December 16, 2025 • 38 mins
Jonathan Mahler is a longtime staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the best-selling book Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, New York Times notable book The Challenge: Hamdan V. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power, and recently published book The Gods of New York: The Tumultuous Eighties, from Donald Trump to the Tompkins Square Riots. Mahler’s first book was adapted into a mini-series for ESPN and his second book, The Challenge, won The Scribes Book Award in 2009. Formerly a columnist for Bloomberg View, Mahler’s writing has also appeared in Slate, the Daily Beast, and New York Magazine. Mahler’s work in sports journalism has been featured in the anthology book series The Best American Sports Writing and received numerous journalism and media awards, including the Gerald Loeb Award and the Mirror Award.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is a best
selling author and a staff writer for The New York Times.
Jonathan Mahler's first book, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning,
was adapted into a mini series for ESPN. His second book,
(00:23):
The Challenge, won the Scribes Book Award in two thousand
and nine. In the world of sports journalism, Jonathan Mahler
has been featured in the anthology book series The Best
American Sports Writing, and has received numerous journalism and media
awards throughout his career. Mahler's latest book, released this past summer,
(00:44):
is entitled The Gods of New York The Tumultuous Eighties
from Donald Trump to the Tompkins Square Riots. Raised in
Palm Springs, California, I was curious where Jonathan Mahler's fascination
with New York originated from.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I was born in New York. Both my parents were
New Yorkers. My father was a working class Jewish kid
from the Bronx who you got himself into Bronx science
and went off to medical school, also in New York,
and was offered a job out in California at a
hospital out there, and you know, he had barely left
New York, and I thought he was like, well, this
is the dream, you know, moved to California, raised my
(01:22):
family out there. So we moved to Palm Springs, and
my mom hated it from day one and couldn't wait
to move back to New York and find you way
there for a while. I was there, really my whole childhood.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
I moved back.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
I was in college when they moved back, and they
actually made a deal because my mom was a smoker,
lifelong smoker, and my father's a doctor. My father said,
if you quit smoking, we'll move back to New York.
And then what happened next was that they moved back
to New York. My mom quit smoking. She was so miserable.
My dad said, please start smoking again. So she got
everything she wanted. She got to move back to New
(01:57):
York and continue smoking.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
What was it about New York that he he didn't
want to go, he wanted to stay.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Well, he just you know, he was a workaholic, and
he was so devoted to his patients that he for
him his life was going to the hospital, seeing patients
in his office, making it a practice.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
He had a practice.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
He worked seven days a week, and so you know,
he had a little, a little snippet of time on
Sunday afternoon when he would sit by the pool and
you know, read a medical journal. So for him, it
was it worked out great. But my mom couldn't stand it.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
So it's interesting to me that you have written three books, correct,
The Box is Burning, Challenge, and then this book now
Gods of New York. They were born in New York,
but you're not a lifelong New Yorker. You know, a
big part of your youth was outside New York. What
is it about New York? Because I mean, we both
everybody has their opinions as to why do we stay? Yeah, yeah,
(02:49):
it's so challenging, it's so tough. Why do we stay? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:53):
It's funny because I grew up in California, but I
always felt like a New Yorker because both my parents
were in New Yorker. I'd rooted for the Yankees and
the Giants and the Knicks. Really from birth, inherited that
from my father, and we would come back every you know,
of every chance we got. My mom would bring us
back to New York, which was, you know, really every year.
I mean we'd come at least once, so I felt
(03:15):
always connected to New York. It was always like the
place where I should be.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Living, I think.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
And by the time I got out of college, my
parents had moved back here, and so it became kind
of naturally the place to move. And once you kind
of settle in in New York, it's so hard to
leave if it worked for you. Yeah, exactly, particularly because
not only because it's so hard to sort of find
a way to make it work that once you do,
you don't want to give it up, but also because
(03:40):
New York is it's always changing. You know, you're always
going to new neighborhoods, discovering new neighborhoods, new restaurants. Your
life here, I feel like it doesn't feel static in
the way that it might in other places, so you
just don't get bored with it.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
I think, well, I think that if you have an
escape from New York, that makes everything a lot different.
If you can't go anywhere else, if you have no
other option, New York can be very very onerous in
that way of your spending the summer there in the
hot summer. But now for you, where did you go
to College of Northwestern? I went to Northwestern? Yea in Chicago,
And did you study journalism there?
Speaker 2 (04:12):
I studied English literature there actually, but I did start
working on the paper there, so that's kind of what
got me launched. So even though I was an English major,
I worked on the college paper.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Why, well, what attracted you to then? You know?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I guess I feel like as I kind of worked
my way through college and started to think about what
I might want to do, I realized that the only
thing I knew I was like pretty good at was
thinking and writing. And then the idea of you know,
going out into the world and not spending all my
days kind of at a desk was appealing to me.
The idea that I might have a career kind of
engaging with people and thinking and writing reporting, reporting. Yeah,
(04:48):
so I thought I would maybe be interested in giving
it a try. So I did it at my senior
year really at Northwestern, and then I graduated and thought, well,
I'm going I'm going to give this a shot and
see how it goes. Moved to New York and try
to be a journalist and if it works out, great
and if it doesn't.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
How did it begin?
Speaker 2 (05:05):
My first job was actually at the McNeil LAIRR News Hour.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
How did you pull that off? How?
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I just applied for an internship there and remarkably was
able to get one, which I loved and you know,
sort of sad to see what's happening to public television.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Now.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Of course that's a separate story, but I felt like
I wanted to I wanted to.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Write how long were you there with them?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
I was there about six months, I think, so recall Yeah,
not very long, no, because it was an internship.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
It was just to get me. Well, what did you
pick up on that in terms of I mean, obviously
I liked both of them and I liked that show,
but it was among the starchiest news programs in my life. Yeah,
those guys were pretty old school. Did you absorb that? Like,
I'm here and what do they want from me?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
I mean what they wanted from me mostly was was
lunch orders.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
And coffee, but it was that face.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah, I mean I think I occasionally, you know, contributed
some research to some stories.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Was basically the extent of my work.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
It was a real inter yeah, true internship, but I
mean those guys were amazing. I mean, Robert McNeil was
an inspiring figure just because he had been a foreign correspondent.
He had just he had this kind of gravatas, like
the kind of qualter Cronkite type gravatas, and he was
so cultured and so well read, and it was just
he was a certain kind of newsman that you just
(06:20):
felt like, Wow, that guy's amazing, Right.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
They took the obligation very seriously, totally. Yeah, Yeah, and
he loved it. Where do you go after McNeil?
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Lay?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
After that, I worked at the Wall Street Journal's wire service,
the Dow Jones News Service, and I was a wire
service reporter there. I mean a lot of people probably
even know what a wire service is, because I think
that them barely exist.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
They were these kind of news services that provided stories
to newspapers all around the world, and they worked on
a very kind of hyperactive schedule. Let's say, I mean
you were kind of writing all the time. Newsrooms would
have these little kind of teletype machines and they would
spit out these stories from the wire services, and they
would rip them off and use them ass copy in
(07:02):
their newspapers. So I did that writing about you know,
financial news for four years and.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
That was.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Yeah, Yeah, it was grueling, grouling.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
What about it made you stay? Well, that's a good question.
I was sort of moving up.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I started as a real kind of general assignment reporter,
where I was I was really just writing. I'm essentially
rewriting press releases, you know, forty press releases a day.
And then I became a proper reporter and so I
sort of, you know, was able to kind of grow
a little bit there, even though I didn't really love
the job. So I was kind of looking for what
(07:41):
I wanted to do next at that point, and I
knew that I wanted to be writing less frequently and
longer stories. And I found my way. I started freelancing
for a newspaper, and then I kind of found my
way there on Staff, which was a Jewish weekly newspaper.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Called The Forward.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yes, it's an amazing institution. I mean it's been around
for well over one hundred years, over one hundred and
fifty years. It was a you know, it was sort
of the newspaper for Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants who came
to New York in the early twentieth century and you know,
a sort of a in the modern era. It was
kind of reinvented as an English language newspaper. So so
(08:19):
I worked there for a number of years and I
love that it was.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
It was great. I remember reading in the book that
you're Jewish and your wife Issima is not Jewish, although
you convinced her to have a Jewish wedding. And she
refers to the harrowing experience of you going to a
New England Christmas.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
That was in an essay I wrote. I think, yes, yeah, no,
she's a writer, she is an editor. So the first
Christmas I went to her grandmother, who's no longer with us,
but yeah, yeah, exactly. She had a little Christmas ornament
with my name on it, which was you know, it
was hard enough to be going to Christmas, but let
alone have an ornament with my name on it.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Was christ You know, it's a very sweet gesture. But
I was. I was surprised how long went the forward,
How many years I.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Was there for?
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Five years? Wow, So you really build a foundation. I did. Well.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
It takes a while, you think, so, yeah, I don't
even believe me, right, Yeah, I guess in each of
these jobs, I felt like I was still learning and
kind of growing and you know, finding new things to do,
so I could stick around. And also because I was
sort of here in New York, there would have been
opportunities at newspapers around the country, But if I wanted
(09:24):
to stay in New York, it's harder.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
And the forward were you married when you did the
on the forward? That was after the forward?
Speaker 2 (09:29):
That was after Yeah. So then I actually was at
my next job where I met my wife, which was
at Talk magazine, but Tina exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah. So, and Tina said she thought that it could
work if one for COVID and Harvey bailing out from
his financial commitment to the thing. She thought it was
a really worthy project. Did you agree? I did.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I thought it was a great magazine. It really was
just starting out. I mean, I think in the end,
I started working there a year before launch, so to
me it feels like it was longer. But I think
that the magazine really only survived for two years. I
loved working for Tina.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
It was fun. I'd never worked at a glossy magazine.
It was a whole other world. Describe that it.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Was just so different. I mean, particularly because I, you know,
I was at a. I had come from this, you know,
weekly Jewish newspaper where basically if you took a source
out to lunch, that meant like splitting the cost of
a tuna sandwich. And then suddenly I met, you know, this,
this glossy magazine where you you know, you have a
proper expense account.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
You know, yes, you want exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
You know, even even raw tuna.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
So it was wild.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I think the idea was that it was obviously kind
of celebrity driven, but it was also literary and classy.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
And and fun.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
You know, I really enjoyed it, but it was coming
at the tail end of the age of the glossy magazine.
What was a story you wrote for her that you
that you enjoyed. I'll tell you what I remember, because
it's the one celebrity, real proper celebrity profile I've ever written.
It was when Ridley Scott was making Gladiator and I
flew over to London to profile Russell Crowe and to
(11:01):
write about the movie. I was in London for what
was in the end, I think an hour long interview
in Russell Crowe's hotel room. I was in London for
a week, kind of waiting to get the nod to
come over and interview, and he obviously had no interest
in talking to me. You know, it was kind of
an education I think in the kind of journalism I
didn't want to do, but you know, an experience like
(11:24):
I'm glad I had.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
But did he come around when you were with him?
Was he really for me? Was he? No?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
No, he was diffident the whole time. He had no
interest in being there. I'm sure he had been forced
to do it. And Ridley Scott was much better. Actually,
I then went out to La and he was he's
a salesman. He is a salesman, and I think he
was interested in talking about his movie. Russell Crowe was
not interested in talking about his performance.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah, I'll tell you.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
There was one other fun story that I did there.
There was a moment in time when the Hermitage Museum
in Saint Petersburg, Russia, had just made an agreement with
the Venetian Hotel, which had just opened in Las Vegas,
and they were going to send some of their art
over to the Venetian and so there was going to
be you know, there were going to be paintings from
(12:09):
the Hermitage in one of the world's most famous museums
in the Venetian Hotel as part of this agreement. So
I went over to Saint Petersburg and spent a few
days in the Hermitage and interviewed people there, and you know,
in the middle of winter, it was kind of just
an unbelievable city, just the most beautiful city. And then
from there I came back to the United States and
(12:30):
went to Las Vegas to the Venetian Hotel. So it
was the biggest kind of you know, contrast of reporting
trips you could possibly imagine.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Yeah, you read talk how long really until it folded?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Which was three years, I guess in the end, because
I started before launch.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yeah, then where do you go?
Speaker 2 (12:46):
That's when I sold my first book, which was Ladies
and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning. So I started writing
that book, and I also started freelancing for the New
York Times magazine. So I was sort of doing those
kind of in tandem for a little while until I
got my book done.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Why the book about the Bronx was your first book?
You've been writing for a while now, and you're going
to write this your first book.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, it was my first book. I mean, it goes
back a little bit to what we were talking about
before that. You know, New York had always had this
kind of mythic hold over me, you know, because my
father had.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Grown up in both my parents had grown up in
New York. My father grew up in the Bronx, and.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
It was always, as I said, the place that I
was kind of supposed to be. I you know, I
had this kind of connection to it, but I also
felt like I didn't know it as well as I
wanted to, and I didn't know its history as well
as I wanted to. So, you know, when you're when
you're setting out, especially when you're setting out to write
your first book, you feel like I need a subject
that I know it's going to hold my interest because
(13:40):
this is going to be hard. And so it was
you know, New York, and you know New York in
the seventies, which was when I had my first kind
of when I first came here, my first images of
New York were really New York in that era, in
the seven yeah, exactly seven eight. And you stayed for
how long on that trip as a child, we would
come for you know, always a couple of weeks. We
would stay in an apartment that belonged to a friend
(14:03):
of my parents.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Summertime.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Summertime, we would go to you know, I go to
Yankee Games. We would go to see you know, we
went and saw show Sweeney Todd. We would see shows
on Broadway. We would sometimes go to you know, Gilbert
and Sullivan Light Opera. We would go to Rockefeller Center.
We would just kind of do all the things you
do here. I just felt like I knew it was
a subject that had a kind of hold over me.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Somewhat surprisingly, you maintain memories as a seven year old
I did. I mean just so interesting.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, I mean, nothing too detailed, but just you know,
almost like movie images that you sort of have a
vague recollection of, and like kind of a sense of
almost aesthetic memories in a way, especially with the first book,
I mean, you really don't know what you're doing. I
did so much research that didn't make its way into
the book. I talked to so many people, I read
so many books. I mean, in a funny way, a
lot of that material didn't appear in the book. But
(14:50):
you have to kind of master a subject in a
way to write a book about it, and that does
mean a reading widely and talking to people widely and
going way really beyond the subject of the book to
feel count yeah, like to just feel marinated in it
and to feel kind of comfortable a lot.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
You know, it's going to stay out, ye, going to
make the cut.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
No, No, that's exactly it. The book was sort of
partly about the Yankees from that year, nineteen seventy seven,
because that had been again this team I followed from
afar out in California, and I was kind of obsessed
with in the way that you are when you're a kid,
you become obsessed with sports teams. And then part of
the book was just about the city and the life
of the city, the nineteen seventy seven Blackout, the Son
(15:32):
of Sam, and these were just things that I as
I researched, I just got kind of more and more into.
It's the great thing about writing a book is that
you know, as you get to know a subject more
in a way, it becomes more captivating.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
It sort of pulls you in. Who was the imprint
for our Strauss and Jeru and how did you pull
that off? Getting a book published? Stuff?
Speaker 2 (15:53):
I wrote a propose, I had a good agent. I
rewrote the proposal a couple of times, and they bought it. Yeah,
and then they published my second.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Book too, Author and journalist Jonathan Mahler. If you enjoy
conversations with intrepid writers, check out my episode with Lawrence Wrights.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
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in the subway and someone says, would you like to
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(16:35):
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Speaker 1 (16:58):
To hear more of my conversation with Lawrence Wright, go
to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Jonathan
Mahler details how his first book, The Bronx, is Burning
wound up becoming a mini series for ESPN. I'm Alec
(17:26):
Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Before joining the
staff at the New York Times, Jonathan Mahler was a
sports columnist for Bloomberg View. He then became a contributing
writer for The New York Times, where he covered everything
from baseball to politics. From Mahler, I wondered what it
was like transitioning from freelancing to full time staff writer.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Actually, for a while I worked from home, and then
I rented an office for a little while in Dumbo
in Brooklyn, and I would go there every day and write,
and then eventually I went full time on staff at
the time, So they gave you a desk, they gave
me a desk. Yeah, Actually, now we don't even I
don't even have a dedicated desk. We have kind of
floating desks in the magazine for.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
The writers, and I, you know, I don't. You're still
working with them now, I am still there. Yeah. And
when you first walked into as I call it the
kremlin there to work at the Times, what was the
feeling you had. Did you feel the kind of halft
of that experience?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yes, definitely, and you know, initially the Times moved so
it kind of, you know, just a few blocks, but
it moved into this very kind of you know, beautiful
sort of modern building.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
You know, it's an amazing office. I mean, I love it.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
I love being in the building. I love being at
the Times. And it's like, you know, in particularly now,
I mean, you feel like the work that the Times
still does feels more important than ever and it's an
amazing workplace filled with just very smart, dedicated people.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And you still feel when you first got there, you
felt you were with a very special crowd of.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
People totally from the beginning till the present day.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
I mean, it really is. It's a special place. Yeah.
Now when you write the book Challenge and you're immersed
in this, a Guantanamo correct Yeah, is one of the
big backdrops there, exactly. I've asked other writers who write
to kind of embrace difficult material. How do you manage
your feelings while you're doing some of this work? You
(19:15):
do ever get really really down and kind of overwhelmed?
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that
you sort of learn and I don't even know if
you learn it, it just you learn it in the
way that it's just sort of necessary is a certain
degree of detachment. I think, not so much that you
become kind of inured to you know, what you're seeing
and hearing, but there's a sort of a pursuit of
(19:39):
a story. There's a kind of a mindset that I
think you get into when you're sort of on a
story and you're pursuing a story. And it's funny because
I think for journalists who sort of do this, you
don't even really think about it until you kind of
step outside and you know, you're asking a question like
that question, because it doesn't feel like you don't feel detached,
but it's what you have to do to to kind
(20:00):
of pursue the story and to not feel defeated by
it or crushed by it.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
In the case of Guantanamo, I mean I think I
just you know, I spent some time down there. I
spent some time in Yemen because the sort of main
one of the main characters of the book was a
Yomeni detainey, and so I wanted to go over and
meet his wife and meet his family, and you know,
he was being held on Guantanama Bay with you know,
his future was very uncertain she had no contact with him.
(20:27):
I mean it was, you know, it was obviously, you know,
sort of powerful and sad to be kind of reporting
on it. But at the same time, I felt like
I had a job to do. I felt like I
needed information I needed for my book and for actually
for a magazine story I did before the book, And
so you just sort of find your way through it.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Is there ever a situation, it doesn't matter whether it's
The Times or the Wall Street Journal, that you want
to do something and you check yourself. Do you say
to yourself, I don't want to bother pitching this idea
because they're probably going to say no, do your censor yourself.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
I don't quite censor myself. I would say that for
an idea to work, it has to be something that
people other than me are going to.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Be interested in.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
So I try to sort of edit myself, I guess,
rather than censor myself. Though I think it's also okay
to kind of go with the passion project now and then,
or try to go with a passion project. I probably
should try to do more of it. In fact, yeah,
I think it's harder.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
How did ESPN become the venue for the Bronx's Burning series.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Yeah, the book kind of moves back and forth between
the Yankee season and the year in the life of
the city. So they were interested in obviously in the
kind of the Yankee story, which is an amazing story
because it's kind of Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin are
just locked in this kind of you know, amazing like
duel over the course of the time. Yes, yeah, it
(21:51):
was some crazy stuff. And Reggie Jackson was this like,
you know, this kind of larger than life figure in
the city, and so is Billy Martin in his way.
So they were in did in the baseball story. Of course,
when they came to me to option it and develop it,
they also said, oh, we're going to you know, we're
interested in the city stuff too. All that kind of
I think kind of fell out along the way and
it really became a kind of a story of the
(22:12):
Yankee season with kind of the city and the kind
of against the backdrop of the city, you know, So
it was sort of half the book in a way,
I guess.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Then you had the movie adaptation of the Challenge and
that was in clooney Land or whatever it was. And
then what happened exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Yeah, well it never it sort of it died in
clooney Land, as I guess sometimes happens. Yeah, I don't
know exactly what happened. I know that there was a script.
Aaron Sorkin actually wrote wrote a script, right, and I
don't know quite what happened, but you know, they renewed
the option and then I guess for whatever reason, the
(22:47):
script didn't work out, and then it just kind of
somehow died.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So when you do this book, now, when you're doing
The Gods of New York, you use I mean, most
writers are very specific and very intentional with their words.
What was it that you felt the word gods applied
to these people? Why did you choose that word? Yeah, well,
it's funny.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
That's a good place to start because the title is
kind of a little controversial, because you could read this
as what, you know, are you calling you know, Donald
Trump and Rudy Giuliani gods? And I think the idea is, really,
I know, the ideas is the kind of the Greek gods,
the sort of the gods who can be vengeful, who
(23:26):
can be narcissistic, and so really the ideas just these
were larger than life figures who were elevated to this stature,
you know, by the kind of culture of the city,
by the tabloids, and so they kind of loomed over
the city like gods in a way. So it's it's
not it's very much not not a god in the
(23:48):
sense that they are all powerful, but rather that they're
these these kind of towering figures who are kind of
hanging over the city, you know, on their own kind
of mount olympus.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
It's a lot of the shots exactly. The picked that
specific time, which is interestingly, the last two years of
Reagan's second term and the first two years of Bush's
only term. Yeah, that eighty six through ninety Why that period?
Why did you home in on that? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I mean, you know, I sort of started with a
kind of a wider lens thinking about the eighties, and
then I kind of came to see that, you know,
I wanted to narrow the narrative down a little bit
just for storytelling purposes. I didn't want it to feel
like kind of a survey history of the eighties. So
and I felt like the story of those four years,
which which were really there, it's the story of really
(24:36):
Cotch's last term as mayor when when everything he's done
over his first two terms unravels and the city unravels.
And so many crazy things happened during this just this
four year period of time. I mean, from Howard Beach
to Black Monday, you know, the stock market crash, to
the Tauana, the crazy Tawana Brawley story, to uh use
(25:00):
Hawkins Jogger use of Hawkins. Plus it was the sort
of the AIDS crisis and and the birth and rise
of Act Up and this kind of whole new activist movement.
It was when Crack arrived in the city. It was
when you know, New York had its first black police
commissioner ever who was presiding over this unprecedented kind of
drug epidemic. It's when homelessness really became an issue in
the city. It was when Spike Lee May Do the
(25:23):
Right Thing, which is you know, kind of an iconic film,
and I really captured the city in this moment. It
just so many things happened in this four year window.
Plus I had kind of Cotch's final term as a
as a sort of a narrative spine that it just
felt like both from a you know, really from a
storytelling end, kind of a more Geshtalty perspective.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
It was like the right the right period, author and
journalist Jonathan Mahler. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we come back, Jonathan Mahler talks about the breaking
(26:05):
point New York City faces today and how it mirrors
that of the nineteen eighties. I'm Alec Baldwin and this
is Here's the Thing. Jonathan Mahler's most recent book, The
(26:27):
Gods of New York, chronicles how New York City dramatically
changed during the tumultuous years of the late nineteen eighties.
The book also details why he believes that period of
time served as a prequel for the New York City
of today. Talking to Maler Now in the aftermath of
(26:48):
an historic mayoral election, I wanted to know his thoughts
on Zoran Mamdani's unlikely political ascension and what his win
says about the current state of New York City.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Well, I think it certainly tells us that the city
is at a kind of a breaking point. I mean,
I think that this is in many ways kind of
the story of my book, right It's the story of
New York is emerging from the kind of dark days
of the seventies, the fiscal crisis. The subways are covered
in graffiti. You know, it's a disaster the city's and
a death spiral.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
And then it's.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Reborn in the nineteen eighties. And at the center of
that rebirth is Wall Street and is the real estate industry,
which kind of lives off of the Wall Street bonuses.
And you know, New York kind of goes through this
transformation and becomes the capital of global finance. But the
problem with that transformation is that a lot of people
are left out of it, a lot of people are
(27:40):
squeezed out of it. And you know, I think that
that cycle it sort of exacerbates over the course of
the decades since then, the wealth gap widens and you
get to a point of crisis now where you have
a you know, you have people who are making you know,
one hundred and forty thousand dollars a year, can't afford
to buy an apartment in a you know, in a
(28:02):
neighborhood they want to live in, and are kind of
struggling to live in the city, and then you have
people who are making a whole lot less than that,
who are on a waiting list to get public housing
for years on end. And so you know, it's maybe
that not surprising in that context that someone who is
really proposing much of it is not not realistic, but
(28:23):
still proposing you know, pretty radical policies here. I mean,
you know, and by radical I mean I don't mean
that in a negative cast necessarily, but big change, let's say,
and you know, from from doubling minimum wage to providing
free childcare for every New Yorker from six weeks to
five years. I mean that is a you know, the
(28:43):
idea that that's you know, a lot of money, A
lot of money, yes, a lot of money. I think
it speaks to really the sort of extreme income inequality
that's kind of become just like the fabric of the city.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Now. See, I wonder with holmlessness, you know, I mean,
when do we say to ourselves that it isn't working
the policy is, and then they have to be taken somewhere.
It could be decommissioned army bases or something in upstate
New York where you can get a shower and a
meal and get cleaned up and get I mean, or
do we just lay on the streets? Has laying on
the streets worked? I don't know. I'm looking for someone
(29:15):
to maybe help now.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Though, now, I mean, those are good questions to ask.
I mean, I tell the story actually in the book
of Really kind of the beginning of New York City's
homeless policy, which is kind of an amazing story. This
guy Bob Hayes, who was at the time a young
associate at a Sullivan and Cromwell, a kind of a
fancy white shoe law firm. You know, this is in
the late seventies, is you know, struck by all the
(29:37):
people he sees who seem to be kind of living
in Washington Square Park and on the streets. And because
this is you know, New York did not have a
homelessness problem per se until this period of time. I mean,
they were what we're called like bums and whinos on
the street the Bowery. Yeah, but you didn't have you
didn't have people sleeping on the streets. So this guy,
Bob Hayes, is sort of curious about this, and he
starts talking to them, and you know, he learns that
(30:00):
they're people who've found themselves on the street, either because
they were in a mental hospital that they were sort
of pushed out of, or they were living in a
single room occupancy hotel, a welfare hotel that they got
they got pushed out of, or you know, they found
their way to the streets and there was nowhere for
them to go. And so he decides he's going to
file a lawsuit on behalf of these people, these homeless people.
One of the plaintiffs literally lists his address as a
(30:22):
cardboard box on Park Avenue, and he is rooting around
in the NYU Law Library to try to figure out,
you know, how he's going to make his case. And
he finds a piece of legislation that was passed during
the Depression, that was sort of pushed by LaGuardia that
says New York State shall provide you know, care, housing
(30:46):
and care for the needy. And he's like, bingo, paydirt.
He adds that to the lawsuit. He's the guy that
honor he did.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Kach realizes that he's cooked, he's lost. He signs a
concree saying that he will do this, and suddenly the
city is desperately trying to house literally thousands of people
who are sleeping on the streets, and so the story
of homelessness kind of begins there. And I think in
the beginning there was the sense of like, Okay, well,
(31:16):
this is just a you know, we'll figure this out.
It's just a logistical issue. We just have to figure
out how to find homes for these people. And needless
to say, that did not happen, and forty years later,
we're still trying to figure out what to do.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
What does the next mayor need to do in terms
of we've been kicking the can on so many issues
in the city, and we've been you know, one day
you turn around, it seems like yesterday people were saying
the subway is great, and we've invested in the subway,
and the subways on time, everybody's love of the subway's
just really really humming along. And then it's like ten
years ago, by the like, the subway's a disaster. Whatever
you do, don't take the subway. I mean, obviously COVID
(31:52):
was a part of that whole episode, but I mean,
I wonder, what is the thing you think, Mom, Donnie Adams,
whoever that comes in what's the issue that we can
no longer forestall?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
I mean, I do think it's the affordability issue. I mean,
I think that this city, it can't be New York
City if it isn't giving people a foothold, if it
isn't giving people a chance, right, I mean, I feel
like I am all for endless opportunity, boundless opportunity in
this city. I think you should be able to come
here and get as rich as you can get, be
(32:24):
as successful as you can be. But I think it
has to also find a way to give people a foothold.
It has to give them some kind of leg up
to try to make it or I think it's just
going to lose so much.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
But we have to have a net. You got to
have a net for people. When I was a kid,
I'm an acting school at NYU, and I'm going and
then years go by and I understand that every maid,
every guy that works in a shop, every bus driver, everybody, cops,
even everybody's coming from somewhere else. New York is that
strange place where I went to GW and they taught
(32:59):
us when we took DC Culture and Politics, where they said,
this is a city where all the rich people live
outside the city. They go on the trains out to Virginia,
Super Virginia, Maryland and so forth. And it changed over
the years, and the Manhattan has always been, for the
large part, maybe with some lapses, the place where the
rich people lived in town exactly, and everybody else who
(33:20):
didn't have money lived out of town commuted. So we
have to make that work for them. I can't stand
to see people, even some I work with who work
take care of my home, struggling with their costs like that.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
What are you planning on doing next? You have another
book on the boiler nothing yet. I have to say
I wrote this book. It took me eight years, and
I was working full time at the Times throughout.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
It is very.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Difficult to write a book while working at the New
York Times. So I think, for a little while at least,
I'll just take a break from the book writing.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Because your wife, your editor.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
She yes, she does, she does, she always does. She's
the best editor.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Oh that's cool, that's cool. Yeah, Well, this book the
Gods of New York. I haven't read a book or
been aware of a book that's encapsulated the cauldron of
New York at that time. I mean, New York was really, really,
really tough. What's an excerpt that you favor?
Speaker 2 (34:15):
How about I'll start with this two paragraphs of my
introduction of ed Koch. At five point twenty five in
the morning on New Year's Day, Edward Irving Koch was
awakened in his king sized bed at Gracie Mansion by
the knock of a police officer on his door, just
as he had been nearly every morning for the past
eight years. He did not have a hangover, but he
(34:36):
did have a head cold. Still, no running nose was
going to keep him from enjoying the historic day ahead.
His historic day. In a matter of hours, he would
become the third person in modern history to serve three
terms as mayor of New York City, and he'd been
re elected in a landslide with seventy eight percent of
the city wide vote. Koch's success was a tribute to
(34:58):
him his w work, ethic and unerring political instincts, but
also to New York and really America. His father, Louis
nee leb, had arrived at Ellis Island in nineteen oh nine,
a Jewish child of peddlers from a dirt, poor hamlet
in the Austro Hungarian Hungarian Empire. He started as a
lowly pantsmaker in a Lower east Side sweatshop, even sleeping
(35:22):
for a while in the factory, and eventually built a
solid middle class life for his family in a leafy
section of the Bronx. His mother, Joyce nee Yetta, was
a Jewish immigrant from similarly humble roots who had come
to New York in nineteen twelve. She also worked in
the garment trade before they were married and had their
second child, Edward, in nineteen twenty four. Kotch had benefited
(35:45):
from the Cities and Countries Largesse, enrolling at the tuition
free City College of New York in Uptown Manhattan when
he was just sixteen before being drafted to serve in
World War II in March nineteen forty three. Three years
and two commondations later, he was back in the city,
living with his parents on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Instead
(36:05):
of finishing college, he went straight to New York University
School of Law courtesy of the GI Bill. At law school,
he fell in love with Greenwich Village, its inexpensive restaurants,
tree lined streets, and countercultural ferment. He was no beatnik
but he had progressive ideals. He took up folk guitar
and was involved in the Right to Sing Committee, which
(36:27):
campaigned against the ban on musicians performing in Washington Square Park.
He also fell in love with politics. Kotsch was now
running his own law practice, but at lunchtime during the
nineteen fifty two and fifty six presidential elections, he could
be found atop a soapbox on busy street corners extolling
the virtues of the Democratic candidate Adelai Stevenson. Derided by
(36:48):
Republicans as an egghead, he soon discovered that he was
a natural public speaker, shrill and nasal, but compelling and persuasive.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
I think it's interesting to me to read that. I'm
glad you read that because it highlights for me in
my lifetime in New York, how some mayors were mayors
who had a distinct personality. Yeah, and coach No one
had more personality, so to say, than coches. And some
of them I wonder if they survived, not because they
don't have any personality. You don't really know very much
about Adams other than he's a cop. That's true. Policies.
(37:21):
The Blasio was kind of in negative integers. In terms
of his personality, Bloomberg had a personality, but it was
always framed in dollar bills, in terms of his wealth,
his wealth, his smarts. I Bloomberg is an exceedingly bright
man and successful man, but that eclipsed everything in terms
of what we know. What was he?
Speaker 2 (37:40):
I mean, he had a profile, but not a personality
in a way, right.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Right, coach may be the last. Coach may be the last. No,
I can't think of anyone had a very bright personality anyway.
My thanks to you, the Gods of New York, a
great analysis of New York in eighty six to nineteen
ninety and my best to luck to you with whatever
you're gonna do next. Thank you so much, Alcol, so
much fun. My thanks to author and journalist Jonathan Maller.
(38:07):
This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin.
Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought
to you by iHeart Radio.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio. My guest today is a best
selling author and a staff writer for The New York Times.
Jonathan Mahler's first book, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning,
was adapted into a mini series for ESPN. His second book,
(00:23):
The Challenge, won the Scribes Book Award in two thousand
and nine. In the world of sports journalism, Jonathan Mahler
has been featured in the anthology book series The Best
American Sports Writing, and has received numerous journalism and media
awards throughout his career. Mahler's latest book, released this past summer,
(00:44):
is entitled The Gods of New York The Tumultuous Eighties
from Donald Trump to the Tompkins Square Riots. Raised in
Palm Springs, California, I was curious where Jonathan Mahler's fascination
with New York originated from.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
I was born in New York. Both my parents were
New Yorkers. My father was a working class Jewish kid
from the Bronx who you got himself into Bronx science
and went off to medical school, also in New York,
and was offered a job out in California at a
hospital out there, and you know, he had barely left
New York, and I thought he was like, well, this
is the dream, you know, moved to California, raised my
(01:22):
family out there. So we moved to Palm Springs, and
my mom hated it from day one and couldn't wait
to move back to New York and find you way
there for a while. I was there, really my whole childhood.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
I moved back.
Speaker 2 (01:35):
I was in college when they moved back, and they
actually made a deal because my mom was a smoker,
lifelong smoker, and my father's a doctor. My father said,
if you quit smoking, we'll move back to New York.
And then what happened next was that they moved back
to New York. My mom quit smoking. She was so miserable.
My dad said, please start smoking again. So she got
everything she wanted. She got to move back to New
(01:57):
York and continue smoking.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
What was it about New York that he he didn't
want to go, he wanted to stay.
Speaker 2 (02:03):
Well, he just you know, he was a workaholic, and
he was so devoted to his patients that he for
him his life was going to the hospital, seeing patients
in his office, making it a practice.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
He had a practice.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
He worked seven days a week, and so you know,
he had a little, a little snippet of time on
Sunday afternoon when he would sit by the pool and
you know, read a medical journal. So for him, it
was it worked out great. But my mom couldn't stand it.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
So it's interesting to me that you have written three books, correct,
The Box is Burning, Challenge, and then this book now
Gods of New York. They were born in New York,
but you're not a lifelong New Yorker. You know, a
big part of your youth was outside New York. What
is it about New York? Because I mean, we both
everybody has their opinions as to why do we stay? Yeah, yeah,
(02:49):
it's so challenging, it's so tough. Why do we stay? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (02:53):
It's funny because I grew up in California, but I
always felt like a New Yorker because both my parents
were in New Yorker. I'd rooted for the Yankees and
the Giants and the Knicks. Really from birth, inherited that
from my father, and we would come back every you know,
of every chance we got. My mom would bring us
back to New York, which was, you know, really every year.
I mean we'd come at least once, so I felt
(03:15):
always connected to New York. It was always like the
place where I should be.
Speaker 1 (03:18):
Living, I think.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
And by the time I got out of college, my
parents had moved back here, and so it became kind
of naturally the place to move. And once you kind
of settle in in New York, it's so hard to
leave if it worked for you. Yeah, exactly, particularly because
not only because it's so hard to sort of find
a way to make it work that once you do,
you don't want to give it up, but also because
(03:40):
New York is it's always changing. You know, you're always
going to new neighborhoods, discovering new neighborhoods, new restaurants. Your
life here, I feel like it doesn't feel static in
the way that it might in other places, so you
just don't get bored with it.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
I think, well, I think that if you have an
escape from New York, that makes everything a lot different.
If you can't go anywhere else, if you have no
other option, New York can be very very onerous in
that way of your spending the summer there in the
hot summer. But now for you, where did you go
to College of Northwestern? I went to Northwestern? Yea in Chicago,
And did you study journalism there?
Speaker 2 (04:12):
I studied English literature there actually, but I did start
working on the paper there, so that's kind of what
got me launched. So even though I was an English major,
I worked on the college paper.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Why, well, what attracted you to then? You know?
Speaker 2 (04:25):
I guess I feel like as I kind of worked
my way through college and started to think about what
I might want to do, I realized that the only
thing I knew I was like pretty good at was
thinking and writing. And then the idea of you know,
going out into the world and not spending all my
days kind of at a desk was appealing to me.
The idea that I might have a career kind of
engaging with people and thinking and writing reporting, reporting. Yeah,
(04:48):
so I thought I would maybe be interested in giving
it a try. So I did it at my senior
year really at Northwestern, and then I graduated and thought, well,
I'm going I'm going to give this a shot and
see how it goes. Moved to New York and try
to be a journalist and if it works out, great
and if it doesn't.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
How did it begin?
Speaker 2 (05:05):
My first job was actually at the McNeil LAIRR News Hour.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
How did you pull that off? How?
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I just applied for an internship there and remarkably was
able to get one, which I loved and you know,
sort of sad to see what's happening to public television.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
Now.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Of course that's a separate story, but I felt like
I wanted to I wanted to.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
Write how long were you there with them?
Speaker 2 (05:25):
I was there about six months, I think, so recall Yeah,
not very long, no, because it was an internship.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
It was just to get me. Well, what did you
pick up on that in terms of I mean, obviously
I liked both of them and I liked that show,
but it was among the starchiest news programs in my life. Yeah,
those guys were pretty old school. Did you absorb that? Like,
I'm here and what do they want from me?
Speaker 2 (05:47):
I mean what they wanted from me mostly was was
lunch orders.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
And coffee, but it was that face.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Yeah, I mean I think I occasionally, you know, contributed
some research to some stories.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Was basically the extent of my work.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
It was a real inter yeah, true internship, but I
mean those guys were amazing. I mean, Robert McNeil was
an inspiring figure just because he had been a foreign correspondent.
He had just he had this kind of gravatas, like
the kind of qualter Cronkite type gravatas, and he was
so cultured and so well read, and it was just
he was a certain kind of newsman that you just
(06:20):
felt like, Wow, that guy's amazing, Right.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
They took the obligation very seriously, totally. Yeah, Yeah, and
he loved it. Where do you go after McNeil?
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Lay?
Speaker 2 (06:29):
After that, I worked at the Wall Street Journal's wire service,
the Dow Jones News Service, and I was a wire
service reporter there. I mean a lot of people probably
even know what a wire service is, because I think
that them barely exist.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
They were these kind of news services that provided stories
to newspapers all around the world, and they worked on
a very kind of hyperactive schedule. Let's say, I mean
you were kind of writing all the time. Newsrooms would
have these little kind of teletype machines and they would
spit out these stories from the wire services, and they
would rip them off and use them ass copy in
(07:02):
their newspapers. So I did that writing about you know,
financial news for four years and.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
That was.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Yeah, Yeah, it was grueling, grouling.
Speaker 1 (07:14):
What about it made you stay? Well, that's a good question.
I was sort of moving up.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
I started as a real kind of general assignment reporter,
where I was I was really just writing. I'm essentially
rewriting press releases, you know, forty press releases a day.
And then I became a proper reporter and so I
sort of, you know, was able to kind of grow
a little bit there, even though I didn't really love
the job. So I was kind of looking for what
(07:41):
I wanted to do next at that point, and I
knew that I wanted to be writing less frequently and
longer stories. And I found my way. I started freelancing
for a newspaper, and then I kind of found my
way there on Staff, which was a Jewish weekly newspaper.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
Called The Forward.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yes, it's an amazing institution. I mean it's been around
for well over one hundred years, over one hundred and
fifty years. It was a you know, it was sort
of the newspaper for Yiddish speaking Jewish immigrants who came
to New York in the early twentieth century and you know,
a sort of a in the modern era. It was
kind of reinvented as an English language newspaper. So so
(08:19):
I worked there for a number of years and I
love that it was.
Speaker 1 (08:22):
It was great. I remember reading in the book that
you're Jewish and your wife Issima is not Jewish, although
you convinced her to have a Jewish wedding. And she
refers to the harrowing experience of you going to a
New England Christmas.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
That was in an essay I wrote. I think, yes, yeah, no,
she's a writer, she is an editor. So the first
Christmas I went to her grandmother, who's no longer with us,
but yeah, yeah, exactly. She had a little Christmas ornament
with my name on it, which was you know, it
was hard enough to be going to Christmas, but let
alone have an ornament with my name on it.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
Was christ You know, it's a very sweet gesture. But
I was. I was surprised how long went the forward,
How many years I.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Was there for?
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Five years? Wow, So you really build a foundation. I did. Well.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
It takes a while, you think, so, yeah, I don't
even believe me, right, Yeah, I guess in each of
these jobs, I felt like I was still learning and
kind of growing and you know, finding new things to do,
so I could stick around. And also because I was
sort of here in New York, there would have been
opportunities at newspapers around the country, But if I wanted
(09:24):
to stay in New York, it's harder.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
And the forward were you married when you did the
on the forward? That was after the forward?
Speaker 2 (09:29):
That was after Yeah. So then I actually was at
my next job where I met my wife, which was
at Talk magazine, but Tina exactly.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah. So, and Tina said she thought that it could
work if one for COVID and Harvey bailing out from
his financial commitment to the thing. She thought it was
a really worthy project. Did you agree? I did.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
I thought it was a great magazine. It really was
just starting out. I mean, I think in the end,
I started working there a year before launch, so to
me it feels like it was longer. But I think
that the magazine really only survived for two years. I
loved working for Tina.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
It was fun. I'd never worked at a glossy magazine.
It was a whole other world. Describe that it.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Was just so different. I mean, particularly because I, you know,
I was at a. I had come from this, you know,
weekly Jewish newspaper where basically if you took a source
out to lunch, that meant like splitting the cost of
a tuna sandwich. And then suddenly I met, you know, this,
this glossy magazine where you you know, you have a
proper expense account.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
You know, yes, you want exactly.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
You know, even even raw tuna.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
So it was wild.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
I think the idea was that it was obviously kind
of celebrity driven, but it was also literary and classy.
Speaker 1 (10:38):
And and fun.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
You know, I really enjoyed it, but it was coming
at the tail end of the age of the glossy magazine.
What was a story you wrote for her that you
that you enjoyed. I'll tell you what I remember, because
it's the one celebrity, real proper celebrity profile I've ever written.
It was when Ridley Scott was making Gladiator and I
flew over to London to profile Russell Crowe and to
(11:01):
write about the movie. I was in London for what
was in the end, I think an hour long interview
in Russell Crowe's hotel room. I was in London for
a week, kind of waiting to get the nod to
come over and interview, and he obviously had no interest
in talking to me. You know, it was kind of
an education I think in the kind of journalism I
didn't want to do, but you know, an experience like
(11:24):
I'm glad I had.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
But did he come around when you were with him?
Was he really for me? Was he? No?
Speaker 2 (11:29):
No, he was diffident the whole time. He had no
interest in being there. I'm sure he had been forced
to do it. And Ridley Scott was much better. Actually,
I then went out to La and he was he's
a salesman. He is a salesman, and I think he
was interested in talking about his movie. Russell Crowe was
not interested in talking about his performance.
Speaker 1 (11:47):
Yeah, I'll tell you.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
There was one other fun story that I did there.
There was a moment in time when the Hermitage Museum
in Saint Petersburg, Russia, had just made an agreement with
the Venetian Hotel, which had just opened in Las Vegas,
and they were going to send some of their art
over to the Venetian and so there was going to
be you know, there were going to be paintings from
(12:09):
the Hermitage in one of the world's most famous museums
in the Venetian Hotel as part of this agreement. So
I went over to Saint Petersburg and spent a few
days in the Hermitage and interviewed people there, and you know,
in the middle of winter, it was kind of just
an unbelievable city, just the most beautiful city. And then
from there I came back to the United States and
(12:30):
went to Las Vegas to the Venetian Hotel. So it
was the biggest kind of you know, contrast of reporting
trips you could possibly imagine.
Speaker 1 (12:37):
Yeah, you read talk how long really until it folded?
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Which was three years, I guess in the end, because
I started before launch.
Speaker 1 (12:44):
Yeah, then where do you go?
Speaker 2 (12:46):
That's when I sold my first book, which was Ladies
and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning. So I started writing
that book, and I also started freelancing for the New
York Times magazine. So I was sort of doing those
kind of in tandem for a little while until I
got my book done.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Why the book about the Bronx was your first book?
You've been writing for a while now, and you're going
to write this your first book.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Yeah, it was my first book. I mean, it goes
back a little bit to what we were talking about
before that. You know, New York had always had this
kind of mythic hold over me, you know, because my
father had.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
Grown up in both my parents had grown up in
New York. My father grew up in the Bronx, and.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
It was always, as I said, the place that I
was kind of supposed to be. I you know, I
had this kind of connection to it, but I also
felt like I didn't know it as well as I
wanted to, and I didn't know its history as well
as I wanted to. So, you know, when you're when
you're setting out, especially when you're setting out to write
your first book, you feel like I need a subject
that I know it's going to hold my interest because
(13:40):
this is going to be hard. And so it was
you know, New York, and you know New York in
the seventies, which was when I had my first kind
of when I first came here, my first images of
New York were really New York in that era, in
the seven yeah, exactly seven eight. And you stayed for
how long on that trip as a child, we would
come for you know, always a couple of weeks. We
would stay in an apartment that belonged to a friend
(14:03):
of my parents.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
Summertime.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Summertime, we would go to you know, I go to
Yankee Games. We would go to see you know, we
went and saw show Sweeney Todd. We would see shows
on Broadway. We would sometimes go to you know, Gilbert
and Sullivan Light Opera. We would go to Rockefeller Center.
We would just kind of do all the things you
do here. I just felt like I knew it was
a subject that had a kind of hold over me.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
Somewhat surprisingly, you maintain memories as a seven year old
I did. I mean just so interesting.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, I mean, nothing too detailed, but just you know,
almost like movie images that you sort of have a
vague recollection of, and like kind of a sense of
almost aesthetic memories in a way, especially with the first book,
I mean, you really don't know what you're doing. I
did so much research that didn't make its way into
the book. I talked to so many people, I read
so many books. I mean, in a funny way, a
lot of that material didn't appear in the book. But
(14:50):
you have to kind of master a subject in a
way to write a book about it, and that does
mean a reading widely and talking to people widely and
going way really beyond the subject of the book to
feel count yeah, like to just feel marinated in it
and to feel kind of comfortable a lot.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
You know, it's going to stay out, ye, going to
make the cut.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
No, No, that's exactly it. The book was sort of
partly about the Yankees from that year, nineteen seventy seven,
because that had been again this team I followed from
afar out in California, and I was kind of obsessed
with in the way that you are when you're a kid,
you become obsessed with sports teams. And then part of
the book was just about the city and the life
of the city, the nineteen seventy seven Blackout, the Son
(15:32):
of Sam, and these were just things that I as
I researched, I just got kind of more and more into.
It's the great thing about writing a book is that
you know, as you get to know a subject more
in a way, it becomes more captivating.
Speaker 1 (15:45):
It sort of pulls you in. Who was the imprint
for our Strauss and Jeru and how did you pull
that off? Getting a book published? Stuff?
Speaker 2 (15:53):
I wrote a propose, I had a good agent. I
rewrote the proposal a couple of times, and they bought it. Yeah,
and then they published my second.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
Book too, Author and journalist Jonathan Mahler. If you enjoy
conversations with intrepid writers, check out my episode with Lawrence Wrights.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
When people go into scientology, they don't you know, they
don't go into it because it's a cult. They go
into it oftentimes because they're looking for something such as well,
you know, sometimes they're spiritual seekers or they're you know,
you might be one of those people that goes down
in the subway and someone says, would you like to
take our personality tests? And you know, well, if we
see that you have a little trouble of communicating with people,
(16:35):
that's true, Well we you know, we can what you say,
we can help you with that. We we have a
course that can help you in your relationships. And the
truth is, oftentimes they can help. It's like going into therapy.
People do benefit from it. So this initial exposure to
scientology is often very positive to people.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
To hear more of my conversation with Lawrence Wright, go
to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Jonathan
Mahler details how his first book, The Bronx, is Burning
wound up becoming a mini series for ESPN. I'm Alec
(17:26):
Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing. Before joining the
staff at the New York Times, Jonathan Mahler was a
sports columnist for Bloomberg View. He then became a contributing
writer for The New York Times, where he covered everything
from baseball to politics. From Mahler, I wondered what it
was like transitioning from freelancing to full time staff writer.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
Actually, for a while I worked from home, and then
I rented an office for a little while in Dumbo
in Brooklyn, and I would go there every day and write,
and then eventually I went full time on staff at
the time, So they gave you a desk, they gave
me a desk. Yeah, Actually, now we don't even I
don't even have a dedicated desk. We have kind of
floating desks in the magazine for.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
The writers, and I, you know, I don't. You're still
working with them now, I am still there. Yeah. And
when you first walked into as I call it the
kremlin there to work at the Times, what was the
feeling you had. Did you feel the kind of halft
of that experience?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
Yes, definitely, and you know, initially the Times moved so
it kind of, you know, just a few blocks, but
it moved into this very kind of you know, beautiful
sort of modern building.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
You know, it's an amazing office. I mean, I love it.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
I love being in the building. I love being at
the Times. And it's like, you know, in particularly now,
I mean, you feel like the work that the Times
still does feels more important than ever and it's an
amazing workplace filled with just very smart, dedicated people.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
And you still feel when you first got there, you
felt you were with a very special crowd of.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
People totally from the beginning till the present day.
Speaker 1 (18:55):
I mean, it really is. It's a special place. Yeah.
Now when you write the book Challenge and you're immersed
in this, a Guantanamo correct Yeah, is one of the
big backdrops there, exactly. I've asked other writers who write
to kind of embrace difficult material. How do you manage
your feelings while you're doing some of this work? You
(19:15):
do ever get really really down and kind of overwhelmed?
Speaker 2 (19:18):
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that
you sort of learn and I don't even know if
you learn it, it just you learn it in the
way that it's just sort of necessary is a certain
degree of detachment. I think, not so much that you
become kind of inured to you know, what you're seeing
and hearing, but there's a sort of a pursuit of
(19:39):
a story. There's a kind of a mindset that I
think you get into when you're sort of on a
story and you're pursuing a story. And it's funny because
I think for journalists who sort of do this, you
don't even really think about it until you kind of
step outside and you know, you're asking a question like
that question, because it doesn't feel like you don't feel detached,
but it's what you have to do to to kind
(20:00):
of pursue the story and to not feel defeated by
it or crushed by it.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
You know.
Speaker 2 (20:04):
In the case of Guantanamo, I mean I think I
just you know, I spent some time down there. I
spent some time in Yemen because the sort of main
one of the main characters of the book was a
Yomeni detainey, and so I wanted to go over and
meet his wife and meet his family, and you know,
he was being held on Guantanama Bay with you know,
his future was very uncertain she had no contact with him.
(20:27):
I mean it was, you know, it was obviously, you know,
sort of powerful and sad to be kind of reporting
on it. But at the same time, I felt like
I had a job to do. I felt like I
needed information I needed for my book and for actually
for a magazine story I did before the book, And
so you just sort of find your way through it.
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Is there ever a situation, it doesn't matter whether it's
The Times or the Wall Street Journal, that you want
to do something and you check yourself. Do you say
to yourself, I don't want to bother pitching this idea
because they're probably going to say no, do your censor yourself.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
I don't quite censor myself. I would say that for
an idea to work, it has to be something that
people other than me are going to.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Be interested in.
Speaker 2 (21:11):
So I try to sort of edit myself, I guess,
rather than censor myself. Though I think it's also okay
to kind of go with the passion project now and then,
or try to go with a passion project. I probably
should try to do more of it. In fact, yeah,
I think it's harder.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
How did ESPN become the venue for the Bronx's Burning series.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Yeah, the book kind of moves back and forth between
the Yankee season and the year in the life of
the city. So they were interested in obviously in the
kind of the Yankee story, which is an amazing story
because it's kind of Reggie Jackson and Billy Martin are
just locked in this kind of you know, amazing like
duel over the course of the time. Yes, yeah, it
(21:51):
was some crazy stuff. And Reggie Jackson was this like,
you know, this kind of larger than life figure in
the city, and so is Billy Martin in his way.
So they were in did in the baseball story. Of course,
when they came to me to option it and develop it,
they also said, oh, we're going to you know, we're
interested in the city stuff too. All that kind of
I think kind of fell out along the way and
it really became a kind of a story of the
(22:12):
Yankee season with kind of the city and the kind
of against the backdrop of the city, you know, So
it was sort of half the book in a way,
I guess.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Then you had the movie adaptation of the Challenge and
that was in clooney Land or whatever it was. And
then what happened exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Yeah, well it never it sort of it died in
clooney Land, as I guess sometimes happens. Yeah, I don't
know exactly what happened. I know that there was a script.
Aaron Sorkin actually wrote wrote a script, right, and I
don't know quite what happened, but you know, they renewed
the option and then I guess for whatever reason, the
(22:47):
script didn't work out, and then it just kind of
somehow died.
Speaker 1 (22:50):
So when you do this book, now, when you're doing
The Gods of New York, you use I mean, most
writers are very specific and very intentional with their words.
What was it that you felt the word gods applied
to these people? Why did you choose that word? Yeah, well,
it's funny.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
That's a good place to start because the title is
kind of a little controversial, because you could read this
as what, you know, are you calling you know, Donald
Trump and Rudy Giuliani gods? And I think the idea is, really,
I know, the ideas is the kind of the Greek gods,
the sort of the gods who can be vengeful, who
(23:26):
can be narcissistic, and so really the ideas just these
were larger than life figures who were elevated to this stature,
you know, by the kind of culture of the city,
by the tabloids, and so they kind of loomed over
the city like gods in a way. So it's it's
not it's very much not not a god in the
(23:48):
sense that they are all powerful, but rather that they're
these these kind of towering figures who are kind of
hanging over the city, you know, on their own kind
of mount olympus.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
It's a lot of the shots exactly. The picked that
specific time, which is interestingly, the last two years of
Reagan's second term and the first two years of Bush's
only term. Yeah, that eighty six through ninety Why that period?
Why did you home in on that? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (24:14):
I mean, you know, I sort of started with a
kind of a wider lens thinking about the eighties, and
then I kind of came to see that, you know,
I wanted to narrow the narrative down a little bit
just for storytelling purposes. I didn't want it to feel
like kind of a survey history of the eighties. So
and I felt like the story of those four years,
which which were really there, it's the story of really
(24:36):
Cotch's last term as mayor when when everything he's done
over his first two terms unravels and the city unravels.
And so many crazy things happened during this just this
four year period of time. I mean, from Howard Beach
to Black Monday, you know, the stock market crash, to
the Tauana, the crazy Tawana Brawley story, to uh use
(25:00):
Hawkins Jogger use of Hawkins. Plus it was the sort
of the AIDS crisis and and the birth and rise
of Act Up and this kind of whole new activist movement.
It was when Crack arrived in the city. It was
when you know, New York had its first black police
commissioner ever who was presiding over this unprecedented kind of
drug epidemic. It's when homelessness really became an issue in
the city. It was when Spike Lee May Do the
(25:23):
Right Thing, which is you know, kind of an iconic film,
and I really captured the city in this moment. It
just so many things happened in this four year window.
Plus I had kind of Cotch's final term as a
as a sort of a narrative spine that it just
felt like both from a you know, really from a
storytelling end, kind of a more Geshtalty perspective.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
It was like the right the right period, author and
journalist Jonathan Mahler. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a
friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on
the iHeartRadio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we come back, Jonathan Mahler talks about the breaking
(26:05):
point New York City faces today and how it mirrors
that of the nineteen eighties. I'm Alec Baldwin and this
is Here's the Thing. Jonathan Mahler's most recent book, The
(26:27):
Gods of New York, chronicles how New York City dramatically
changed during the tumultuous years of the late nineteen eighties.
The book also details why he believes that period of
time served as a prequel for the New York City
of today. Talking to Maler Now in the aftermath of
(26:48):
an historic mayoral election, I wanted to know his thoughts
on Zoran Mamdani's unlikely political ascension and what his win
says about the current state of New York City.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Well, I think it certainly tells us that the city
is at a kind of a breaking point. I mean,
I think that this is in many ways kind of
the story of my book, right It's the story of
New York is emerging from the kind of dark days
of the seventies, the fiscal crisis. The subways are covered
in graffiti. You know, it's a disaster the city's and
a death spiral.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
And then it's.
Speaker 2 (27:19):
Reborn in the nineteen eighties. And at the center of
that rebirth is Wall Street and is the real estate industry,
which kind of lives off of the Wall Street bonuses.
And you know, New York kind of goes through this
transformation and becomes the capital of global finance. But the
problem with that transformation is that a lot of people
are left out of it, a lot of people are
(27:40):
squeezed out of it. And you know, I think that
that cycle it sort of exacerbates over the course of
the decades since then, the wealth gap widens and you
get to a point of crisis now where you have
a you know, you have people who are making you know,
one hundred and forty thousand dollars a year, can't afford
to buy an apartment in a you know, in a
(28:02):
neighborhood they want to live in, and are kind of
struggling to live in the city, and then you have
people who are making a whole lot less than that,
who are on a waiting list to get public housing
for years on end. And so you know, it's maybe
that not surprising in that context that someone who is
really proposing much of it is not not realistic, but
(28:23):
still proposing you know, pretty radical policies here. I mean,
you know, and by radical I mean I don't mean
that in a negative cast necessarily, but big change, let's say,
and you know, from from doubling minimum wage to providing
free childcare for every New Yorker from six weeks to
five years. I mean that is a you know, the
(28:43):
idea that that's you know, a lot of money, A
lot of money, yes, a lot of money. I think
it speaks to really the sort of extreme income inequality
that's kind of become just like the fabric of the city.
Speaker 1 (28:54):
Now. See, I wonder with holmlessness, you know, I mean,
when do we say to ourselves that it isn't working
the policy is, and then they have to be taken somewhere.
It could be decommissioned army bases or something in upstate
New York where you can get a shower and a
meal and get cleaned up and get I mean, or
do we just lay on the streets? Has laying on
the streets worked? I don't know. I'm looking for someone
(29:15):
to maybe help now.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
Though, now, I mean, those are good questions to ask.
I mean, I tell the story actually in the book
of Really kind of the beginning of New York City's
homeless policy, which is kind of an amazing story. This
guy Bob Hayes, who was at the time a young
associate at a Sullivan and Cromwell, a kind of a
fancy white shoe law firm. You know, this is in
the late seventies, is you know, struck by all the
(29:37):
people he sees who seem to be kind of living
in Washington Square Park and on the streets. And because
this is you know, New York did not have a
homelessness problem per se until this period of time. I mean,
they were what we're called like bums and whinos on
the street the Bowery. Yeah, but you didn't have you
didn't have people sleeping on the streets. So this guy,
Bob Hayes, is sort of curious about this, and he
starts talking to them, and you know, he learns that
(30:00):
they're people who've found themselves on the street, either because
they were in a mental hospital that they were sort
of pushed out of, or they were living in a
single room occupancy hotel, a welfare hotel that they got
they got pushed out of, or you know, they found
their way to the streets and there was nowhere for
them to go. And so he decides he's going to
file a lawsuit on behalf of these people, these homeless people.
One of the plaintiffs literally lists his address as a
(30:22):
cardboard box on Park Avenue, and he is rooting around
in the NYU Law Library to try to figure out,
you know, how he's going to make his case. And
he finds a piece of legislation that was passed during
the Depression, that was sort of pushed by LaGuardia that
says New York State shall provide you know, care, housing
(30:46):
and care for the needy. And he's like, bingo, paydirt.
He adds that to the lawsuit. He's the guy that
honor he did.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
Yeah. Wow.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
Kach realizes that he's cooked, he's lost. He signs a
concree saying that he will do this, and suddenly the
city is desperately trying to house literally thousands of people
who are sleeping on the streets, and so the story
of homelessness kind of begins there. And I think in
the beginning there was the sense of like, Okay, well,
(31:16):
this is just a you know, we'll figure this out.
It's just a logistical issue. We just have to figure
out how to find homes for these people. And needless
to say, that did not happen, and forty years later,
we're still trying to figure out what to do.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
What does the next mayor need to do in terms
of we've been kicking the can on so many issues
in the city, and we've been you know, one day
you turn around, it seems like yesterday people were saying
the subway is great, and we've invested in the subway,
and the subways on time, everybody's love of the subway's
just really really humming along. And then it's like ten
years ago, by the like, the subway's a disaster. Whatever
you do, don't take the subway. I mean, obviously COVID
(31:52):
was a part of that whole episode, but I mean,
I wonder, what is the thing you think, Mom, Donnie Adams,
whoever that comes in what's the issue that we can
no longer forestall?
Speaker 2 (32:03):
I mean, I do think it's the affordability issue. I mean,
I think that this city, it can't be New York
City if it isn't giving people a foothold, if it
isn't giving people a chance, right, I mean, I feel
like I am all for endless opportunity, boundless opportunity in
this city. I think you should be able to come
here and get as rich as you can get, be
(32:24):
as successful as you can be. But I think it
has to also find a way to give people a foothold.
It has to give them some kind of leg up
to try to make it or I think it's just
going to lose so much.
Speaker 1 (32:38):
But we have to have a net. You got to
have a net for people. When I was a kid,
I'm an acting school at NYU, and I'm going and
then years go by and I understand that every maid,
every guy that works in a shop, every bus driver, everybody, cops,
even everybody's coming from somewhere else. New York is that
strange place where I went to GW and they taught
(32:59):
us when we took DC Culture and Politics, where they said,
this is a city where all the rich people live
outside the city. They go on the trains out to Virginia,
Super Virginia, Maryland and so forth. And it changed over
the years, and the Manhattan has always been, for the
large part, maybe with some lapses, the place where the
rich people lived in town exactly, and everybody else who
(33:20):
didn't have money lived out of town commuted. So we
have to make that work for them. I can't stand
to see people, even some I work with who work
take care of my home, struggling with their costs like that.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
What are you planning on doing next? You have another
book on the boiler nothing yet. I have to say
I wrote this book. It took me eight years, and
I was working full time at the Times throughout.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
It is very.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
Difficult to write a book while working at the New
York Times. So I think, for a little while at least,
I'll just take a break from the book writing.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
Because your wife, your editor.
Speaker 2 (33:56):
She yes, she does, she does, she always does. She's
the best editor.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
Oh that's cool, that's cool. Yeah, Well, this book the
Gods of New York. I haven't read a book or
been aware of a book that's encapsulated the cauldron of
New York at that time. I mean, New York was really, really,
really tough. What's an excerpt that you favor?
Speaker 2 (34:15):
How about I'll start with this two paragraphs of my
introduction of ed Koch. At five point twenty five in
the morning on New Year's Day, Edward Irving Koch was
awakened in his king sized bed at Gracie Mansion by
the knock of a police officer on his door, just
as he had been nearly every morning for the past
eight years. He did not have a hangover, but he
(34:36):
did have a head cold. Still, no running nose was
going to keep him from enjoying the historic day ahead.
His historic day. In a matter of hours, he would
become the third person in modern history to serve three
terms as mayor of New York City, and he'd been
re elected in a landslide with seventy eight percent of
the city wide vote. Koch's success was a tribute to
(34:58):
him his w work, ethic and unerring political instincts, but
also to New York and really America. His father, Louis
nee leb, had arrived at Ellis Island in nineteen oh nine,
a Jewish child of peddlers from a dirt, poor hamlet
in the Austro Hungarian Hungarian Empire. He started as a
lowly pantsmaker in a Lower east Side sweatshop, even sleeping
(35:22):
for a while in the factory, and eventually built a
solid middle class life for his family in a leafy
section of the Bronx. His mother, Joyce nee Yetta, was
a Jewish immigrant from similarly humble roots who had come
to New York in nineteen twelve. She also worked in
the garment trade before they were married and had their
second child, Edward, in nineteen twenty four. Kotch had benefited
(35:45):
from the Cities and Countries Largesse, enrolling at the tuition
free City College of New York in Uptown Manhattan when
he was just sixteen before being drafted to serve in
World War II in March nineteen forty three. Three years
and two commondations later, he was back in the city,
living with his parents on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Instead
(36:05):
of finishing college, he went straight to New York University
School of Law courtesy of the GI Bill. At law school,
he fell in love with Greenwich Village, its inexpensive restaurants,
tree lined streets, and countercultural ferment. He was no beatnik
but he had progressive ideals. He took up folk guitar
and was involved in the Right to Sing Committee, which
(36:27):
campaigned against the ban on musicians performing in Washington Square Park.
He also fell in love with politics. Kotsch was now
running his own law practice, but at lunchtime during the
nineteen fifty two and fifty six presidential elections, he could
be found atop a soapbox on busy street corners extolling
the virtues of the Democratic candidate Adelai Stevenson. Derided by
(36:48):
Republicans as an egghead, he soon discovered that he was
a natural public speaker, shrill and nasal, but compelling and persuasive.
Speaker 1 (36:57):
I think it's interesting to me to read that. I'm
glad you read that because it highlights for me in
my lifetime in New York, how some mayors were mayors
who had a distinct personality. Yeah, and coach No one
had more personality, so to say, than coches. And some
of them I wonder if they survived, not because they
don't have any personality. You don't really know very much
about Adams other than he's a cop. That's true. Policies.
(37:21):
The Blasio was kind of in negative integers. In terms
of his personality, Bloomberg had a personality, but it was
always framed in dollar bills, in terms of his wealth,
his wealth, his smarts. I Bloomberg is an exceedingly bright
man and successful man, but that eclipsed everything in terms
of what we know. What was he?
Speaker 2 (37:40):
I mean, he had a profile, but not a personality
in a way, right.
Speaker 1 (37:43):
Right, coach may be the last. Coach may be the last. No,
I can't think of anyone had a very bright personality anyway.
My thanks to you, the Gods of New York, a
great analysis of New York in eighty six to nineteen
ninety and my best to luck to you with whatever
you're gonna do next. Thank you so much, Alcol, so
much fun. My thanks to author and journalist Jonathan Maller.
(38:07):
This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.
Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin.
Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is
Danielle Gingrich. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought
to you by iHeart Radio.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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