Podcasts about Tom Wolfe

Long before I oriented my life around reading, I would get the majority of my (4-5!) books per year read during the summer. But summer reads get a bad rap for being too silly, too saucy, too simple. So this summer join me in bridging the gap to find great beachy reads. We want books that have a speedy pace *and* expand our minds! We want books that help us escape our everyday lives *and* teach us something new. A mesmerizing coming-of-age novel! A slim tear-jerky memoir! A crucial self-help book! An evocative life story from the deep south. And, of course, the Tom Wolfe novel I think everybody should start with… I made this video and podcast for you: Please enjoy my 5 summer beach books to stretch your mind like taffy while you bake in the sun… Let's find your next read now...

I wasn't sure I'd be able to finish the Jake Tapper/Alex Thompson book, Original Sin. I downloaded the audiobook, narrated by Tapper, to listen to as I drive across the country from California to Ohio to see my daughter for her birthday. Out my window, I see the same running commentary of the real America I witnessed years ago, which changed my mind about Trump and MAGA. When you see Trump's name arising in unexpected places in nearly every state, from Arizona (“Viva Trump”) to Nebraska to Iowa to New York, you know something significant has shifted in this country.It felt like a secret cry for help among forgotten and abandoned Americans. I see it even now:I was not encouraged by the book's first chapter, which describes a world where the Democratic Party isn't corrupt, where they don't hand-pick candidates and then force everyone to “Vote Blue No Matter Who,” where identity politics don't rule the day, and where the democratic process is allowed to play out. What a load of garbage. To quote Deep Throat in All the President's Men, “Oh, but it's touching.” Just imagine Gavin Newsom attempting to challenge Kamala Harris. She might be the world's worst candidate, but all points lead back to her; you have to start there, whether they had a primary or not. They knew that, which is why they skipped the foreplay and went straight to a first-ever installed candidate for president. So I didn't think listening to an entire audiobook shaped by a false premise and awash in false media narratives would be a good use of my time. Maybe I'd listen to, I don't know, the new Mark Twain biography.As Victor Davis Hanson points out, Jake Tapper is an unreliable narrator because there would be no Biden cover-up if the media had done its job:Had Original Sin been written by Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, or even Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi, it would have been the searing indictment of a deep state plot foiled by Mr. McGoo, told with bemused irony. But it is dead serious, for better or worse.But I must say, in the end, I'm glad I stuck with it. It might not be the definitive account of the rise and fall of a once-mighty empire I would have wanted, but it is a surprisingly revealing look behind the curtain all the same.Could it really be that Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg were brought in to “direct” Joe Biden with better light, sound, and acting coaching? Yes. Could it be that Rob Reiner and Jane Fonda broke down in hysterics at some mansion in the Hollywood Hills after the debate? Yes. If the aim was to scapegoat Joe Biden, they failed. He comes off as the most sympathetic, a victim of a massive machine of creeps that chewed him up and spit him out. Do they legitimately believe we would sympathize with some fat cat in Hollywood who threatens never to write another check unless they push Biden out? We're supposed to care about what the donors think? Tapper seems to have emerged from the grim experience with a bit of a perspective shift. At least now, he's able to talk about the problems the Democrats have in a way he hasn't in the past ten years. The value of Original Sin, at least for someone like me who fled the party in disgust in 2020 after watching them use their power to take our elections away from the people and decide their outcome, isn't so much that there are any new revelations. But it's a book written from the inside, with access to over 200 voices anxious to be heard. That meant following the events as they unfolded in real time, and let me tell you, there is pleasure in that. I found it cathartic, not just because the Democrats had it coming, and got everything they deserved, but for the sheer joy of witnessing the most most powerful people in the world have their asses handed to them by the very democracy they claimed they wanted to protect. That George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, and Jeffrey Katzenberg were so heavily involved in the politics of the Democrats makes it all look like the Wizard of Oz, pulling back the curtain and exposing the ugly truth. Hollywood might make this into a series for HBO or Netflix, but since the co-founder and chairman of Netflix, Reed Hastings, was one of the fat cats who threatened to withhold funds unless the Democrats got rid of Biden, I'm guessing we won't get the whole story. But if they wanted to tell it like it really happened, it would make one hell of a tale.The Story That Writes ItselfHollywood doesn't have the guts to tell the whole story. They can't because they're part of it. They're way too cozy with the Democrats, and if they really wanted to tell the truth, they'd have to admit, as with Michael Corleone, they are part of the same hypocrisy. At best, they could cobble together something that paints Trump as the ultimate evil that vain and selfish Joe and Jill Biden allowed to take back power. The real story is how they built a powerful coalition and had no choice but to turn to corruption to preserve that power. This would make a great long-form series.Episode One—The “hope and change” candidate lights up the world and chooses an “old white guy” to be his Veep, just as JFK did with LBJ, a cynical ploy to make his youth and inexperience (and, in this case, skin color) more palatable for a nervous electorate. Episode Two - The “hope and change” guy doesn't like the “old white guy” as the successor of his powerful coalition, which now includes all of culture, all corporations, all institutions, all media, and all social media. Why go backwards? The “old white guy” with a stutter who just lost his beloved son to brain cancer was no longer useful to the “hope and change” guy. No one thinks much of it as he's kicked to the curb and embarrassed as not electable enough, not desirable enough, and past his sell-by date. So, the “hope and change” guy picks the “Wall Street Sweetheart,” the former First Lady and Secretary of State, to become the “first woman POTUS.” With the help of a grassroots populist movement and an “Old Socialist” challenging the “Wall Street Sweetheart,” the party is fractured, and Trump wins. Episode Three - The establishment and the Obama coalition decide that Trump should not be allowed to rule, forget democracy! Who needs it? No “old white guy” was supposed to win, least of all that guy. Millions pour into the streets in an orgy of self pity, imagined oppression, fragility, privilege and narcissism — mass hysteria takes hold, cancel culture grips the left. Hundreds lose their jobs as they desperately try to undo the election results and get rid of Trump. They impeach him, they frame him, they smear him, they attack him. The OG “old white guy” waiting in the wings isn't looking so bad. An easy, lateral move. An establishment pick. One “old white guy” for another.Episode Four - 2020 is its own whole episode. It has to be. It was the year the Democrats sold their souls to the Devil to cling to power. They spent $1 billion with a “well-funded cabal” of elites to fund and amplify the racial protests, change election laws, $400 million to collect ballots, and trot in experts to lie about everything from the laptop to COVID to the protests. They censored Americans on social media, and the FBI forced censorship of the laptop. The country sinks. Media credibility is destroyed. Large swaths of the electorate abandon the Democrats. But the “old white guy” wins. So finally, he gets his dream at long last, to be president of the United States. Episode Five - The “old white guy” is finally the savior he always dreamed he'd be. He became a blank check for Black Americans, trans Americans, and especially women of color. He would finish what the “hope and change” guy started. Are we topless at the White House?But the “old white guy” bungles the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and his approval ratings tank. Americans don't see a nice old grandpa anymore. They see George Spahn, who just moved the Manson Family into the White House, and now they're running the country.Now what? He goes after Trump and MAGA, calling them fascists, extremists, and a danger to society. If the “old white guy” can't have the presidency, then no one will.The “old white guy” isn't so nice anymore. Trump is indicted four times, convicted, and takes a mug shot that goes viral. They've sold their soul to the Devil, after all, they're not going to give up power so easily. Episode Six - The final battle. Trump teases and torments the “old white guy” and forces him to debate. Trump mocks him mercilessly at his rallies for not knowing where he is. For Trump, beating him will be a cake walk for anyone not sucked into the false reality pushed by the legacy media.Trump and Biden debate rematch. The “old white guy” crashes and burns so hard it nearly sets Rob Reiner's hair on fire. “He just lost the election,” Dana Bash scribbles on a note to Jake Tapper. What now for the empire that was never the resistance?Trump survives an assassination attempt at Butler the following month. His entire campaign is transformed. Elon Musk joins his dream team. This was our last best hope for America. We wanted out. We wanted something new. We wanted to be set free:But inside the Bubble, it's Original Sin. It's denial. It's a legacy press that lies to the monarchs, lies to their voters, sending them cascading into yet more hysteria. Please make the bad orange man go away! For the sake of democracy! Please give us our utopia back! Jane Fonda, Steven Spielberg, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, David Simon, Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Rob Reiner are losing their minds. It's a dystopia full of aging, frustrated aristocrats who can't keep democracy down. We're about to lose our democracy, they cry. Biden will lose us our democracy, they insist. How can this be happening? Get rid of the “old white guy.” GET RID OF HIM! For the sake of democracy! “We need a new nominee,” says George Clooney. Who's we? What happened to democracy? Now, the duly elected nominee, aka “the old white guy,” must step aside to save democracy? Yes, that is where the Democrats arrived in their pitiful last gasp to salvage and preserve their power. They cynically install the “woman of color” because they know all points lead to Kamala Harris. Their flock will fall in line as they always have. Push him out, push the “old white guy” out in a palace coup worthy of a fading, useless, self-serving monarchy on the brink of collapse. Trump wins again. We see the “old white guy” grinning in the oval office and having the last laugh. They used him. They lied to him. They flattered him. Then, they kicked him out, all because they were exposed and couldn't hide the truth anymore.As the scene fades to black, we see a close-up on Jake Tapper lying in bed, working it all out. Holy s**t, he thinks. Someone has to tell this story. He picks up the phone, “Alex? Hi, it's Jake. I was wondering if we might talk.” I mean, come on. It's Ishtar Part Two. It writes itself.Do I think you should read Original Sin? Absolutely. It might not be the whole truth. It might be spin for the Democrats to regroup and recover. It might be reputation laundering for the media. But for me, it was an early Christmas present, if only for the delicious pleasure of watching them squirm as their corrupt plot to cling to power unravels. I can't think of anything more satisfying than that. Original Sin proves two things: the Democrats are creeps and they got exactly what they deserved.Somewhere in Iowa, 8pm.// This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sashastone.substack.com/subscribe

Knowledge Project: Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- Most people protect their identity. Andy Grove would rewrite his, again and again. He started as a refugee, became a chemist, turned himself into an engineer, then a manager, and finally the CEO who built Intel into a global powerhouse. He didn't cling to credentials or titles. When a challenge came up, he didn't delegate, he learned. This episode explores the radical adaptability that made Grove different. While his peers obsessed over innovation, he focused on something far more enduring: the systems, structures, and people needed to scale that innovation. Grove understood that as complexity rises, technical brilliance fades and coordination becomes king.  You'll learn how he redefined leadership, why he saw management as a creative act, and what most founders still get wrong about building great companies. If you're serious about getting better—at work, at thinking, at leading—this is the episode you'll be glad you didn't miss.  This episode is for informational purposes only and most of the research came from The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow, Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, and Tom Wolfe's profile of Robert Noyce available here. Check out highlights from these books in our repository, and find key lessons from Grove here — ⁠⁠https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-andy-grove/⁠ (05:02 ) PART 1: Hungarian Beginnings(06:48) German Occupation(09:27) Soviet Liberation(11:01) End of the War(12:35) Leaving Hungary (14:10) PART 2: In America(16:50) Origin of Silicon Valley(20:04) Fairchild (22:54) PART 3: Building Intel(25:15) Becoming a Manager(29:39) Intel's Make-or-Break Moment(31:35) Quality Control Obsession(34:41) Orchestrating Brilliance(37:49) The Microprocessor Revolution and Intel's Growth(40:32) Intel's Growth and the Microma Lesson(30:51) The Grove Influence(47:00) The Birth of Intel Culture(49:42) ​​The Fruits of Transformation(50:43) The Test Ahead (53:07) PART 4: Inflection Points(55:23) The Valley of Death(58:26) The IBM Lesson(01:01:18) CASSANDRA's: The Value of Middle Management(01:04:09) Executing a Painful Pivot (01:08:25) Reflections, afterthoughts, and lessons Thanks to our sponsors for supporting this episode: MOMENTOUS: Head to ⁠⁠livemomentous.com⁠⁠ and use code KNOWLEDGEPROJECT for 35% off your first subscription.  NOTION MAIL: Get Notion Mail for free right now at ⁠notion.com/knowledgeproject Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of all episodes, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. Newsletter — The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Knowledge Project Key Takeaways Check out the episode pageRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgMost people protect their identity. Andy Grove would rewrite his, again and again. He started as a refugee, became a chemist, turned himself into an engineer, then a manager, and finally the CEO who built Intel into a global powerhouse. He didn't cling to credentials or titles. When a challenge came up, he didn't delegate, he learned. This episode explores the radical adaptability that made Grove different. While his peers obsessed over innovation, he focused on something far more enduring: the systems, structures, and people needed to scale that innovation. Grove understood that as complexity rises, technical brilliance fades and coordination becomes king.  You'll learn how he redefined leadership, why he saw management as a creative act, and what most founders still get wrong about building great companies. If you're serious about getting better—at work, at thinking, at leading—this is the episode you'll be glad you didn't miss.  This episode is for informational purposes only and most of the research came from The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow, Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, and Tom Wolfe's profile of Robert Noyce available here. Check out highlights from these books in our repository, and find key lessons from Grove here — ⁠⁠https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-andy-grove/⁠ (05:02 ) PART 1: Hungarian Beginnings(06:48) German Occupation(09:27) Soviet Liberation(11:01) End of the War(12:35) Leaving Hungary (14:10) PART 2: In America(16:50) Origin of Silicon Valley(20:04) Fairchild (22:54) PART 3: Building Intel(25:15) Becoming a Manager(29:39) Intel's Make-or-Break Moment(31:35) Quality Control Obsession(34:41) Orchestrating Brilliance(37:49) The Microprocessor Revolution and Intel's Growth(40:32) Intel's Growth and the Microma Lesson(30:51) The Grove Influence(47:00) The Birth of Intel Culture(49:42) ​​The Fruits of Transformation(50:43) The Test Ahead (53:07) PART 4: Inflection Points(55:23) The Valley of Death(58:26) The IBM Lesson(01:01:18) CASSANDRA's: The Value of Middle Management(01:04:09) Executing a Painful Pivot (01:08:25) Reflections, afterthoughts, and lessons Thanks to our sponsors for supporting this episode: MOMENTOUS: Head to ⁠⁠livemomentous.com⁠⁠ and use code KNOWLEDGEPROJECT for 35% off your first subscription.  NOTION MAIL: Get Notion Mail for free right now at ⁠notion.com/knowledgeproject Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of all episodes, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. Newsletter — The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Knowledge Project Key Takeaways Check out the episode pageRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgMost people protect their identity. Andy Grove would rewrite his, again and again. He started as a refugee, became a chemist, turned himself into an engineer, then a manager, and finally the CEO who built Intel into a global powerhouse. He didn't cling to credentials or titles. When a challenge came up, he didn't delegate, he learned. This episode explores the radical adaptability that made Grove different. While his peers obsessed over innovation, he focused on something far more enduring: the systems, structures, and people needed to scale that innovation. Grove understood that as complexity rises, technical brilliance fades and coordination becomes king.  You'll learn how he redefined leadership, why he saw management as a creative act, and what most founders still get wrong about building great companies. If you're serious about getting better—at work, at thinking, at leading—this is the episode you'll be glad you didn't miss.  This episode is for informational purposes only and most of the research came from The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow, Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, and Tom Wolfe's profile of Robert Noyce available here. Check out highlights from these books in our repository, and find key lessons from Grove here — ⁠⁠https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-andy-grove/⁠ (05:02 ) PART 1: Hungarian Beginnings(06:48) German Occupation(09:27) Soviet Liberation(11:01) End of the War(12:35) Leaving Hungary (14:10) PART 2: In America(16:50) Origin of Silicon Valley(20:04) Fairchild (22:54) PART 3: Building Intel(25:15) Becoming a Manager(29:39) Intel's Make-or-Break Moment(31:35) Quality Control Obsession(34:41) Orchestrating Brilliance(37:49) The Microprocessor Revolution and Intel's Growth(40:32) Intel's Growth and the Microma Lesson(30:51) The Grove Influence(47:00) The Birth of Intel Culture(49:42) ​​The Fruits of Transformation(50:43) The Test Ahead (53:07) PART 4: Inflection Points(55:23) The Valley of Death(58:26) The IBM Lesson(01:01:18) CASSANDRA's: The Value of Middle Management(01:04:09) Executing a Painful Pivot (01:08:25) Reflections, afterthoughts, and lessons Thanks to our sponsors for supporting this episode: MOMENTOUS: Head to ⁠⁠livemomentous.com⁠⁠ and use code KNOWLEDGEPROJECT for 35% off your first subscription.  NOTION MAIL: Get Notion Mail for free right now at ⁠notion.com/knowledgeproject Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of all episodes, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. Newsletter — The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most people protect their identity. Andy Grove would rewrite his, again and again. He started as a refugee, became a chemist, turned himself into an engineer, then a manager, and finally the CEO who built Intel into a global powerhouse. He didn't cling to credentials or titles. When a challenge came up, he didn't delegate, he learned. This episode explores the radical adaptability that made Grove different. While his peers obsessed over innovation, he focused on something far more enduring: the systems, structures, and people needed to scale that innovation. Grove understood that as complexity rises, technical brilliance fades and coordination becomes king.  You'll learn how he redefined leadership, why he saw management as a creative act, and what most founders still get wrong about building great companies. If you're serious about getting better—at work, at thinking, at leading—this is the episode you'll be glad you didn't miss.  This episode is for informational purposes only and most of the research came from The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow, Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove, and Tom Wolfe's profile of Robert Noyce available here. Check out highlights from these books in our repository, and find key lessons from Grove here — ⁠⁠https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/outliers-andy-grove/⁠ (05:02 ) PART 1: Hungarian Beginnings(06:48) German Occupation(09:27) Soviet Liberation(11:01) End of the War(12:35) Leaving Hungary (14:10) PART 2: In America(16:50) Origin of Silicon Valley(20:04) Fairchild (22:54) PART 3: Building Intel(25:15) Becoming a Manager(29:39) Intel's Make-or-Break Moment(31:35) Quality Control Obsession(34:41) Orchestrating Brilliance(37:49) The Microprocessor Revolution and Intel's Growth(40:32) Intel's Growth and the Microma Lesson(30:51) The Grove Influence(47:00) The Birth of Intel Culture(49:42) ​​The Fruits of Transformation(50:43) The Test Ahead (53:07) PART 4: Inflection Points(55:23) The Valley of Death(58:26) The IBM Lesson(01:01:18) CASSANDRA's: The Value of Middle Management(01:04:09) Executing a Painful Pivot (01:08:25) Reflections, afterthoughts, and lessons Thanks to our sponsors for supporting this episode: MOMENTOUS: Head to ⁠⁠livemomentous.com⁠⁠ and use code KNOWLEDGEPROJECT for 35% off your first subscription.  NOTION MAIL: Get Notion Mail for free right now at ⁠notion.com/knowledgeproject Upgrade — If you want to hear my thoughts and reflections at the end of all episodes, join our membership: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fs.blog/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠ and get your own private feed. Newsletter — The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it's completely free. Learn more and sign up at ⁠⁠fs.blog/newsletter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's guest is Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He spent two years as a police officer in Baltimore. I asked him to come on and talk about his new book, Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. It's one of my favorite books I've read this year (and it was one of my three book recommendations on Ezra Klein's show last week).Peter spoke with hundreds of police officers and NYC officials to understand and describe exactly how the city's leaders in the early 1990s managed to drive down crime so successfully.We discussed:* How bad did things get in the 1970s?* Why did processing an arrest take so long?* What did Bill Bratton and other key leaders do differently?* How did police get rid of the squeegee men?I've included my reading list at the bottom of this piece. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits.Subscribe for one new interview a week.Peter, how would you describe yourself?I would say I'm a criminologist: my background is sociology, but I am not in the sociology department. I'm not so big on theory, and sociology has a lot of theory. I was a grad student at Harvard in sociology and worked as a police officer [in Baltimore] and that became my dissertation and first book, Cop in the Hood. I've somewhat banked my career on those 20 months in the police department.Not a lot of sociologists spend a couple of years working a police beat.It's generally frowned upon, both for methodological reasons and issues of bias. But there is also an ideological opposition in a lot of academia to policing. It's seen as going to the dark side and something to be condemned, not understood.Sociologists said crime can't go down unless we fix society first. It's caused by poverty, racism, unemployment, and social and economic factors — they're called the root causes. But they don't seem to have a great impact on crime, as important as they are. When I'm in grad school, murders dropped 30-40% in New York City. At the same time, Mayor Giuliani is slashing social spending, and poverty is increasing. The whole academic field is just wrong. I thought it an interesting field to get into.We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. I had a blast reading it. Tell me about the process of writing it.A lot of this is oral history, basically. But supposedly people don't like buying books that are called oral histories. It is told entirely from the perspective of police officers who were on the job at the time. I would not pretend I talked to everyone, because there were 30,000+ cops around, but I spoke to many cops and to all the major players involved in the 1990s crime drop in New York City.I was born in the ‘90s, and I had no idea about a crazy statistic you cite: 25% of the entire national crime decline was attributable to New York City's crime decline.In one year, yeah. One of the things people say to diminish the role of policing is that the crime drop happened everywhere — and it did end up happening almost everywhere. But I think that is partly because what happened in New York City was a lot of hard work, but it wasn't that complicated. It was very easy to propagate, and people came to New York to find out what was going on. You could see results, literally in a matter of months.It happened first in New York City. Really, it happened first in the subways and that's interesting, because if crime goes down in the subways [which, at the time, fell under the separate New York City Transit Police] and not in the rest of the city, you say, “What is going on in the subways that is unique?” It was the exact same strategies and leadership that later transformed the NYPD [New York Police Department].Set the scene: What was the state of crime and disorder in New York in the ‘70s and into the ‘80s?Long story short, it was bad. Crime in New York was a big problem from the late ‘60s up to the mid ‘90s, and the ‘70s is when the people who became the leaders started their careers. So these were defining moments. The city was almost bankrupt in 1975 and laid off 5,000 cops; 3,000 for a long period of time. That was arguably the nadir. It scarred the police department and the city.Eventually, the city got its finances in order and came to the realization that “we've got a big crime problem too.” That crime problem really came to a head with crack cocaine. Robberies peaked in New York City in 1980. There were above 100,000 robberies in 1981, and those are just reported robberies. A lot of people get robbed and just say, “It's not worth it to report,” or, “I'm going to work,” or, “Cops aren't going to do anything.” The number of robberies and car thefts was amazingly high. The trauma, the impact on the city and on urban space, and people's perception of fear, all comes from that. If you're afraid of crime, it's high up on the hierarchy of needs.To some extent, those lessons have been lost or forgotten. Last year there were 16,600 [robberies], which is a huge increase from a few years ago, but we're still talking an 85% reduction compared to the worst years. It supposedly wasn't possible. What I wanted to get into in Back from the Brink was the actual mechanisms of the crime drop. I did about fifty formal interviews and hundreds of informal interviews building the story. By and large, people were telling the same story.In 1975, the city almost goes bankrupt. It's cutting costs everywhere, and it lays off more than 5,000 cops, about 20% of the force, in one day. There's not a new police academy class until 1979, four years later. Talk to me about where the NYPD was at that time.They were retrenched, and the cops were demoralized because “This is how the city treats us?” The actual process of laying off the cops itself was just brutal: they went to work, and were told once they got to work that they were no longer cops. “Give me your badge, give me your gun."The city also was dealing with crime, disorder, and racial unrest. The police department was worried about corruption, which was a legacy of the Knapp Commission [which investigated NYPD corruption] and [Frank] Serpico [a whistleblowing officer]. It's an old police adage, that if you don't work, you can't get in trouble. That became very much the standard way of doing things. Keep your head low, stay out of trouble, and you'll collect your paycheck and go home.You talk about the blackout in 1977, when much of the city lost power and you have widespread looting and arson. 13,000 off-duty cops get called in during the emergency, and only about 5,000 show up, which is a remarkable sign of the state of morale.The person in my book who's talking about that is Louis Anemone. He showed up because his neighbor and friend and partner was there, and he's got to help him. It was very much an in-the-foxholes experience. I contrast that with the more recent blackout, in which the city went and had a big block party instead. That is reflective of the change that happened in the city.In the mid-80s you get the crack cocaine epidemic. Talk to me about how police respond.From a political perspective, that era coincided with David Dinkins as [New York City's first black] mayor. He was universally disliked, to put it mildly, by white and black police officers alike. He was seen as hands off. He was elected in part to improve racial relations in New York City, to mitigate racial strife, but in Crown Heights and Washington Heights, there were riots, and racial relations got worse. He failed at the level he was supposed to be good at. Crime and quality of life were the major issues in that election.Dinkins's approach to the violence is centered around what they called “community policing.” Will you describe how Dinkins and political leaders in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s thought about policing?This is under Ben Ward, the [NYPD] Commissioner at the time. The mayor appoints the police commissioner — and the buck does stop with the mayor — but the mayor is not actively involved in day-to-day operations. That part does go down to the police department.Community policing was seen as an attempt to improve relations between the police and the community. The real goal was to lessen racial strife and unrest between black (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) communities and the NYPD. Going back to the ‘60s, New York had been rocked by continued unrest in neighborhoods like Central Harlem, East New York, and Bushwick. Community policing was seen as saying that police are partly to blame, and we want to improve relations. Some of it was an attempt to get the community more involved in crime fighting.It's tough. It involves a certain rosy view of the community, but that part of the community isn't causing the problems. It avoids the fact there are people who are actively criming and are willing to hurt people who get in their way. Community policing doesn't really address the active criminal element, that is a small part of any community, including high-crime communities.Arrests increased drastically during this era, more than in the ‘90s with broken windows policing. If the idea is to have fewer arrests, it didn't happen in the ‘80s. Some good came out of it, because it did encourage cops to be a bit more active and cops are incentivized by overtime. Arrests were so incredibly time-consuming, which kind of defeated the purpose of community policing. If you made an arrest in that era, there was a good chance you might spend literally 24 hours processing the arrest.Will you describe what goes into that 24 hours?From my experience policing in Baltimore, I knew arrests were time-consuming and paperwork redundant, but I could process a simple arrest in an hour or two. Even a complicated one that involved juveniles and guns and drugs, we're talking six to eight hours.In the ‘80s, Bob Davin, [in the] Transit Police, would say they'd make an arrest, process at the local precinct, search him in front of a desk officer, print him, and then they would have to get a radio car off patrol to drive you down to central booking at 100 Centre Street [New York City Criminal Court]. Then they would fingerprint him. They didn't have the live scan fingerprints machine, it was all ink. It had to be faxed up to Albany and the FBI to see if it hit on any warrant federally and for positive identification of the person. Sometimes it took 12 hours to have the prints come back and the perp would be remanded until that time. Then you'd have to wait for the prosecutor to get their act together and to review all the paperwork. You couldn't consider bail unless the prints came back either positive or negative and then you would have that initial arraignment and the cop could then go home. There are a lot of moving parts, and they moved at a glacial pace.The system often doesn't work 24/7. A lot of this has changed, but some of it was having to wait until 9 am for people to show up to go to work, because it's not a single system. The courts, the jails, and policing all march to their own drummer, and that created a level of inefficiency.So much of the nitty-gritty of what cops actually do is boring, behind-the-scenes stuff: How do we speed up the paperwork? Can we group prisoners together? Can we do some of this at the police station instead of taking it downtown? Is all of this necessary? Can we cooperate with the various prosecutors? There are five different prosecutors in New York City, one for each borough.There's not a great incentive to streamline this. Cops enjoyed the overtime. That's one of the reasons they would make arrests. So during this time, if a cop makes an arrest for drug dealing, that cop is gone and no cop was there to replace him. If it's a minor arrest, there's a good chance in the long run charges will be dropped anyway. And you're taking cops off the street. In that sense, it's lose-lose. But, you have to think, “What's the alternative?”Bob Davin is a fascinating guy. There's a famous picture from 1981 by Martha Cooper of two cops on a subway train. It's graffitied up and they're in their leather jackets and look like cops from the ‘70s. Martha Cooper graciously gave me permission to use the picture, but she said, "You have to indemnify me because I don't have a release form. I don't know who the cops are." I said, "Martha, I do know who the cop is, because he's in my book and he loves the picture.” Bob Davin is the cop on the right.Davin says that things started to get more efficient. They had hub sites in the late ‘80s or ‘90s, so precincts in the north of Manhattan could bring their prisoners there, and you wouldn't have to take a car out of service to go back to Central Booking and deal with traffic. They started collecting prisoners and bringing them en masse on a small school bus, and that would cut into overtime. Then moving to electronic scan fingerprints drastically saves time waiting for those to come back.These improvements were made, but some of them involve collective bargaining with unions, to limit overtime and arrests that are made for the pure purpose of overtime. You want cops making arrests for the right reason and not simply to make money. But boy, there was a lot of money made in arrests.In 1991, you have the infamous Crown Heights riot in Brooklyn. Racial tensions kick off. It's a nightmare for the mayor, there's this sense that he has lost control. The following year, you have this infamous police protest at City Hall where it becomes clear the relationship between the cops and the mayor has totally evaporated. How does all that play into the mayoral race between Dinkins and Giuliani?It was unintentional, but a lot of the blame for Crown Heights falls on the police department. The part of the story that is better known is that there was a procession for a Hasidic rabbi that was led by a police car. He would go to his wife's grave, and he got a little three-car motorcade. At some point, the police look at this and go "Why are we doing this? We're going to change it." The man who made the deal said ‘I"m retiring in a couple weeks, can we just leave it till then? Because I gave him my word." They're like, "Alright, whatever."This motor car procession is then involved in a car crash, and a young child named Gavin Cato is killed, and another girl is severely injured. The volunteer, Jewish-run ambulance shows up and decides they don't have the equipment: they call for a professional city ambulance. Once that ambulance is on the way, they take the mildly-injured Jewish people to the hospital. The rumor starts that the Jewish ambulance abandoned the black children to die.This isn't the first incident. There's long been strife over property and who the landlord is. But this was the spark that set off riots. A young Jewish man was randomly attacked on the street and was killed.As an aside, he also shouldn't have died, but at the hospital they missed internal bleeding.Meanwhile, the police department has no real leadership at the time. One chief is going to retire, another is on vacation, a third doesn't know what he's doing, and basically everyone is afraid to do anything. So police do nothing. They pull back, and you have three days of very anti-Semitic riots. Crowds chanting "Kill the Jews" and marching on the Lubavitch Hasidic Headquarters. Al Sharpton shows up. The riots are blamed on Dinkins, which is partly fair, but a lot of that's on the NYPD. Finally, the mayor and the police commissioner go to see what's going on and they get attacked. It's the only time in New York City history that there's ever been an emergency call from the police commissioner's car. People are throwing rocks at it.It took three days to realise this, but that's when they say “We have to do something here,” and they gather a group of officers who later become many of Bratton's main chiefs at the time [Bill Bratton was Commissioner of the NYPD from 1994-1996, under Giuliani]: Mike Julian, Louis Anemone, Ray Kelly, and [John] Timoney. They end the unrest in a day. They allow people to march, they get the police department to set rules. It still goes on for a bit, but no one gets hurt after that, and that's it.It was a huge, national story at the time, but a lot of the details were not covered. Reporters were taken from their car and beaten and stripped. The significance was downplayed at the time, especially by the New York Times, I would say.That's followed by the Washington Heights riots, which is a different story. A drug dealer was shot and killed by cops. There were rumors, which were proven to be false, that he was executed and unarmed. Then there were three days of rioting there. It wasn't quite as severe, but 53 cops were hurt, 120 stores were set on fire, and Mayor Dinkins paid for the victim's family to go to the Dominican Republic for the funeral. The police perspective again was, “You're picking the wrong side here.”Then there's the so-called Police Riot at City Hall. Nominally, it was about the CCRB, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and setting up an accountability mechanism to control cops. But really it was just an anti-Dinkins protest. It was drunken and unruly. The cops stormed the steps of City Hall. I have the account of one of the cops who was on the top of those steps looking at this mob of cops storming to him, and he's getting worried he's going to be killed in a crush. There were racist chants from off-duty cops in the crowd. It did not reflect well on police officers. But it showed this hatred of David Dinkins, who was seen as siding with criminals and being anti-police. The irony is that Dinkins is the one who ends up hiring all the cops that Giuliani gets credit for.In the “Safe Streets, Safe City” program?Yes. That was because a white tourist, Brian Watkins, was killed in a subway station protecting his parents who were getting robbed. That led to the famous headline [in the New York Post] of “Dave, do something! Crime-ravaged city cries out for help.” He, with City Council President Peter Vallone, Sr., drafted and pushed through this massive hiring of police officers, “Safe Streets, Safe City.”The hiring wasn't fast-tracked. It might be because Dinkins's people didn't really want more cops. But it was a Dinkins push that got a massive hiring of cops. When the first huge class of police officers graduated, Bill Bratton was there and not David Dinkins.Some interviewees in your book talk about how there's physically not enough room in the police academies at this time, so they have to run classes 24/7. You cycle cohorts in and out of the same classroom, because there are too many new cops for the facilities.You have thousands of cops going through it at once. Everyone describes it as quite a chaotic scene. But it would have been hard to do what the NYPD did without those cops. Ray Kelly, who was police commissioner under Dinkins at the end [from 1992 to 1994] before he became police commissioner for 12 years under Bloomberg [from 2002 to 2013] probably could have done something with those cops too, but he never had the chance, because the mayoral leadership at the time was much more limiting in what they wanted cops to do.Crime starts declining slowly in the first few years of the ‘90s under Dinkins, and then in ‘93 Giuliani wins a squeaker of a mayoral election against Dinkins.One of the major issues was the then-notorious “squeegee men” of New York City. These were guys who would go to cars stopped at bridges and tunnel entrances and would rub a squeegee over the windshield asking for money. It was unpleasant, intimidating, and unwanted, and it was seen as one of those things that were just inevitable. Like graffiti on the subway in the ‘80s. Nothing we can do about it because these poor people don't have jobs or housing or whatever.The irony is that Bratton and Giuliani were happy to take credit for that, and it was an issue in the mayoral campaign, but it was solved under David Dinkins and Ray Kelly and Mike Julian with the help of George Kelling [who, with James Wilson, came up with broken windows theory]. But they never got credit for it. One wonders if, had they done that just a few months earlier, it would have shifted the entire campaign and we'd have a different course of history in New York City.It's a great example of a couple of things that several people in your book talk about. One is that disorder is often caused by a very small set of individuals. There's only like 70 squeegee men, yet everybody sees them, because they're posted up at the main tunnel and bridge entrances to Manhattan. And getting them off the streets solves the problem entirely.Another emphasis in the book is how perceptions of crime are central. You quote Jack Maple, the father of Compstat, as saying, “A murder on the subway counts as a multiple murder up on the street, because everybody feels like that's their subway.” The particular locations of crimes really affect public perception.Absolutely. Perception is reality for a lot of these things, because most people aren't victimized by crime. But when people perceive that no one is in control they feel less safe. It's not that this perception is false, it just might not be directly related to an actual criminal act.The other thing I try to show is that it's not just saying, “We've got to get rid of squeegee men. How do you do it?” They had tried before, but this is why you need smart cops and good leadership, because it's a problem-solving technique, and the way to get rid of graffiti is different to the way you get rid of squeegee men.This book is in opposition to those who just say, “We can't police our way out of this problem.” No, we can. We can't police our way out of every problem. But if you define the problem as, we don't want people at intersections with squeegees, of course we can police our way out of the problem, using legal constitutional tools. You need the political will. And then the hard work starts, because you have to figure out how to actually do it.Will you describe how they tackle the squeegee men problem?Mike Julian was behind it. They hired George Kelling, who's known for broken windows. They said, “These people are here to make money. So to just go there and make a few arrests isn't going to solve the problem.” First of all, he had to figure out what legal authority [to use], and he used Traffic Reg 44 [which prohibits pedestrians from soliciting vehicle occupants]. He talked to Norm Siegel of the NYCLU [New York Civil Liberties Union] about this, who did not want this crackdown to happen. But Norman said, “Okay, this is the law, I can't fight that one. You're doing it legally. It's all in the books.” And So that took away that opposition.But the relentless part of it is key. First they filmed people. Then, when it came to enforcement, they warned people. Then they cited people, and anybody that was left they arrested. They did not have to arrest many people, because the key is they did this every four hours. It was that that changed behavior, because even a simple arrest isn't going to necessarily deter someone if it's a productive way to make money. But being out there every four hours for a couple of weeks or months was enough to get people to do something else. What that something else is, we still don't know, but we solved the squeegee problem.So in 93, Giuliani is elected by something like 50,000 votes overall. Just as an aside, in Prince of the City, Fred Siegel describes something I had no idea about. There's a Puerto Rican Democratic Councilman who flips and supports Giuliani. Mayor Eric Adams, who at the time was the head of a nonprofit for black men in law enforcement, calls him a race traitor for doing that and for being married to a white woman. There was a remarkable level of racial vitriol in that race that I totally missed.10 years ago when I started this, I asked if I could interview then-Brooklyn borough president Eric Adams, and he said yes, and the interview kept getting rescheduled, and I said, “Eh, I don't need him.” It's a regret of mine. I should have pursued that, but coulda, woulda, shoulda.Giuliani is elected, and he campaigns very explicitly on a reducing crime and disorder platform. And he hires Bill Bratton. Tell me about Bratton coming on board as NYPD commissioner.Bratton grew up in Boston, was a police officer there, became head of the New York City Transit Police when that was a separate police department. Right before he becomes NYPD Commissioner, he's back in Boston, as the Chief of Police there, and there is a movement among certain people to get Bratton the NYC job. They succeed in that, and Bratton is a very confident man. He very much took a broken windows approach and said, “We are going to focus on crime.” He has a right-hand man by the name of Jack Maple who he knows from the Transit Police. Maple is just a lieutenant in transit, and Bratton makes him the de facto number two man in the police department.Jack Maple passed away in 2001 and I didn't know what I was going to do, because it's hard to interview a man who's no longer alive. Chris Mitchell co-wrote Jack Maple's autobiography called Crime Fighter and he graciously gave me all the micro-cassettes of the original interviews he conducted with Maple around 1998. Everyone has a Jack Maple story. He's probably the most important character in Back from the Brink.Jack Maple comes in, no one really knows who he is, no one respects him because he was just a lieutenant in Transit. He goes around and asks a basic question — this is 1994 — he says, “How many people were shot in New York City in 1993?” And nobody knows. That is the state of crime-fighting in New York City before this era. There might have been 7,000 people shot in New York City in 1990 and we just don't know, even to this day.One citation from your book: in 1993, an average of 16 people were shot every day. Which is just remarkable.And remember, shootings have been declining for two or three years before that! But nobody knew, because they weren't keeping track of shootings, because it's not one of the FBI Uniform Crime Report [which tracks crime data nationally] index crimes. But wouldn't you be curious? It took Jack Maple to be curious, so he made people count, and it was findable, but you had to go through every aggravated assault and see if a gun was involved. You had to go through every murder from the previous year and see if it was a shooting. He did this. So we only have shooting data in New York City going back to 1993. It's just a simple process of caring.The super-short version of Back from the Brink is it was a change in mission statement: “We're going to care about crime.” Because they hadn't before. They cared about corruption, racial unrest, brutality, and scandal. They cared about the clearance rate for robbery a bit. You were supposed to make three arrests for every ten robberies. It didn't matter so much that you were stopping a pattern or arresting the right person, as long as you had three arrests for every ten reported crimes, that was fine.This is a story about people who cared. They're from this city — Bratton wasn't, but most of the rest are. They understood the trauma of violence and the fact that people with families were afraid to go outside, and nobody in the power structure seemed to care. So they made the NYPD care about this. Suddenly, the mid-level police executives, the precinct commanders, had to care. and the meetings weren't about keeping overtime down, instead they were about ”What are you doing to stop this shooting?”Tell listeners a little bit more about Jack Maple, because he's a remarkable character, and folks may not know what a kook he was.I think he was a little less kooky than he liked to present. His public persona was wearing a snazzy cat and spats and dressing like a fictional cartoon detective from his own mind, but he's a working-class guy from Queens who becomes a transit cop.When Bratton takes over, he writes a letter up the chain of command saying this is what we should do. Bratton read it and said, “This guy is smart.” Listening to 80 hours of Jack Maple, everyone correctly says he was a smart guy, but he had a very working-class demeanor and took to the elite lifestyle. He loved hanging out and getting fancy drinks at the Plaza Hotel. He was the idea man of the NYPD. Everyone has a Jack Maple imitation. “You're talking to the Jackster,” he'd say. He had smart people working under him who were supportive of this. But it was very much trying to figure out as they went along, because the city doesn't stop nor does it sleep.He was a bulls***er, but he's the one who came up with the basic outline of the strategy of crime reduction in New York City. He famously wrote it on a napkin at Elaine's, and it said, “First, we need to gather accurate and timely intelligence.” And that was, in essence, CompStat. “Then, we need to deploy our cops to where they need to be.” That was a big thing. He found out that cops weren't working: specialized units weren't working weekends and nights when the actual crime was happening. They had their excuses, but basically they wanted a cushy schedule. He changed that. Then, of course, you have to figure out what you're doing, what the effective tactics are. Then, constant follow up and assessment.You can't give up. You can't say “Problem solved.” A lot of people say it wasn't so much if your plan didn't work, you just needed a Plan B. It was the idea that throwing your hands in the air and saying, “What are you going to do?” that became notoriously unacceptable under Chief Anemone's stern demeanor at CompStat. These were not pleasant meetings. Those are the meetings that both propagated policies that work and held officers accountable. There was some humiliation going on, so CompStat was feared.Lots of folks hear CompStat and think about better tracking of crime locations and incidents. But as you flesh out, the meat on the bones of CompStat was this relentless follow-up. You'd have these weekly meetings early in the morning with all the precinct heads. There were relentless asks from the bosses, “What's going on in your district or in your precinct? Can you explain why this is happening? What are you doing to get these numbers down?” And follow-ups the following week or month. It was constant.CompStat is often thought of as high-tech computer stuff. It wasn't. There was nothing that couldn't have been done with old overhead projectors. It's just that no one had done it before. Billy Gorta says it's a glorified accountability system at a time when nobody knew anything about computers. Everyone now has access to crime maps on a computer. It was about actually gathering accurate, timely data.Bratton was very concerned that these numbers had to be right. It was getting everyone in the same room and saying, “This is what our focus is going to be now.” And getting people to care about crime victims, especially when those crime victims might be unsympathetic because of their demeanor, criminal activity, or a long arrest record. “We're going to care about every shooting, we're going to care about every murder.”Part of it was cracking down on illegal guns. There were hundreds of tactics. The federal prosecutors also played a key role. It was getting this cooperation. Once it started working and Giuliani made it a major part of claiming success as mayor, suddenly everyone wanted to be part of this, and you had other city agencies trying to figure it out. So it was a very positive feedback loop, once it was seen as a success.When Bratton came on the job, he said, “I'm going to bring down crime 15%.” No police commissioner had ever said that before. In the history of policing before 1994, no police commissioner ever promised a double-digit reduction in crime or even talked about it. People said “That's crazy.” It was done, and then year after year. That's the type of confidence that they had. They were surprised it worked as well as it did, but they all had the sense that there's a new captain on this ship, and we're trying new things. It was an age of ideas and experiment.And it was a very short time.That's the other thing that surprised me. Giuliani fired Bratton in the middle of ‘96.It's remarkable. Bratton comes in ‘94, and August 1994 is where you see crime drop off a cliff. You have this massive beginning of the reduction that continues.That inflection point is important for historical knowledge. I don't address alternatives that other people have proposed [to explain the fall in crime] — For example, the reduction in lead [in gasoline, paint, and water pipes] or legalized abortion with Roe v. Wade [proposed by Stephen Dubner].Reasonable people can differ. Back from the Brink focuses on the police part of the equation. Today, almost nobody, except for a few academics, says that police had nothing to do with the crime drop. That August inflection is key, because there is nothing in a lagged time analysis going back 20 years that is going to say that is the magic month where things happened. Yet if you look at what happened in CompStat, that's the month they started getting individual officer data, and noticing that most cops made zero arrests, and said, “Let's get them in the game as well.” And that seemed to be the key; that's when crime fell off the table. The meetings started in April, I believe, but August is really when the massive crime drop began.To your point about the confidence that crime could be driven down double digits year over year, there's a great quote you have from Jack Maple, where he says to a fellow cop, “This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. As long as we have absolute control, we can absolutely drive this number into the floor.”One detail I enjoyed was that Jack Maple, when he was a transit cop, would camp out under a big refrigerator box with little holes cut out for eyes and sit on the subway platform waiting for crooks.For people who are interested in Jack Maple, it is worth reading his autobiography, Crime Fighter. Mike Daly wrote New York's Finest, which uses the same tapes that I had access to, and he is much more focused on that. He's actually the godfather of Jack Maple's son, who is currently a New York City police officer. But Maple and co were confident, and it turned out they were right.As well as having changes in tactics and approach and accountability across the NYPD, you also have a series of specific location cleanups. You have a specific initiative focused on the Port Authority, which is a cesspool at the time, an initiative in Times Square, the Bryant Park cleanup, and then Giuliani also focuses on organized crime on the Fulton Fish Market, and this open-air market in Harlem.I was struck that there was both this general accountability push in the NYPD through CompStat, and a relentless focus on cleaning up individual places that were hubs of disorder.I'm not certain the crime drop would have happened without reclamation of public spaces and business improvement districts. Bryant Park's a fascinating story because Dan Biederman, who heads the Corporation, said, “People just thought it was like a lost cause, this park can't be saved. The city is in a spiral of decline.” He uses Jane Jacobs' “eyes on the street” theory and then George Kelling and James Q. Wilson's broken windows theory. The park has money — not city money, but from local property owners — and it reopens in 1991 to great acclaim and is still a fabulous place to be. It showed for the first time that public space was worth saving and could be saved. New York City at the time needed that lesson. It's interesting that today, Bryant Park has no permanent police presence and less crime. Back in the ‘80s, Bryant Park had an active police presence and a lot more crime.The first class I ever taught when I started at John Jay College in 2004, I was talking about broken windows. A student in the class named Jeff Marshall, who is in my book, told me about Operation Alternatives at the Port Authority. He had been a Port Authority police officer at the time, and I had not heard of this. People are just unaware of this part of history. It very much has lessons for today, because in policing often there's nothing new under the sun. It's just repackaged, dusted off, and done again. The issue was, how do we make the Port Authority safe for passengers? How do we both help and get rid of people living in the bus terminal? It's a semi-public space, so it makes it difficult. There was a social services element about it, that was Operational Alternatives. A lot of people took advantage of that and got help. But the flip side was, you don't have to take services, but you can't stay here.I interviewed the manager of the bus terminal. He was so proud of what he did. He's a bureaucrat, a high-ranking one, but a port authority manager. He came from the George Washington Bridge, which he loved. And he wonders, what the hell am I going to do with this bus terminal? But the Port Authority cared, because they're a huge organization and that's the only thing with their name on it — They also control JFK Airport and bridges and tunnels and all the airports, but people call the bus terminal Port Authority.They gave him almost unlimited money and power and said, “Fix it please, do what you've got to do,” and he did. It was environmental design, giving police overtime so they'd be part of this, a big part of it was having a social service element so it wasn't just kicking people out with nowhere to go.Some of it was also setting up rules. This also helped Bratton in the subway, because this happened at the same time. The court ruled that you can enforce certain rules in the semi-public spaces. It was not clear until this moment whether it was constitutional or not. To be specific, you have a constitutional right to beg on the street, but you do not have a constitutional right to beg on the subway. That came down to a court decision. Had that not happened, I don't know if in the long run the crime drop would have happened.That court decision comes down to the specific point that it's not a free-speech right on the subway to panhandle, because people can't leave, because you've got them trapped in that space.You can't cross the street to get away from it. But it also recognized that it wasn't pure begging, that there was a gray area between aggressive begging and extortion and robbery.You note that in the early 1990s, one-third of subway commuters said they consciously avoided certain stations because of safety, and two thirds felt coerced to give money by aggressive panhandling.The folks in your book talk a lot about the 80/20 rule applying all over the place. That something like 20% of the people you catch are committing 80% of the crimes.There's a similar dynamic that you talk about on the subways, both in the book and in your commentary over the past couple years about disorder in New York. You say approximately 2,000 people with serious mental illness are at risk for street homelessness, and these people cycle through the cities, streets, subways, jails, and hospitals.What lessons from the ‘90s can be applied today for both helping those people and stopping them being a threat to others?Before the ‘80s and Reagan budget cuts there had been a psychiatric system that could help people. That largely got defunded. [Deinstitutionalization began in New York State earlier, in the 1960s.] We did not solve the problem of mental health or homelessness in the ‘90s, but we solved the problem of behavior. George Kelling [of broken windows theory] emphasized this repeatedly, and people would ignore it. We are not criminalizing homelessness or poverty. We're focusing on behavior that we are trying to change. People who willfully ignore that distinction almost assume that poor people are naturally disorderly or criminal, or that all homeless people are twitching and threatening other people. Even people with mental illness can behave in a public space.Times have changed a bit. I think there are different drugs now that make things arguably a bit worse. I am not a mental health expert, but we do need more involuntary commitment, not just for our sake, but for theirs, people who need help. I pass people daily, often the same person, basically decomposing on a subway stop in the cold. They are offered help by social services, and they say no. They should not be allowed to make that choice because they're literally dying on the street in front of us. Basic humanity demands that we be a little more aggressive in forcing people who are not making rational decisions, because now you have to be an imminent threat to yourself or others. That standard does need to change. But there also need to be mental health beds available for people in this condition.I don't know what the solution is to homelessness or mental health. But I do know the solution to public disorder on the subway and that's, regardless of your mental state or housing status, enforcing legal, constitutional rules, policing behavior. It does not involve locking everybody up. It involves drawing the line between acceptable and unacceptable behavior. It's amazing how much people will comply with those rules.That presents the idea that someone's in charge, it's not a free-for-all. You get that virtuous loop, which New York had achieved in 2014–2016, when crime was at an all-time low in the city. Then the politicians decided public order wasn't worth preserving anymore. These are political choices.I had a similar version of this conversation with a friend who was shocked that there were zero murders on the subway in 2017 and that that number was stable: you had one or two a year for several years in the mid-2010s.It was five or fewer a year from 1997 to 2019, and often one or two. Then you have zero in 2017. There were [ten in 2022]. It coincides perfectly with an order from [Mayor] de Blasio's office and the homeless czar [Director of Homeless Services Steven] Banks [which] told police to stop enforcing subway rules against loitering. The subways became — once again — a de facto homeless shelter. Getting rule-violating homeless people out of the subway in the late ‘80s was such a difficult and major accomplishment at the time, and to be fair it's not as bad as it was.The alternative was that homeless outreach was supposed to offer people services. When they decline, which 95% of people do, you're to leave them be. I would argue again, I don't think that's a more humane stance to take. But it's not just about them, it's about subway riders.There's one story that I think was relevant for you to tell. You were attacked this fall on a subway platform by a guy threatening to kill you. It turns out he's had a number of run-ins with the criminal justice system. Can you tell us where that guy is now?I believe he's in prison now. The only reason I know who it is is because I said, one day I'm going to see his picture in the New York Post because he's going to hurt somebody. Am I 100 percent certain it's Michael Blount who attacked me? No, but I'm willing to call him out by name because I believe it is. He was out of prison for raping a child, and he slashed his ex-girlfriend and pushed her on the subway tracks. And then was on the lam for a while. I look at him and the shape of his face, his height, age, build, complexion, and I go, that's got to be him.I wasn't hurt, but he gave me a sucker punch trying to knock me out and then chased me a bit threatening to kill me, and I believe he wanted to. It's the only time I ever was confronted by a person who I really believe wanted to kill me, and this includes policing in the Eastern District in Baltimore. It was an attempted misdemeanor assault in the long run. But I knew it wasn't about me. It was him. I assume he's going to stay in prison longer for what he did to his ex-girlfriend. But I never thought it would happen to me. I was lucky the punch didn't connect.Peter Moskos's new book is Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop.My reading listEssays:Johnny Hirschauer's reporting, including “A Failed 'Solution' to 'America's Mental Health Crisis',“ “Return to the Roots,” and “The Last Institutions.” “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. ​“It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem,” Charles Lehman.Books:Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, Jill Leovy.​Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York, and the Genius of American Life, Fred Siegel.​ Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, Peter Moskos.​Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic, Sam Quinones.​Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.statecraft.pub

Successful playwrights and television writers (and married couple) Barbara Wallace and Tom Wolfe are playing successful playwrights (and married couple) Charlotte and Arthur Sanders in the Waterfront Playhouse production of Paul Slade Smith's The Angel Next Door through February 8, 2025. Friends of the pod Barb and Tom make their first joint appearance to talk about their return to the stage as “eccentric artists” playing eccentric artists; being directed by Waterfront Playhouse artistic director Patrick New; help from Chicago actor (and friend of the pod) Laura T. Fisher and the LineLearner app; the importance of reading a script's “funny type;” a possible new play called Terror at Four Feet; finding out one's musical chops are out of tune; and how much acting is actually involved for two successful writers playing two successful writers. (Length 21:06) The post Key West ‘Angel's appeared first on Reduced Shakespeare Company.

Maya Hawke performs Joan Didion's classic collection superbly. Host Jo Reed and AudioFile's Alan Minskoff discuss how Hawke pays attention to Didion's exquisite prose and captures her careful observations. Hawke gets Didion's measured pace and thoughtful tone just right as she conveys the much-admired author's idiosyncratic, elegant language. The audiobook vividly brings back the 1960s, when Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson created "new journalism."  Read our review of the audiobook at our website. Published by Macmillan Audio.  Discover thousands of audiobook reviews and more at AudioFile's website.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Like most people, Tom Wolfe didn't like modern architecture. He wondered why we abandoned our patrimony of cathedrals and palaces for a million indistinguishable concrete boxes. Unlike most people, he was a journalist skilled at deep dives into difficult subjects. The result is From Bauhaus To Our House, a hostile history of modern architecture which addresses the question of: what happened? If everyone hates this stuff, how did it win? How Did Modern Architecture Start? European art in the 1800s might have seemed a bit conservative. It was typically sponsored by kings, dukes, and rich businessmen, via national artistic guilds that demanded strict compliance with classical styles and heroic themes. The Continent's new progressive intellectual class started to get antsy, culminating in the Vienna Secession of 1897. Some of Vienna's avante-garde artists officially split from the local guild to pursue their unique transgressive vision. The point wasn't that the Vienna Secession itself was particularly modern… https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-from-bauhaus-to-our-house 

On Wednesday's edition of SaskAgToday with Ryan Young: -The Canadian Food Inspection Agency began an investigation into a positive case of Bovine TB found in a Saskatchewan cow. -The Senate and House of Commons have adjourned for the holidays. -Kevin Hursh of SaskAgToday.com spoke with Tom Wolfe about drone use in Canada. -We'll hear more from Alberta beekeeper Michael Paradis regarding challenges facing the industry.

A Sokolébresztő szinte jubileumi, 199. adásában – hallgatói kérésre – kedvenc űrös-kozmikus-tudományos, "sci", "fi", és "sci-fi" könyveinket szakértettük meg állandó, de régen hallott szakértőnkkel, Werner Norberttel. Bár az adásidő nem kegyelmezett, a NASA várható közeljövőjének megszakértése után azért szóba került Carl Sagan feledhetetlen Kapcsolatától Cixin Liu Háromtest trilógiáján át Fred Hoyle, Isaac Asimov és Arthur C. Clarke egy-két könyvéig sok kedvenc. Nem mulasztottuk el megemlíteni Stephen Baxtert és Andy Weirt. S persze méltattuk a "non fiction" kategóriában például Avi Loeb Földnkívülijét, Oriana Fallaci legendás Apollós riportregényét (Ha meghal a Nap), Gene Kranz Houston, baj van című alapművét, illetve Tom Wolfe-tól Az igazakat. De mindezzel még csak a felszínt kapargattuk, így például A gyermekkor vége, A galaxis útikalauz vagy épp Az idő rövid története szóba se került, pedig igény az lett volna rá. https://parallaxis.blog.hu/2024/12/11/sokol_ep199 https://youtu.be/PrehUpIv1aA Patreon oldalunkon támogatóink számára a nyilvános premier előtt tesszük elérhetővé podcastjeink epizódjait, illetve a Parallaxis Podcast hosszabb, különleges változatát – akár már havi 1000 forintért! (a tájékoztatás nem teljes körű) https://www.patreon.com/parallaxis Adásainkat megtalálod többek között Spotify-on, Soundcloud- és YouTube-csatornánkon, valamint Google és Apple Podcasts-en is! Kattints és válassz platformot! https://parallaxis.blog.hu/2021/07/16/podcast_platformok Még több podcast a Parallaxis Univerzumban: http://podcast.emtv.hu

The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. by Peter Ames Carlin chronicles the band's precipitous rise to fame, shining a comprehensive light on their journey. Carlin joins us to talk about his start in music journalism, telling important stories, the lasting influence of songs and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over. This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                     New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app Featured Books (Episode): The Name of This Band Is R.E.M. by Peter Ames Carlin Mystery Train by Greil Marcus The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe

Sales has watched A Man In Full, and wonders why it hasn't been a global hit. Crabb has a theory, which she unspools at length while indulging her weakness for big-screen megaflops. Also discussed: Miranda July's lady-pleaser All Fours, and Jessie Tu's new novel The Honeyeater. READ FULL SHOWNOTES ON Chat10Looks3.com Listen now on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode of Triple M Homegrown, Matty O is joined by Tom and Nick Wolfe of The Wolfe Brothers to dive deep into their incredible musical journey. From humble beginnings, jamming in the back shed of their parents' cherry farm in Longley, Tasmania, to becoming one of Australia's most popular country-rock acts, the Wolfe Brothers have truly lived an extraordinary story. They share how their rise to fame began with a fateful call to be Lee Kernaghan's backing band, propelling them into the spotlight. Now, they're selling out shows across Australia and abroad, and they're just getting started! Tune in for a conversation filled with laughs, memories, and a whole lot of music love. Catch up on their latest news, upcoming tour dates, and future projects as they continue to dominate the music scene. You won't want to miss this exciting interview with two of Australia's finest musicians!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Summary This week Anna (https://x.com/AnnaRRose) and Nico (https://x.com/nico_mnbl) chat with Arnaud Schenk (https://x.com/_arnauds_), one of the original co-founders of Aztec (https://aztec.network/) and creator of the Polaris Fellowship (https://www.polaris-fellowship.com/). They discuss Arnaud's recent blog post ‘On Trust Infrastructure', exploring the down sides of a trustless system, the need to make online community building more possible and how programmable cryptography may play a role in these solutions. They explore the history of computer culture, the rejection of institutions by mid-90s internet culture and how the seeds for this were set by the 60s counterculture. Here's some additional links for this episode: 05:09 * Episode 75: Exploring Aztec with Zac Williamson (https://zeroknowledge.fm/75-2/) 05:09 * Episode 176: Zk-zk-rollup & zk.money with Zac and Joe from Aztec (https://zeroknowledge.fm/176-2/) 05:09 * Episode 273: History of Plonk, Noir, and the building of Aztec 3 (https://zeroknowledge.fm/273-2/) 07:38 * Episode 237: Exploring ZK Research with Jens Groth (https://zeroknowledge.fm/237-2/) 20:01 * Into the deep end: making sense of PLONK - Zac Williamson (CTO, Aztec Protocol) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty-LZf0YCK0&list=PLj80z0cJm8QFnY6VLVa84nr-21DNvjWH7&index=156) 23:55 * Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work by Michael P. Farrell (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3645929.html) 27:05 * No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior by Joshua Meyrowitz (https://global.oup.com/academic/product/no-sense-of-place-9780195042313?cc=us&lang=en&) 29:33 * On Trust Infrastructure by Arnaud Schenk (https://gestalt.cafe/trust-infrastructure/) 39:28 * Crypto's Three Body Problem by Lotti, Shorin, Hart (https://otherinter.net/research/three-body-problem/) 48:13 * Plurality philosophy in an incredibly oversized nutshell by Vitalik Buterin (https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/08/21/plurality.html) 52:21 * From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo3773600.html) 52:21 * The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/The-Electric-Kool-Aid-Acid-Test-Tom-Wolfe.pdf) * On Crypto Article by Arnaud Schenk (https://gestalt.cafe/on-crypto/) * Knot Group Wiki (https://knot-group.github.io/wiki/) Check out the ZK Jobs Board (https://jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm/) for the latest jobs in ZK at jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm (https://jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm/) zkSummit12 is happening in Lisbon on Oct 8th! Applications to attend are now open at zksummit.com (https://www.zksummit.com/), apply today as early bird tickets are limited! Episode Sponsors Attention, all projects in need of server-side proving, kick start your rollup with Gevulot's ZkCloud, the first zk-optimized decentralized cloud! Get started with a free trial plus extended grant opportunities for premier customers until Q1 2025. Register at Gevulot.com (https://gevulot.com/). Aleo (http://aleo.org/) is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey. Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/ (http://aleo.org/). If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (www.youtube.com/channel/UCYWsYz5cKw4wZ9Mpe4kuM_g)

Send The Movie Wire a message!This week on the show! Chaos love company in the movie based on the popular video game is BorderlandsSometimes it is the one who loves you who hurts you the most. Blake Lively stars in the movie adaption to the Colleen Hoover novel It Ends with UsAnd FinallyA place for fun, a place for friends, a place for hunting. The mouse is out in The Mouse TrapThis week's episode does cover a film with a   sensitive subject, the word "love," should never ever be used in situations of domestic violence. If you or somebody you know is a victim of domestic violence please have your voice heard. Don't wait call. National Domestic Violence Hotline: 1-800-799-7233Ready for my verdict?   Let's get into it! *Help support the show by leaving a review on Apple podcast or Spotify!**You can now listen to The Movie Wire on YouTube.! Listen and subscribe here!If you haven't tuned in, followed, or subscribed to The Cultworthy Cinema Podcast and The Movie Wire's new crossover show Back 2 the Balcony, now is your time, because this week, we cover the Tom Wolfe novel movie adaption, starring Tom Hanks and Bruce Wilson in Bonfire of the Vanities Listen and follow here Apple PodcastSpotifyYouTubeMake sure to check out a podcast that will add some sugar and spice to your week with baking and murder with Karen and Anne at The Sugar-Coated Murder's podcast.Listen Here!Buy Karen and Annes Book Click Click Click Here

This week Justin and I cover the Brian de Palma misfire - BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES!In this adaptation of the Tom Wolfe novel, powerful Wall Street executive Sherman McCoy (Tom Hanks) is riding with his greedy girlfriend, Maria (Melanie Griffith), when she makes a wrong turn and winds up in the Bronx. There, she runs over a black boy and drives off without reporting it. When alcoholic tabloid reporter Peter Fallow (Bruce Willis) discovers the story, he knows it will be scandalous and riles up New Yorkers with his coverage of the case, which soon goes to trial.Hear our take on the film as well as the reviews of Siskel and Ebert. CHECK OUT OUR SPONSOR!BULLETPROOF COFFEE: https://www.bulletproof.com - USE CODE "B2B"Be sure to subscribe on your favorite pod platform and our YOUTUBE channel!Visit thecultworthy.comVisit https://www.themoviewire.comVideo: https://www.youtube.com/@back2thebalcony

This week Chris From Brooklyn and Chris Stanley discuss JD Vance's animist accusations, the AP printing a headline debunking it then retracting it, the chemical clock in the Vice Presidents house, what caused RFK's voice to sound like that, the left getting into conspiracy stuff, Chris' beef with Tom Wolfe, Michael Bay making a movie based off the Skibidi Toilet meme and so much more!Support Our Sponsors!https://monthlyknifeclub.com/ - Use promo code: GAS for 10% off your first month!Smallbatchcigar.com Use the promo code GAS10 to get 10% off plus 5% reward points.YoDelta.com - Use promo code GAS for 25% off your order!YoKratom.com - Check out Yo Kratom (the home of the $60 kilo) for all your kratom needs!High Society Radio is 2 native New Yorkers who started from the bottom and didn't raise up much. That's not the point, if you enjoy a sideways view on technology, current events, or just an in depth analysis of action movies from 2006 this is the show for you.Chris Stanley is the on air producer for Bennington on Sirius XM.Chris from Brooklyn is a lifelong street urchin, a former head chef and current retiree.Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChrisFromBklynInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/chrisfrombklynEngineer: JorgeExecutive Producer: Mike HarringtonInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/themharrington/Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheMHarringtonSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Guest: G.H. "Hank" HarrisonCourtney Love , Kurt Cobain, Grateful Dead and MORE!!!!Hank Harrison is a writer and publisher with a deep interest in Medieval History, the Celts, Neolithic Archaeology, the Star Mounds, archaic astronomy, Hermetism and sacred geometry. He began writing about human and animal psychology in graduate school in 1962. Since founding the Arkives Press in 1967, Hank has been a frequent guest on hundreds of national and international television and radio shows, including Katherine Cryer on Court TV, Geraldo Rivera and Maury Povitch. He has also appeared across Canada on CBC Radio highlighted by a historical appearance on the Jane Hauten Show. He is featured several times each year on American radio and television shows including, Tom Likus, Allen Handelman and numerous local shows.Media AppearancesIn pursuit of his work he has appeared on America's Most Wanted, Hard Copy, the National Enquirer, American Journal, Inside Edition, Unsolved Mysteries and A Current Affair and on similar radio and television talk shows in Europe. His entry in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World began with the 1976 edition.Hank is featured in the controversial documentary film: Kurt & Courtney, by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield and in the well-known educational documentary LSD: 25. Both films were released on Video and DVD and shown on Showtime, HBO and over the BBC channels. Likewise he was featured in books such as Who Killed Kurt Cobain (1997) by Max Wallace and Queen of Noise (1996) by Melissa Rossi. In the early years of his career (1965-1976) he was mentioned in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe and was featured in Time, Life, Newsweek and the New York Times for his pioneering work with Drug Abuse intervention programs.Hank spent an idyllic childhood on Cannery Row and the beaches of Pacific Grove before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1949. He attended Hayward High School, the College of San Mateo, San Jose State and San Francisco State University. He has lived and taught in Canada, England, Holland and Ireland. While in Ireland he worked as a consultant for the Irish department of labor. He is the author of seven books, and over 200 magazine & journal articles.Hank holds a degree in Psychology from San Francisco State University and has attended postgraduate classes in anthropology and various seminars at Stanford. He also studied urban cultural experiments at the University of Amsterdam and is privileged to have studied renaissance and medieval topics with the late Dame Frances Yates at the Warburg Institute, London.Awards & HonorsIn 1968 he was awarded a scholarship to the Rocky Mountain Writer's Conference. In 1974 he was writer in residence at Montalvo Center for the Arts, Saratoga, California and won a six-month journalism residency in Las Vegas as feature editor for the Las Vegas Sun. In 1984 he attended the prestigious Stanford Publications course on a grant from Applied Materials Corporation. The first two books of his trilogy on the social history of the Grateful Dead have exceeded 300,000 copies in sales worldwide and have been translated into Portuguese, (Brazil) German, French and Dutch. A mass-market paperback was released in England. The long awaited Vol. 3, Dead End is in preparation.His book: Love Kills: The Assassination of Kurt CobainCan only be bought through him because all avenues of publication have been shut down. Email: zendogg@gmail.comhttp://www.arkives.com/http://www.eponafarms.com/http://www.hankharrison.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-opperman-report--1198501/support.

In this episode, Zach West chats with Hilaritas Press Podcast host Mike Gathers about the 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness as described by Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, and Antero Alli. • • • Links… • Maybe Day: https://www.maybeday.net/   • Prometheus Rising: http://www.hilaritaspress.com/portfolio-item/prometheus-rising/   • Flashbacks by Timothy Leary: https://www.amazon.com/Flashbacks-Timothy-Leary/dp/0874774977/   • Electric Kool Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe: https://www.amazon.com/Electric-Kool-Aid-Acid-Test/dp/031242759X   • Info-Psychology by Timothy Leary: https://www.amazon.com/Info-Psychology/dp/1561841056/   • Zach West's I2C2: https://zachwesti2c2.com/   • Mike Gather's Links: https://linktr.ee/mgathers23   • Leary/RAW at deoxy: https://web.archive.org/web/19990427045540/http://www.deoxy.org/learyraw.htm   • McKenna at deoxy: https://web.archive.org/web/19990429200557/http://deoxy.org/mckenna.htm • • • Guest Host Zack West  Host Mike Gathers Producer/Engineer Richard Rasa

Leah Buley and Joe Natoli have teamed up to make something great (check out the reviews on Amazon!) even greater. How? Well, considering that The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide was written more than a decade ago, it was time to revisit the content and make it even more relevant for today's UX teams. After all, times have changed. But the fundamental principles of the original book haven't changed. They are as solid today as they were 11 years ago. What has changed is that the methods have been adapted for the speed of change in today's businesses. Joe says it best: “These methods are shorter. They're simpler. They're more direct in a lot of ways, and they cut to the chase in a way that longer processes don't. I've met plenty of senior people who are throwing up their hands and going, ‘We're doing all the things. Why isn't this working?' And the truth is, they're kind of overworking and overthinking. Everything in this book is practical and direct and gets you from point A to B. I just don't think there's any better way to get there.” What You'll Learn from this Episode: - About Leah's experience as a solo UX practitioner and the inspiration behind the first edition of UX Team of One - How the UX field has changed over the past decade - How the second edition aims to provide comprehensive yet practical UX methods that can be applied in various organizational settings - About the shortcomings of UX boot camps and educational programs - A perspective that balances UX advocacy with business objectives and the reality of corporate politics - How to navigate and thrive in a UX career despite industry challenges, focusing on practical, adaptable methods and tools. Quick Reference Guide: 0:46 - Introduction of Leah and Joe 1:33 - The User Experience Team of One, second edition 6:46 - Large or small team, Leah and Joe's book is comprehensive without being overwhelming 8:58 - Righting wrongs 12:14 - What's new in the second edition – striving to do more with less 15:58 - Break - plug for the Rosenverse 18:20 - The current shitstorm 21:39 - On speed 24:40 - On toolkits. Tools and methods are two different things. 28:16 - Who needs The User Experience Team of One? 30:45 - Leah and Joe's gifts for the audience Resources and Links from Today's Episode: Rick Rubin's The Creative Act https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/0593652886 Jakob Bro, jazz guitarist https://jakobbro.com/web/ Confessions of a Pricing Man by Hermann Simon https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Pricing-Man-Affects-Everything/dp/3319203991 Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe https://www.amazon.com/Bonfire-Vanities-Tom-Wolfe/dp/0312427573 The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide by Leah Buley and Joe Natoli https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/the-user-experience-team-of-one-second-edition/

What I learned from reading The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on Silicon Valley by Tom Wolfe. Read The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company by Michael Malone with me. ----Founders Notes gives you the superpower to learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. You can search all my notes and highlights from every book I've ever read for the podcast. Get access to Founders Notes here. ----Build relationships with other founders, investors, and executives at a Founders Event----(1:00) America is today in the midst of a great technological revolution. With the advent of the silicon chip, information processing, and communications, the national economy have been strikingly altered. The new technology is changing how we live, how we work, how we think. The revolution didn't just happen; it was engineered by a small number of people. Collectively, they engineered Tomorrow. Foremost among them is Robert Noyce.(2:00) Steve Jobs on Robert Noyce: “He was one of the giants in this valley who provided the model and inspiration for everything we wanted to become. He was the ultimate inventor. The ultimate rebel. The ultimate entrepreneur.”(4:00) When you read biographies of people who've done great work, it's remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.  — How To Do Great Work by Paul Graham. (Founders #314)(7:00) Bob Noyce had a passion for the scientific grind.(10:00) He had a profound and baffling self-confidence.(15:00) They called Shockley's personalty reverse charisma. —  Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age by Joel Shurkin. (Founders #165)(25:00) What the beginning of an industry looks like: Anywhere from 50 to 90% of the transistors produced would turn out to be defective.(33:00) Young engineers were giving themselves over to a new technology as if it were a religious mission.(41:00) Noyce's idea was that every employee should feel that he could go as far and as fast in this industry as his talent would take him. He didn't want any employee to look at the structure of Intel and see a complex set of hurdles.(43:00) This wasn't a corporation. It was a congregation.(43:00) There were sermons. At Intel everyone, Noyce included, was expected to attend sessions on "the Intel Culture." At these sessions the principles by which the company was run were spelled out and discussed.(45:00) If you're ambitious and hardworking, you want to be told how you're doing.(45:00) In Noyce's view, most of the young hotshots who were coming to work for Intel had never had the benefit of honest grades in their lives. In the late 1960s and early 1970s college faculties had been under pressure to give all students passing marks so they wouldn't have to go off to Vietnam, and they had caved in, until the entire grading system was meaningless. At Intel they would learn what measuring up meant.(49:00) When you are trying to convince an audience to accept a radical innovation, almost by definition the idea is so far from the status quo that many people simply cannot get their minds around it. They quickly discovered that the marketplace wasn't just confused by the concept of the microprocessor, but was actually frightened by its implications. Many of my engineering friends scoffed at it was a gimmick. Their solution? The market had to be educated. At one point, Intel was conducting more seminars and workshops on how to use the microprocessor than the local junior collage's total catalog of courses. Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove became part of a traveling educational roadshow. Everyone who could walk and talk became educators. It worked.  —  The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World's Most Important Company by Michael Malone. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

The first AI Engineer World's Fair talks from OpenAI and Cognition are up!In our Benchmarks 101 episode back in April 2023 we covered the history of AI benchmarks, their shortcomings, and our hopes for better ones. Fast forward 1.5 years, the pace of model development has far exceeded the speed at which benchmarks are updated. Frontier labs are still using MMLU and HumanEval for model marketing, even though most models are reaching their natural plateau at a ~90% success rate (any higher and they're probably just memorizing/overfitting).From Benchmarks to LeaderboardsOutside of being stale, lab-reported benchmarks also suffer from non-reproducibility. The models served through the API also change over time, so at different points in time it might return different scores.Today's guest, Clémentine Fourrier, is the lead maintainer of HuggingFace's OpenLLM Leaderboard. Their goal is standardizing how models are evaluated by curating a set of high quality benchmarks, and then publishing the results in a reproducible way with tools like EleutherAI's Harness.The leaderboard was first launched summer 2023 and quickly became the de facto standard for open source LLM performance. To give you a sense for the scale:* Over 2 million unique visitors* 300,000 active community members* Over 7,500 models evaluatedLast week they announced the second version of the leaderboard. Why? Because models were getting too good!The new version of the leaderboard is based on 6 benchmarks:*

We took the holiday week off,  so we're sharing an episode from behind the paywall. Coming soon: new episodes on The Biden Problem, SCOTUS, and Israeli illiberalism as an inspiration for the global right. ***In this episode, from January 2024, writer Osita Nwanevu joins for a rip-roaring conversation about legendary prose stylist, "new journalist," and novelist Tom Wolfe. Reviewing a new documentary about Wolfe ("Radical Wolfe" on Netflix), Osita writes, "Behind the ellipses and exclamation points and between the lines of his prose, a lively though often lazy conservative mind was at work, making sense of the half-century that birthed our garish and dismal present, Trump and all."Answered herein: is Tom Wolfe a good writer? What kind of conservative is he? How does his approach compare to other "new journalists" like Joan Didion and Garry Wills? And what's the deal with the white suit?Further Reading:Osita Nwanevu, "The Electric Kool-Aid Conservative," The New Republic, Jan 5, 2023Tom Wolfe, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," Esquire, Nov 1963.— "The Birth of ‘The New Journalism'; Eyewitness Report," New York Magazine, Feb 1972.— "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," New York Magazine, June 1972— The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)— A Man in Full (1998)— The Kingdom of Speech (2016)Peter Augustine Lawler, "What is Southern Stoicism? An Interview with Professor Peter Lawler,"  Daily Stoic, March 2017...and don't forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to all of our extensive catalogue of bonus episodes!

In his recent essay in Tablet, “Why the Western Rebellion Against the Jews Produces Bad Art and Bad Politics,” Blake Smith writes about the Bulgarian-French-American critic and philosopher Julia Kristeva, and in particular her fruitful and fascinating analyses of the viciously anti-Semitic French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. For Kristeva, Céline is, among many other things, a great example of how anti-Semitism is embedded in western culture in a way that precedes even the very early Christian antipathy to Jews for their role in rejecting Jesus. We are anti-Semitic, in the West, because our very psyches were formed, before Jesus was even a gleam in God's eye, when the rival but intimately bound figures of the Jewish patriarch and the Jewish prophet set the archetypal boundaries within which we would live and develop. When we rebel, as we must, it is against one or the other of these figures. Blake writes:Western fathers, Kristeva insisted, are Jewish. Even Westerners who are neither Jewish nor religious derive from the heritage of the Bible their profoundest and most intimate understanding not only of God—a loving, punishing, powerful, yet often apparently absent or vindictive father—but of everything associated with the “paternal function.” Our sense of political authority, of social norms, of our own fathers and our own fatherhood, is suffused with biblical legacies. A vision of a bearded older man, compounded of God and the patriarchs with whom God spoke, hangs like a superimposed image before every one of our apparently secular leaders, judges, and dads. Whenever we rebel against their authority, and seek to extirpate from ourselves and our culture that authority's deepest, most hidden foundations, we therefore may easily find ourselves locked no longer in struggle with real, empirical fathers and powers (who may well need to be overcome) but with the abstract, symbolic, Jewish “paternal function” which, never exhaustively embodied by anything, may nevertheless be figured, as a scapegoat, by Jews.But the Bible contains both Law and Prophets: a power that compels obedience to rules and measures all men's worth by them, and a power that compels some men to strangely singularize themselves through antinomian acts of outrageous transgression—powers both called God. The prophets marry whores, lay for months unmoving in bizarre positions, eat disgusting bread, report dreams and sightings in which respectable authorities are laid low by vicious pagan foreigners. Here a relation to God seems not to assure the continuity of patriarchal tradition, of sons becoming fathers through adherence to rules and roles, but rather to endanger everything that might make one socially recognizable as a decent person. The prophets, unsurprisingly, are often reluctant, pleading with God that they are not well-suited for such a task, or simply fleeing it.The traditions of the West, Kristeva posited, since they derive in large measure from the Bible, turn on its central tension between, on the one hand, seeing God as granter of the Law, guarantor of the social order and our place with in it, and, on the other, hearing God's summons to undo ourself and the world that they might be remade. To hold on rightly both to the “very risky right to be different” as revealed by the Prophets through their bewilderingly personal access to the divine, and “the Law” as given publicly, plainly, to everyone, once and for all, is a difficult venture, and perhaps one bound to teeter endlessly between stifling conformist legalism and reckless individualist fanaticism.In addition to Blake's essay on Kristeva on Céline, we also talk about lots of other stuff, including Blake's efforts to launch a magazine about gay male life and culture, why I (somewhat surprisingly) don't like Tom Wolfe; and Blake's very loving parents who didn't exactly come through when he came out. What thematically unifies the episode, I think, is the shared concern that Blake and I have with how we can reverse the polarity of our current political and cultural equilibrium, in which culture is boring and limp and predictable and politics are intense and transgressive and surprising. Without quite signing on to Kristeva's vision of western civilization being premised on the tension between the Jewish father and the Jewish rebel, we find it a useful frame with which to think. Hope you enjoy. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

Before writer-director Philip Kaufman brought Tom Wolfe's best-selling book to the big screen in 1983, astronauts in movies were often just alien hunters or asteroid chasers. But under Kaufman's direction, spaceflight became a deeply human endeavor, focusing on inner strength rather than external threats. This 80s flick, which runs for over three hours and features an unconventional structure, tells the story of test pilots like Chuck Yeager and Gordon Cooper as they break the sound barrier and America ventures into the “Space Race” with Russia. Kaufman himself described it as “the longest movie ever made without a plot.” So get ready to take flight and orbit Earth as Tim Williams and guest co-hosts Jeff Atkins, Ben Carpenter, and Darby Mirocha discuss “The Right Stuff” from 1983 on this episode of the 80s Flick Flashback Podcast. Here are some additional behind-the-scenes trivia we were unable to cover on this episode: Some were concerned that when this film was released it would help propel John Glenn, then a U.S. Senator from Ohio, into the Presidency. Newsweek Magazine had a cover story about it. Although Glenn ran for President in 1984, he lost the Democratic nomination to Walter Mondale. Sources: Wikipedia, IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, Box Office Mojo https://www.wired.com/2014/11/oral-history-of-right-stuff/ We'd love to hear your thoughts on our podcast! You can share your feedback with us via email or social media. Your opinions are incredibly valuable to us, and we'd be so grateful to know what you enjoyed about our show. If we missed anything or if you have any suggestions for 80s movies, we'd love to hear them too! If you're feeling extra supportive, you can even become a subscription member through "Buy Me A Coffee". For more details and other fun extensions of our podcast, check out this link. Thank you for your support! https://linktr.ee/80sFlickFlashback

In this week's episode, we don our polarized hippie glasses and go back in time to investigate the cultural legacy of the Grateful Dead and all that they represent: psychedelia, Pied Piper figures and their cult-like followings, cross-country motor travel, bootleg merchandising, musical improvisation, and more. We analyze the parallels between the infamous Summer of Love and the summer now upon us, with a special focus on the darksided undercurrents lurking through both. Links: Finding Authenticity in a T-Shirt – The New Yorker (on Online Ceramics) Owsley Stanley's website — The Bear StoryOwsley Stanley: The King of LSD – Rolling StoneThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, 1968 (full PDF!) Grateful Dead 2015 Chacos collabThe End of Merch – GQ Will the Grateful Dead Live Forever ... Through Merch? – BillboardA Guide to Grateful Dead IconographyHow Fashion Became Obsessed with the Grateful Dead – WSJ Why, in 2018, is Fashion Obsessed with the Grateful Dead Aesthetic? – FashionistaThe Disembodied Body of Marilyn Monroe – Wendy LesserFind exclusive episodes here

In this week's episode, we don our polarized hippie glasses and go back in time to investigate the cultural legacy of the Grateful Dead and all that they represent: psychedelia, Pied Piper figures and their cult-like followings, cross-country motor travel, bootleg merchandising, musical improvisation, and more. We analyze the parallels between the infamous Summer of Love and the summer now upon us, with a special focus on the darksided undercurrents lurking through both.Links:Finding Authenticity in a T-Shirt – The New Yorker (on Online Ceramics) Owsley Stanley's website — The Bear StoryOwsley Stanley: The King of LSD – Rolling StoneThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe, 1968 (full PDF!)Grateful Dead 2015 Chacos collabThe End of Merch – GQWill the Grateful Dead Live Forever ... Through Merch? – BillboardA Guide to Grateful Dead IconographyHow Fashion Became Obsessed with the Grateful Dead – WSJ Why, in 2018, is Fashion Obsessed with the Grateful Dead Aesthetic? – FashionistaThe Disembodied Body of Marilyn Monroe – Wendy LesserFind exclusive episodes here

On this week's episode of You Are What You Read, we are joined by actor, producer and director Griffin Dunne to talk about his remarkable new memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club. You know Griffin's work as producer and actor in After Hours; director of Practical Magic and of the documentary The Center Will Not Hold about his aunt, Joan Didion.  The son of Dominick and Ellen Dunne and nephew of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Griffin grew up among literary superstars. His memoir brims with anecdotes about Hollywood's most dazzling characters: Sean Connery, Janis Joplin, Tom Wolfe, Carrie Fisher, and many more. Griffin and his family found hope even in the darkest of circumstances after the murder of his beloved sister, Dominique. In this episode, Griffin unpacks the absurd, hilarious and heartbreaking stories of his memoir and the love and humor that sustained his family. Thanks to our wonderful sponsors! This episode of You Are What You Read is sponsored by BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/WHATYOUREAD today to get 10% off your first month. Get it off your chest, with BetterHelp. We'd also like to thank Book of the Month.  Head over to bookofthemonth.com and use Promo Code ADRI to get your first book for just $9.99. Thank you for listening, and thank you for reading. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Nutter and Tom Wolfe bring their special blend of comedy and music to an evening entitled “Another Father's Day Ruined,” part of the Solo Sunday series held at Mrs. Murphy & Sons Irish Bistro. Mark and Tom discuss their 30-plus-year partnership and reveal their collaborative – for want of a better word – "process;" the ways in which neither of them are Mick Jagger; the time Tom opened for Bill Hicks; a history of ruining other things, like opera and Gershwin; memories of writing and filming the Chris Farley and Matthew Perry comedy Almost Heroes; and almost dying while researching Wild Men, their early-90s parody of Robert Bly's Iron John. (Length 21:36)

With Garth Risk Hallberg discussing his second novel, and first in nine years, The Second Coming. Topics included: (1) the unique benefits of writing *very* long books; (2) Tom Wolfe & the sprawling, all-inclusive NYC novel; and (3) how/how not to deal with sudden, massive literary fame. Order Mark's novel Bunyan and Henry. All episodes of The Thoughtful Bro aired live originally on A Mighty Blaze. The Thoughtful Bro is proudly sponsored by Libro.fm.

In the wake of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union set off on the great space race, competing to see which super power could put the first human in space and eventually land them on the Moon. As historian John Strausbaugh writes, that race should have been over before it even started. Strausbaugh's new book, The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, is a harrowing and frequently hilarious account of how political leaders and engineers slapped together a space program with little apparent concern for the lives of the cosmonauts they hurled into Earth's orbit. Moscow blustered about the size of its rockets and the triumph of its space pioneers. But that patriotic rhetoric hid the true nature of a program that was harried and haphazard, and whose leaders weren't quite sure how to return their pilots to Earth after launching them into space. The Soviet space program stands in stark contrast, Strausbaugh told Shane Harris, to the methodical and comparatively risk-averse NASA program, which eventually overtook its rival. Books, historical figures, and near-death space walks discussed in this episode include: The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-stuff/9781541703346/?lens=publicaffairs The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312427566/therightstuff Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir by Jerry Linenger https://www.amazon.com/Off-Planet-Surviving-Perilous-Station/dp/007136112X Sergei Korolev https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/sergei-korolev-life-history-timeline Yuri Gagarin https://www.pbs.org/redfiles/rao/gallery/gagarin/index.html Alexi Leonov https://time.com/5802128/alexei-leonov-spacewalk-obstacles/ More about John Strausbaugh:https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/john-strausbaugh/?lens=twelve Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/lawfare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the wake of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union set off on the great space race, competing to see which super power could put the first human in space and eventually land them on the Moon. As historian John Strausbaugh writes, that race should have been over before it even started. Strausbaugh's new book, The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, is a harrowing and frequently hilarious account of how political leaders and engineers slapped together a space program with little apparent concern for the lives of the cosmonauts they hurled into Earth's orbit. Moscow blustered about the size of its rockets and the triumph of its space pioneers. But that patriotic rhetoric hid the true nature of a program that was harried and haphazard, and whose leaders weren't quite sure how to return their pilots to Earth after launching them into space. The Soviet space program stands in stark contrast, Strausbaugh told Shane Harris, to the methodical and comparatively risk-averse NASA program, which eventually overtook its rival. Books, historical figures, and near-death space walks discussed in this episode include: The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-strausbaugh/the-wrong-stuff/9781541703346/?lens=publicaffairs The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780312427566/therightstuff Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir by Jerry Linenger https://www.amazon.com/Off-Planet-Surviving-Perilous-Station/dp/007136112X Sergei Korolev https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/sergei-korolev-life-history-timeline Yuri Gagarin https://www.pbs.org/redfiles/rao/gallery/gagarin/index.html Alexi Leonov https://time.com/5802128/alexei-leonov-spacewalk-obstacles/ More about John Strausbaugh:https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/contributor/john-strausbaugh/?lens=twelve Chatter is a production of Lawfare and Goat Rodeo. This episode was produced and edited by Cara Shillenn of Goat Rodeo. Podcast theme by David Priess, featuring music created using Groovepad. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Comment cette spirituelle mini-série remet-elle en lumière l'œuvre de Tom Wolfe ? Qui était ce romancier américain, et pourquoi l'adaptation de son roman-culte « Le bûcher des vanités » a-t-elle été un échec ? Quelle nouvelle génération de distributeurs achète aujourd'hui les films de Cannes ? Pourquoi la Belgique est un territoire difficile pour le cinéma ? Les découvertes musicales : - Clairo - Sexy to Someone - Lenny Kravitz – Paralyzed -November Ultra - En Amour, Pt. 3 - London Grammar, SebastiAn - Dancing By Night Merci pour votre écoute La semaine des 5 Heures, c'est également en direct tous les jours de la semaine de 19h à 20h00 sur www.rtbf.be/lapremiere Retrouvez tous les épisodes de La semaine des 5 Heures avec les choix musicaux de Rudy dans leur intégralité sur notre plateforme Auvio.be : https://auvio.rtbf.be/emission/1451 Et si vous avez apprécié ce podcast, n'hésitez pas à nous donner des étoiles ou des commentaires, cela nous aide à le faire connaître plus largement.

Clint Lanier and Dave McArthur get back into the live podcasting studio to record a discussion of Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test while drinking vodka and Kool-Aid.

This week on The Treatment, Elvis sits down with Emmy winning actor Jeff Daniels to discuss his latest project, the Netflix series adaptation Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full. Next, Heeramandi director Sanjay Leela Bhansali joins to talk about his Netflix series and his robust career in Indian cinema. And for The Treat, Oscar nominated director Ava DuVernay talks about the 1993 film she always watches before beginning a new project.

The Drunk Guys become masters of the beer universe this week when they read Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. They master: Compartmentalized by Finback, Murderous by Pipeworks, Cake News by Omipollo, Gimme the Gorbage by Little House, and Oop! I Hopped My Pants! by Sand City Brewing. Join

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comAdam is the best magazine editor of my generation, and an old friend. From 2004 to 2019, he was the editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, and before that he edited the New York Times Magazine, and 7 Days — a weekly news magazine covering art and culture in NYC. His first book is The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing.For two clips of our convo — on the bygone power of magazines, and the birth of the great and powerful performance artist Dina Martina — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: his upbringing on Long Island; fantasizing about NYC through the cosmopolitanism of magazines; being a “magazine junky extremely early”; the literary journalism of the ‘60s; Gay Talese; Joan Didion; Tom Wolfe; Adam's early start at The Village Voice; 18-hour workdays; joining Rolling Stone then Esquire; commissioning Frank Rich's groundbreaking piece on gay culture; the visual strength of mags; 7 Days “doomed from the start” because of a stock market crash; the NYT's Joe Lelyveld hiring Adam to “make trouble” with creative disruption; Tina Brown; “the mix” of magazines like a dinner party; the psychodrama of writers clashing with colleagues; how the Internet killed magazines; the blogosphere; podcasting; the artist Cheryl Pope and her series on miscarriages; Tony Kushner's Angels in America; when creation is tedious and painful; Leaves of Grass and its various versions; Montaigne's essays; Pascal and the incompleteness of The Pensées; Amy Sillman painting over her beautiful work; Steven Sondheim; choreographer Twyla Tharp; poetry as the concentration of language and the deconstruction of how we speak; poets Marie Howe and Louise Gluck; the fiction writer George Saunders; how weed suppresses the ego; and Adam's preternatural calm.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Oren Cass on Republicans moving left on class, Noah Smith on the economy, Bill Maher on everything, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, and the great Van Jones! Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Lucretia hosts this week's episode, reminding us once again that Republicans are living up to their reputation as "the stupid party" with the proposed "Anti-Semitism Awareness Act" that seems to have overlooked this quaint old thing called the First Amendment. Steve gamely tries to defend the political strategy behind it, but Lucretia is having none of it (putting her in rare alignment with the New York Times), wondering why anyone would want to distract attention away from Democrats tieing themselves in electoral hangman's knots over the anti-Semitism raging wild inside their party and their wholly-owned subsidiary college campuses. Republicans ought to impose a gag order on themselves, and crusade against the gag order on Trump in his current trial in New York. Concerning which, John has several observations.And about that campus scene: another week, and another data point for Steve's thesis that "it's going to get worse before it gets worse." About the only sensible conclusion is that somewhere in the Great Beyond, Tom Wolfe is behind the whole current scene. Maybe we can still get a sequel from him, Bonfire of the Inanities.

On this episode, acclaimed actor and Beatles fan Jeff Daniels joins “Everything Fab Four” to discuss his experience filming a movie scene with George Harrison and getting his guitar signed by the Quiet Beatle. Across his five decade-long career, Jeff Daniels has worked with some of the world's most revered filmmakers. He made his screen debut in Miloš Forman's Ragtime, and followed with James L. Brooks's Terms of Endearment, Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Mike Nichols's Heartburn. Daniels has been nominated for numerous Golden Globe and Screen Actors Awards for his dramatic turns, including such films as Jonathan Demme's Something Wild and Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale. In 2012, Daniels joined the cast of HBO's political drama The Newsroom, which earned him a Prime Time Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. Playing Will McAvoy, Daniels' monologue about American exceptionalism in the series pilot has been viewed more than 22 million times on YouTube. His acclaimed television work also includes his portrayal of John O'Neill in the Hulu miniseries The Looming Tower and FBI director James Comey in Showtime's The Comey Rule. In May 2024, stars in the new Netflix limited series A Man In Full, based on Tom Wolfe's novel of the same name. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/everythingfabfour/support

Rich and the guys react to the Jamal Murray's buzzer-beater that put the Denver Nuggets up 2-0 in their NBA Playoffs series against LeBron and the  Lakers, and to the Knicks torrid comeback to take a 2-games-to-none lead against the 76ers. Emmy-winning actor Jeff Daniels joins Rich in-studio to discuss his upcoming Netflix series ‘A Man in Full' based on the Tom Wolfe bestselling novel, the ascension of his beloved Detroit Lions, his famous death scene in ‘Speed,' and shares some great stories about his ‘Terms of Endearment' co-star Jack Nicholson.   Rich breaks down the 2024 NFL Draft QB class and how the high hopes for the 2021 QB class went up in flames instead. Please check out other RES productions: Overreaction Monday: http://apple.co/overreactionmonday  What the Football with Suzy Shuster and Amy Trask: http://apple.co/whatthefootball Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit smokeempodcast.substack.comEli Lake is a longtime journalist, but we know him best for the tremendous “Re-Education With Eli Lake” podcast (Nancy's #1 pod pick in 2023). Lake has recently become a contributor to the Free Press, where he writes about this world as it explodes. Nancy and Sarah talked with him about the paradox of anarchists attending meetings, why writers can be precious little bitches, the upcoming DNC in Chicago, and how he made our outro song, or at least instructed the robot to do so.* “When I kiss you on your mask you understand”* What does PEN America do?* Eli and Nancy's Wikipedia pages are full of lies* “You're not the boss of me” as the spirit of America* Will things go full Baader-Meinhof at the Chicago DNC?* Don't go to journalism school, kids* Some love for Tom Wolfe, Bryan Burrough, Ask a Jew* Newsroom is the Jay Rosen of TV shows* “Norman Finkelstein is the Jew-y Jew who performs for anti-Semites”Plus, Lenny Bruce as a podcaster, Menachem Begin as OG punk rock, and is marijuana the Jewish kryptonite? Send us your letters! We want them! We're not the boss of you, but we'd still like you to become a paid subscriber.

April 19th, which is this Friday, marks an odd holiday known as Bicycle Day — the day, now 81 years ago, when Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann rode his bike home from work after dosing himself with his lab concoction, lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD. The first acid trip.Hofmann's wobbly ride is what launches us into an exploration of a moment, when Ken Kesey, an evangelist of acid would emerge from a Menlo Park hospital lab, and plow through the nation's gray flannel culture in a candy colored bus. Some know Kesey as the enigmatic author behind One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest — others, as the driving force in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe's seminal work in New Journalism. In honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of Acid Test, Brooke speaks with Wolfe and writer River Donaghey about how acid shaped Kesey, spawned the book and de-normalized American conformity.Songs:Holidays B by Ib GlindemannIm Glück by Neu!Apache '65 by Davie Allan and the ArrowsSelections from "The Acid Tests Reels" by The Merry Pranksters & The Grateful DeadAlicia by Los MonstruosThe Days Between by The Grateful Dead (Live 6/24/95)  On the Media is supported by listeners like you. Support OTM by donating today (https://pledge.wnyc.org/support/otm). Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @onthemedia, and share your thoughts with us by emailing onthemedia@wnyc.org.

In Episode 163, Sara Hildreth, from @FictionMatters and co-host of the podcast Novel Pairings, returns for her third appearance on our show as our expert for Classics & Retellings 101. Sara guides us through the sometimes intimidating world of timeless reads in an accessible way. She busted some myths about classics and changed my mind about some elements of the classics. And, she has a great approach to find the perfect retelling of your favorite classics for your next read.  This post contains affiliate links through which I make a small commission when you make a purchase (at no cost to you!). CLICK HERE for the full episode Show Notes on the blog. Highlights Sara explores the definitions of a classic and a modern classic book. We talk about separating the American literature canon from the idea of a classic. Sara talks about being free to define classics on personal terms. The idea of a book being labeled a “future classic.” Now-famous books that went unnoticed initially when they were released. Sara's personal reading motivations. Common issues people have when trying to tackle classic books. Notable quirks of many classics that were first published as serials. Tips and advice for approaching older books. Addressing the pressure surrounding reading or revisiting classics. Examples of nonfiction classics. Legal considerations for all those retellings. The rise of retellings as a trend with today's audience. The difference between retellings and fan fiction. Sara's recommendations for accessible classic literature. A different approach to finding the right retelling for your reading. Please note: Sara mistakenly mentions during the discussion that The Great Gatsbydid not come into popularity until its distribution to soldiers during World War I, when this actually occurred during World War II. Sara's Book Recommendations [49:02] Two OLD Books She Loves — Classics The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton | Amazon | Bookshop.org [49:43] Passing by Nella Larson | Amazon | Bookshop.org  [53:12] Other Books Mentioned The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton [50:58] The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton [50:59] Roman Fever and Other Stories by Edith Wharton [51:03] The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett [55:44] Two NEW Books She Loves — Retellings Anna K by Jenny Lee | Amazon | Bookshop.org [57:35] The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vho | Amazon | Bookshop.org [1:00:28] Other Books Mentioned Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy [59:01] Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar [59:53] Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan [59:58] One Book She DIDN'T Love — Classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain | Amazon | Bookshop.org[1:03:25] One NEW RELEASE She's Excited About — Retelling and Classic Pairing The Garden by Claire Beams (April 9, 2024) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [1:05:12] Other Books Mentioned The Illness Lesson by Claire Beams [1:05:37] Little Women by Louisa May Alcott [1:05:41] The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett [1:06:21] Last 5-Star Book Sara Read James by Percival Everett (March 19, 2024) | Amazon | Bookshop.org [1:07:47] Books Mentioned During the Classics Discussion The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe [3:44] Beloved by Toni Morrison [10:46] Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver [12:05] David Copperfield by Charles Dickens [12:19] James by Percival Everett (March 19, 2024) [13:29] Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain [13:34] Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys [13:51] Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë [14:02] The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald [14:45] Frankenstein by Mary Shelley [15:09] Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn [15:20] Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë [24:27] A Model of Christian Charity: A City on a Hill by John Winthrop [26:35] A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft [26:47] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass [26:54] The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank [26:59] A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf [27:02] In Cold Blood by Truman Capote [27:14] The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith [29:13] The Time Machine by H. G. Wells [29:20] The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson [29:23] Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier [29:30] The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood [29:36] The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor [29:45] The Most Dangerous Game by Richard Connell [30:17] The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman [30:20] The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson [30:23] The Minority Report and Other Classic Stories by Philip K. Dick [30:26] Going to Meet the Man: Stories (with Sonny's Blues) by James Baldwin [30:37] Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Stories from the Harlem Renaissance (with The Gilded Six-Bits) by Zora Neale Hurston [30:42] Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston [30:54] Kindred by Octavia E. Butler [31:00] Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler [31:08] Books Mentioned During the Retellings Discussion Julia by Sandra Newman [33:38] 1984 by George Orwell [33:40] Hamlet by William Shakespeare [34:10] Emma by Jane Austen [34:24] The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare [34:28] The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson [34:45] Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith [34:51] Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson [35:04] And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie [35:08] The Winters by Lisa Gabriele [35:35] The Odyssey by Homer [36:38] The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller [37:00] Circe by Madeline Miller [37:01] Hogarth Shakespeare series by various authors [37:53] Canongate Myth Series by various authors [37:57] The Austen Project series by various authors [38:00] Eligible by Curtis Sittenfeld [38:03] Naamah by Sarah Blake [38:56] Anna K by Jenny Li [40:10] Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy [40:20] Tom Lake by Ann Patchett [40:41] Beautiful Little Fools by Jillian Cantor [42:36] Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes [44:14] Marmee by Sarah Miller [44:17] Little Women by Louisa May Alcott [44:22] Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell [44:38] Ruth's Journey: A Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind by Donald McCaig [44:40] Pride by Ibi Zoboi [45:19] Other Links The Atlantic | Italo Calvino's 14 Definitions of What Makes a Classic by Maria Popova (July 7, 2012) Novel Pairings | The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton (February 27, 2024) About Sara Hildreth Website | Instagram | Facebook  Sara Hildreth is the creator behind FictionMatters, a literary Instagram account, newsletter, and book club focused on putting thought-provoking books into the hands of adventurous readers. She also co-hosts Novel Pairings, a podcast dedicated to making the classics readable, relevant, and fun.

Jake talks Gillis vs. Simons and the comedy wars. Then Anders examines the classic 1970 Tom Wolfe article "Radical Chic", and what it says both about the trappings of aloof takedown journalism and the limits of liberalism. Subscribe to our bonus feed to get the full episode and more at Patreon.com/poddamnamerica

Subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon to listen to this premium episode, and all of our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/knowyourenemyWriter Osita Nwanevu joins for a rip-roaring conversation about legendary prose stylist, "new journalist," and novelist Tom Wolfe. Reviewing a new documentary about Wolfe ("Radical Wolfe" on Netflix), Osita writes, "Behind the ellipses and exclamation points and between the lines of his prose, a lively though often lazy conservative mind was at work, making sense of the half-century that birthed our garish and dismal present, Trump and all."Answered herein: is Tom Wolfe a good writer? What kind of conservative is he? How does his approach compare to other "new journalists" like Joan Didion and Garry Wills? And what's the deal with the white suit?Further Reading:Osita Nwanevu, "The Electric Kool-Aid Conservative," The New Republic, Jan 5, 2023Tom Wolfe, "The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," Esquire, Nov 1963.— "The Birth of ‘The New Journalism'; Eyewitness Report," New York Magazine, Feb 1972.— "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's," New York Magazine, June 1972— The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)— A Man in Full (1998)— The Kingdom of Speech (2016)Peter Augustine Lawler, "What is Southern Stoicism? An Interview with Professor Peter Lawler,"  Daily Stoic, March 2017

On the morning of November 14th, 1943, Leonard Bernstein, the talented 25-year-old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, got a phone call saying he would at last be leading the respected orchestral group — in six hours, that afternoon, with no time to rehearse.The sudden thrust into the spotlight transformed Bernstein into a national celebrity. For almost five decades, the wunderkind would be at the forefront of American music, as a conductor, composer, virtuoso performer, writer, television personality and teacher.He would also help create the most important Broadway musicals of the mid-20th century — On The Town, Wonderful Town and West Side Story. These shows would not only spotlight the talents of its young creator. They would also spotlight the romance and rhythm of New York City.Bernstein is one of New York's most influential cultural figures. He spent most of his life in the city, and that's the focus of today's story – Leonard Bernstein's New York.The new film Maestro, starring Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan, focuses on Bernstein's personal story and intimate life. That specific angle is not our objective today – for the most part. We're looking at the relationship between the creator and his urban inspiration. Where did Bernstein make his name in New York City and how did his work change the city?FEATURING The Village Vanguard, City Center, Carnegie Hall, the old Metropolitan Opera and the Dakota ApartmentsAnd co-starring Jerome Robbins, Aaron Copland, Stephen Sondheim, Comden and Green, Lauren Bacall, Tom Wolfe of course Felicia MontealegreVisit the website for more information and images Music snippet information“On The Town: Act I: Opening: New York, New York” (Studio Cast Recording 1961)CBS Broadcast, Manfred Overture, Op 115 (New York Philharmonic)“Joan Crawford Fan Club” The RevuersSymphony No. 1 Jeremiah (New York Philharmonic)CBS Broadcast, Don Quixote, Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character, op. 35 (New York Philharmonic)Fancy Free Ballet_ VII. FinaleI Get Carried Away, On The TownChristopher Street (From Wonderful Town Original Cast Recording 1953)On the Waterfront Main Title (Revised)Candide, Act II - No. 31, Make Our Garden Grow (Finale)West Side Story_ Act II_ SomewhereSymphonic Dances from West Side StorySamuel Barber, Adagio for Strings, Op. 11 (New York Philharmonic)Leonard Bernstein - Young People's Concerts - What Does Music Mean? (1958) Kaddish, Symphony No. 3 (To the Beloved Memory of John F. Kennedy)  I. Invocation - Kaddish 1The Ladies Who Lunch / Company Original Broadway CastMass - Hymn and Psalm_ A Simple Song Dybbuk Suite No. 2 - Leah  (New York Philharmonic)Leonard Bernstein and Shirley Verrett at GMHC Circus Benefit, Madison Square GardenMahler - Symphony No.5 (New York Philharmonic)

Since the beginning of the space program, we've expected astronauts to be fully-abled athletic overachievers—one-part science geeks, two-part triathletes—a mix the writer Tom Wolfe called “the right stuff.” But what if, this whole time, we've had it wrong? In this episode from 2022, reporter Andrew Leland joins blind Linguistics Professor Sheri Wells-Jensen and a crew of 11 other disabled people. They embark on a mission to prove not just that they have what it takes to go to space, but that disability gives them an edge. On Mission AstroAccess, the crew members hop on an airplane to take a zero-gravity flight—the same NASA uses to train astronauts. With them, we learn that the challenges to making space accessible may not be the ones we thought. And Andrew, who is legally blind, confronts unexpected conclusions of his own. By the way, Andrew's new book is out. In The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (https://zpr.io/nLZ8H), Andrew recounts his transition from sighted to blind. Suspended between anxiety and anticipation, he also begins to explore the many facets of blindness as a culture. It's well worth a read.  Read the article by Sheri Wells-Jensen, published in The Scientific American in 2018. “The Case for Disabled Astronaut” (https://zpr.io/nLZ8H).  This episode was reported by Andrew Leland and produced by María Paz Gutiérrez, Matt Kielty and Pat Walters. Jeremy Bloom contributed music and sound design. Production sound recording by Dan McCoy.Special thanks to William Pomerantz, Sheyna Gifford, Jim Vanderploeg, Tim Bailey, and Bill Barry Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.   Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.orgLeadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.