During the 1980s, he worked in New York City politics and in publishing, where his proudest achievements were drafting the bill to name a portion of
Central Park "
Strawberry Fields", commissioning of a biography of the anarchist
Emma Goldman, and the reissue of the
WPA Guide to New York City. He was also briefly lead singer for a punk band, The Editors, before leaving the group to study in Britain. This experience was background for writing pop music reviews in
Vanity Fair. After working as a senior editor at the
Village Voice, editing the paper's political and news coverage and writing a cover story exposing the corrupt politics behind the proposed redevelopment of
Times Square, his interests for lost causes led him to
New York Newsday, where he wrote a weekly media column and covered the
1988 presidential campaign. His reporting on the
1990 Happy Land Social Club fire in the Bronx won a
Page One Award from the
Newspaper Guild of New York and his investigative reporting on New York City's ineffectual fire code was a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize. Following a year as a research fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies centre at Columbia, Guttenplan moved to London in 1994. He has taught
American History at
University College and at
Birkbeck College, and was a commentator on
American culture and
politics for the
BBC. Guttenplan worked for
The Nations London bureau from around 1996 until the
2016 United States presidential election.
Neal Ascherson wrote: "Guttenplan sat through every day of the trial, and no wiser, more honest, or more melancholy book will ever be written about it."
The Holocaust on Trial has been translated into German, Italian and Swedish. When his friend and former teacher
Edward Said became too ill to continue lecturing, Guttenplan arranged to film a series of lengthy conversations which, after Said died in 2003, became
Edward Said: The Last Interview. The British journal
Sight and Sound described the film as "the kind of portrait of an intellectual which is very rare," while
The Times of London called it "enthralling, touching, melancholic and fierce."
The New York Times pronounced it "riveting", adding "
Edward Said: The Last Interview proves that a couch, a camera and a great mind can be all the inspiration a filmmaker needs." In June 2009, Guttenplan completed a biography of
I. F. Stone, the American journalist, titled
American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone, published by
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This book was awarded with the 2010 Sperber Prize for Biography. In 2018, Guttenplan's profile of nine progressive activists in the United States,
The Next Republic, was published by
Seven Stories Press. Guttenplan replaced Publisher
Katrina vanden Heuvel as Editor of
The Nation on June 15, 2019. ==Personal life==