American · b. 1988
Sam Lansky is an American journalist and writer. Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1988, he grew up largely in New York, attended the Dwight School after his parents' divorce, and studied creative writing at Vassar College and The New School. He worked as a freelance critic for New York, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Out before joining Time magazine in 2014, where he later became West Coast editor and profiled Taylor Swift as the magazine's 2023 Person of the Year. His debut book, the memoir The Gilded Razor (2016), recounts his teenage addiction and recovery. His first novel, Broken People (2020), follows a similarly autobiographical narrator through a weekend with a Los Angeles-adjacent shaman promising total transformation. Lansky later ghostwrote Britney Spears' memoir The Woman in Me (2023) and Amy Griffin's The Tell, and moved into film and television, executive-producing I Wish You All the Best (2024) and co-writing I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025). He lives in Los Angeles.