Background

Randy Cohen was born on July 12, 1948, in Charleston, South Carolina, United States, and raised in Reading, Pennsylvania. He is a son of Harry Cohen and Irma Cohen, maiden name Greenberg.

Education

Randy Cohen attended the State University of New York at Albany, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in 1971, and California Institute of Arts, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in music composition in 1973. In 2011, he was granted an honorary doctorate from the State University of New York at Albany.

Career

Randy Cohen's first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines such as the New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic, and the Young Love romance comic book series. For several years, he wrote "The News Quiz," a regular column of topical comedy for the online magazine Slate. He is also a former contributor to All Things Considered, National Public Radio's flagship news program.

Cohen was the author of "The Ethicist," a column in the New York Times Magazine, from 1999 until 2011. The column explored ethical questions and the meaning of ethical life. Cohen notably had no background in ethics before coming to the New York Times Magazine and has said that he never intended to become an ethicist.

Before becoming a journalist, Cohen worked extensively in television. He wrote for "Late Night with David Letterman," for which he shared three Emmy Awards during the mid-1980s. He won a fourth Emmy for his work on Michael Moore's "TV Nation" and also wrote for the comedy show "Ed." He was the original head writer on the "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," for which he also co-wrote the theme music.

From television sketch comedy to wrestling with serious ethical issues, Randy Cohen's varied writing career has generally focused on everyday concerns, but with a distinctive twist. In 1979, he published Easy Answers to Hard Questions, which addresses questions drawn from popular culture, including songs and clichés. Questions such as "How clean is a whistle?" and "Why must I be a teenager in love?" get real answers. In 1981, Cohen went from answer man to unsolicited- advice man, collecting the results in Modest Proposals: The Official Correspondence of Randy Cohen. The "modest proposals" are actually ridiculous suggestions sent to public figures. In Diary of a Flying Man, Cohen dispenses with quips, questions, and letters to skewer every day in a series of fictional stories. In these pieces, ordinary characters find themselves dealing with ridiculous situations, either of their own making or not. In 2002, Cohen published The Good, the Bad, and the Difference: How to Tell Right from Wrong in Everyday Situations, a collection of his columns with a great deal more on his theory of ethics, some follow-up with people who took his advice, and even a chapter on columns he has changed his mind about. As Cohen himself told a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "it's a chance to write about my background, how the column developed, what I hope to accomplish in it. And in a more theoretical way, how I think about ethics." His latest book, "Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything," published in 2012, tackles everyday ethical issues in a question-and-answer format.

In 2009, Cohen moderated The Connecticut Forum "It's Satire!" featuring panelists Jason Alexander, Samantha Bee, and David Javerbaum. He was the original head writer on The Rosie O'Donnell Show for which he also co-wrote the theme music. In 2010, his first play, "The Punishing Blow," ran at New York's Clurman Theater.

Now Randy Cohen is the host and creator of the nationally-syndicated "Person Place Thing" podcast produced by JCC Manhattan and sponsored by WAMC/Northeast Public Radio. "Person Place Thing" is an interview show based on the idea that people are particularly engaging when they speak not directly about themselves but about something they care about. Guests talk about one person, one place, and one thing that are important to them. Guests have included actor F. Murray Abraham to Emmy-winning "Saturday Night Live" writer Alan Zweibel.

Achievements

• Randy Cohen won four Emmy Awards for his work on television. He was the original head writer on the "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," who also later created his own "Person Place Thing" interview show. For many years, he wrote for the New York Times magazine column.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Good, the Bad & the Difference: How to Tell the Right From Wrong in Everyday Situations

    (Randy Cohen's wisdom and witticisms have been collected i...)

    2002
  • Diary Of A Flying Man

    (Stories deal with a teenage supermodel, a paranoid New Yo...)

    1989
  • Be Good: How to Navigate the Ethics of Everything

    (Randy Cohen helps readers locate their own internal ethic...)

    2012
  • Modest Proposals: The Official Correspondence of Randy Cohen

    (Tongue-in-cheek letters and suggestions to corporations, ...)

    1981

Views

Randy Cohen thinks that people will be about as virtuous as the society in which they live. It is essential to work toward the building of a just society if people are to have any hope at all of being fair and honest individuals. He believes that people must often seek common ground with other people as a way to achieve those goals dictated by individual values. According to Cohen, that's one reason why democracy seems an essentially ethical system: it gives people the means to create a better society in which they can become better individuals.

Interests

• Writers

  William Shakespeare

• Sport & Clubs

  cycling

Connections

Randy Cohen married writer and activist Katha Pollitt on June 6, 1987. Later they divorced. From this marriage, he has one daughter, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen.

Father:

Harry Cohen

Mother:

Irma Cohen

ex-wife:

Katha Pollitt

Daughter:

Sophie Pollitt-Cohen

Sophie Pollitt-Cohen was born on September 25, 1987. She is a co-author of The Notebook Girls by Warner Books. The book began the journal with her friends, Julia Baskin, Lindsey Newman, and Courtney Toombs at Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 2001.

References

• Person Place Thing with Randy Cohen