the book in 2020. Kurt Andersen co-founded Spy magazine in 1986, edited New York magazine, hosted the public radio programme Studio 360 for seventeen years, and wrote the novels Turn of the Century and Heyday. His previous book Fantasyland traced American credulity back four centuries. Reviewers who accepted the economic history often balked at the word conspiracy, arguing that a shared interest is not the same as a plot, which is the seam the book is usually attacked at.