Frank Rich

Frank Rich joined New York magazine in June 2011 as Writer-at-Large, writing monthly on politics and culture, and editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay. He is also a commentator on nymag.com, engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week.

Rich joined the magazine following a distinguished career at the New York Times, where his Sunday OpEd column had helped inaugurate the expanded opinion pages that the paper introduced in the Sunday Week in Review section in April 2005. 

Mr. Rich started as a Times  Op-Ed columnist in January 1994. From 1999 to 2003, he was also a senior writer for The New York Times Magazine, a dual title that was a first for The Times. Before writing his column, Mr. Rich served as The Times’s chief drama critic beginning in 1980, the year he joined the paper. In collaboration with Adam Moss, now the editor of New York, Mr. Rich served an advisory role in revamping The Times’s daily and Sunday cultural report in 2003-2005 and also was a front-page columnist for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section as part of that section’s redesign and expansion.

Among other honors, Mr. Rich received the George Polk Award for commentary in 2005. In 2011 he received the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University. He has written about politics and culture for many publications. His latest book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth in Bush's America, was published by Penguin Press in 2006 and as a Penguin paperback in 2007.  His childhood memoir, Ghost Light, was published in 2000 by Random House and as a Random House Trade Paperback in 2001.  A collection of Mr. Rich’s drama reviews, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980-1993, was published by Random House in October 1998.  His book The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, co-authored with Lisa Aronson, was published by Knopf in 1987.

In 2008, Mr. Rich signed on as a creative consultant to help initiate and develop new programming at HBO. He is an executive producer of two HBO projects: Veep, a comedy series satirizing Washington, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus; and a forthcoming documentary about Stephen Sondheim.

Before joining The Times, Mr. Rich was a film and television critic at Time magazine, film critic for the New York Post and film critic and senior editor of New Times Magazine.  He was a founding editor of The Richmond (Va.) Mercury, a weekly newspaper, in the early 1970s.

Mr. Rich earned a B.A. degree in American History and Literature, graduating magna cum laude from Harvard College in 1971 and serving as Editorial Chairman of The Harvard Crimson.

Mr. Rich has two sons. He lives in Manhattan with his wife, the author and novelist Alex Witchel, who is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.