He’s the author of the novels Heyday and Turn of the Century. Heyday was a New York Times bestseller that the Los Angeles Times called "a major work;" the New York Times Book Review said there is "something moving, a stirring spirit, in the energy of its amazement;" and the Chicago Sun-Times (and nine other papers) said it "deserves instant acceptance into the ranks [of] Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, [and] Gore Vidal's Lincoln." The New York Times called the national bestseller Turn of the Century "wickedly satirical" and "outrageously funny" and one of the Notable Books of the year, while The Wall Street Journal called it a "smart, funny and excruciatingly deft portrait of our age."

He has also written for film, television and the stage. He adapted Turn of the Century as a screenplay for the director Curtis Hanson. During the 1990s he was executive producer and head writer of two prime-time specials for NBC, How to Be Famous and Hit List, starring Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and a creator of three pilots for ABC and NBC. He is co-author of Loose Lips, a satirical off-Broadway revue that had long runs in New York and Los Angeles starring Bebe Neuwirth, Peter Boyle, Harry Shearer and Andy Richter. And he has written Broomhilda, a musical comedy for the stage, with the lyricist Martin Charnin.

He writes a column called "The Imperial City" for New York magazine, and contributes to Vanity Fair. He has previously been a columnist for The New Yorker ("The Culture Industry") and Time ("Spectator"). He began his career in journalism at Time, where during the 1980s he was an award-winning writer on politics and criminal justice before becoming, for eight years, the magazine’s architecture and design critic.