115. Kurt Andersen (originally aired 3/20/19)

Hey, welcome to Scratching the Surface.

I'm Jared Fuller, and this is my podcast about design criticism and practice.

On this week's episode, I am talking to the incomparable Kurt Anderson.

Kurt is someone that I've admired from afar and whose work I've enjoyed for many, many years.

You might know him as the co-founder of Spy Magazine with Graydon Carter, or as the host of the truly delightful public radio show Studio 360, or as the author of novels like True Believers and Turn of the Century, or his new nonfiction book Fantasyland.

What you might not know, though, is that in the middle of publishing the magazine that famously called Donald Trump a short-fingered Bulgarian in 1988, and publishing novels and hosting a radio show, he was also the design and architecture critic for Time Magazine for almost eight years.

And that's where this conversation started.

I was very curious how someone who had been writing about crime and politics, suddenly found himself writing about design for a major magazine.

And what's been interesting to me about Kurt's career since then is that even though he's not really writing about design explicitly anymore, it's still a theme that seems to run through much of his work.

In 2017 he published Fantasyland, How America Went Haywire, that looks at America's seemingly predisposition to believe in myth and magic and fantasy.

He goes back 500 years and brings us all the way up to the present in the era of Trump and fake news.

And really puts this current moment into a historical perspective.

It was one of my favorite books that year.

And I think has a lot to do with design as well.

So in addition to Fantasyland, we talk about his interest in moving between mediums.

We talk about how his relationship to design has changed over the years.

And how he thought about writing design for a general audience in the late 80s.

This was one of the most fun chapters.

I've had in a conversation in a long time.

I've been a fan of Kurt's for years and his varied career is the kind that I aspire to.

So it was a real honor to have him on the podcast.