Jonathan Alter is an award-winning author, political analyst, documentary filmmaker, columnist, television producer and radio host. His new book, published in 2020, is "His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life." He is the author of three New York Times bestsellers: “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies”(2013), “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” (2010) and “The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope”(2006), also one of the Times’ “Notable Books” of the year. Since 1996, Alter has been a contributing correspondent and political analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. In 2019, he co-produced and co-directed the HBO documentary, “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists.”
After 28 years as a columnist and senior editor at Newsweek, where he wrote more than 50 cover stories, Alter is now a columnist for the Daily Beast and the co-host, with his wife, Emily Lazar, and their three children, Charlotte Alter, Tommy Alter, and Molly Alter, of “Alter Family Politics,” which airs Thursdays at 10:00 a.m. on RadioAndy on SiriusXM, 102. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the National Headliner Award for his coverage of 9/11, the Gerald Loeb Award, and the Book Award from the New Jersey Council of the Humanities. In 2019, he was one of the inaugural inductees into the New Jersey Journalism Hall of Fame.

A Chicago native, Harvard graduate and resident of Montclair, New Jersey, Alter has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, Esquire, Bloomberg View and other publications. In the 2013-2014 season, he served as an executive producer of “Alpha House,” a 21-episode half-hour political comedy available on Amazon.