Senior Editor/Blogger, The Atlantic, and columnist, The Sunday Times of London
Tuesday, February 5, 2008, 11:10 a.m.
A native of England, Andrew Sullivan has established himself as one of the most provocative political and social commentators in the country today. A senior editor of The Atlantic and a columnist for The Sunday Times of London, he was one of the first journalists to experiment with blogging. His blog, “The Daily Dish,” where he shares blunt observations about current events and people in the news, appears on The Atlantic’s homepage.
While a student at Harvard University, Sullivan worked as a summer intern at The New Republic, eventually becoming a full-time associate editor, the youngest in the magazine’s history. In 1991, at the age of 27, he was named editor-in-chief, a position he held for five years. Under his leadership, The New Republic focused on sociological topics, including race relations, popular culture, and homosexuality. Adweek conferred its “Editor of the Year” honors on Sullivan in 1996.
Sullivan is the author of three books. He examined gay rights in his 1995 critically-acclaimed book Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality. Through a series of essays, he made an impassioned plea for diverse audiences to acknowledge the humanity of AIDS and to view friendship as an integral element of our society in 1998’s Love Undetectable. In his most recent book, 2006’s The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back, Sullivan argues for the revival of a conservative tradition based on practical restraint, individual freedom, constitutional norms and skepticism.
Sullivan first came to the United States on a Harkness Fellowship, the British equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship. He earned his undergraduate degree at Oxford University and holds an M.A. in public administration and a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Harvard University.