Andrew Sullivan

Andrew Michael Sullivan (born 10 August 1963) is a British-American author, editor, and blogger.

Sullivan is a political commentator, a former editor of The New Republic, and the author or editor of six books.

He won a scholarship in 1981 to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded a first-class Bachelor of Arts in modern history and modern languages.

He founded the Pooh Stick Society at Oxford, and in his second year, he was elected President of the Oxford Union for Trinity term 1983.

Born and raised in Britain, he has lived in the United States since 1984 and currently resides in Washington, D.C., and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

He is openly gay and a practicing Catholic.

Sullivan was born in South Godstone, Surrey, England, into a Catholic family of Irish descent, and was brought up in the nearby town of East Grinstead, West Sussex.

He was educated at a Catholic primary school followed by Reigate Grammar School, where his classmates included future Labour Party leader Keir Starmer and future Conservative member of the House of Lords Andrew Cooper.

After writing briefly for a newspaper, Sullivan won scholarship in 1984 to Harvard University, where he earned a Master of Public Administration in 1986 from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, followed by a Doctor of Philosophy degree in government from Harvard in 1990.

His dissertation was titled Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott.

Sullivan first wrote for The Daily Telegraph on American politics.

In 1986, Sullivan went to work for The New Republic magazine initially on a summer internship; among the most significant articles he wrote were "Gay Life Gay Death", an essay on the AIDS crisis, and "Sleeping with the Enemy", in which he attacked the practice of "outing", both of which earned him some recognition among the gay community.

While completing graduate work at Harvard in 1988, Sullivan published an attack in Spy magazine on Rhodes Scholars, "All Rhodes Lead Nowhere in Particular," which dismissed recipients of the scholarship as "hustling apple-polisher[s]"; "high-profile losers"; "the very best of the second-rate"; and "misfits by the very virtue of their bland, eugenic perfection."

"[T]he sad truth is that as a rule," Sullivan wrote, "Rhodies possess none of the charms of the aristocracy and all of the debilities: fecklessness, excessive concern that peasants be aware of their achievement, and a certain hemophilia of character."

Author Thomas Schaeper notes that "[i]ronically, Sullivan had first gone to the United States on a Harkness Fellowship, one of many scholarships spawned in emulation of the Rhodes program."

He was appointed the editor of The New Republic in October 1991, a position he held until 1996.

In that position, he expanded the magazine from its traditional roots in political coverage to cultural issues and the politics surrounding them.

During this time, the magazine generated several high-profile controversies.

In 1994, Sullivan published excerpts on race and intelligence from Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial The Bell Curve, which argued that some of the measured difference in IQ scores among racially defined groups was a result of genetic inheritance.

Almost the entire editorial staff of the magazine threatened to resign if material that they considered racist was published.

To appease them, Sullivan included lengthy rebuttals from 19 writers and contributors.

He has continued to speak approvingly of the research and arguments presented in The Bell Curve, writing, "The book ... still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade. The fact of human inequality and the subtle and complex differences between various manifestations of being human—gay, straight, male, female, black, Asian—is a subject worth exploring, period."

According to Sullivan, this incident was a turning point in his relationship with the magazine's staff and management, which he conceded was already bad because he "was a lousy manager of people".

He left the magazine in 1996.

Sullivan began writing for The New York Times Magazine in 1998, but was fired by editor Adam Moss in 2002.

Jack Shafer wrote in Slate magazine that he had asked Moss in an e-mail to explain this decision, but that his e-mails went unanswered, adding that Sullivan was not fully forthcoming on the subject.

Sullivan wrote on his blog that the decision had been made by Times executive editor Howell Raines, who found Sullivan's presence "uncomfortable", but defended Raines's right to fire him.

Sullivan suggested that Raines had done so in response to Sullivan's criticism of the Times on his blog, and said he had expected that his criticisms would eventually anger Raines.

Sullivan has also worked as a columnist for The Sunday Times of London.

Ross Douthat and Tyler Cowen have suggested that Sullivan is the most influential political writer of his generation, particularly because of his very early and strident support for same-sex marriage, his early political blog, his support of the Iraq War, and his subsequent support of Barack Obama's presidential candidacy.

He started a political blog, The Daily Dish, in 2000, and eventually moved his blog to platforms, including Time, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and finally an independent subscription-based format.

In 2003, he wrote he was no longer able to support the American conservative movement, as he was disaffected with the Republican Party's continued rightward shift towards social conservatism on social issues during the George W. Bush era.

He announced his retirement from blogging in 2015.

After the cessation of his long-running blog, The Dish, in 2015, Sullivan wrote regularly for New York during the 2016 presidential election, and in February 2017 he began writing a weekly column, "Interesting Times", for the magazine.

From 2016 to 2020, Sullivan was a writer-at-large at New York.

His newsletter The Weekly Dish was launched in July 2020.

Sullivan has stated that his conservatism is rooted in his Catholic background and in the ideas of the British political philosopher Michael Oakeshott.

On July 19, 2020, following the unexplained absence of his column for June 5, Sullivan announced that he would no longer write for New York. He announced he would be reviving The Dish as a newsletter, The Weekly Dish, hosted by Substack.

Sullivan describes himself as a conservative and is the author of The Conservative Soul.

He has supported a number of traditional libertarian positions, favouring limited government and opposing social interventionist measures such as affirmative action.