In Conversation: Michael Bloomberg

Entertaining and infuriating exit interview with New York City’s mayor, in which Bloomberg defends the rich, criticizes the current mayoral candidates, and trumpets his record across crime, education and quality of life:

A common theme in the campaign to succeed you has been that you’ve governed primarily for the rich.

“I’m fascinated by these comments—and it is just campaign rhetoric—suggesting that we haven’t done enough for the poor. The truth of the matter is we’ve done a lot more than anybody else has ever done. The average compensation—income—for the bottom 20 percent is higher than in almost every other city. Of course, the average compensation for the top 20 percent is 25 percent higher than the next four cities. But that’s our tax base. If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend, because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.

“Who’s paying our taxes? We pay the highest school costs in the country. It comes from the wealthy! We have an $8.5 billion budget for our Police Department. We’re the safest big city in the country—stop me when you get bored with this! Life expectancy is higher here than in the rest of the country—who’s paying for that? We want these people to come here, and it’s not our job to say that they’re over- or underpaid. I might not pay them the same thing if it was my company—maybe I’d pay them more, I don’t know. All I know is from the city’s point of view, we want these people, and why criticize them? Wouldn’t it be great if we could get all the Russian billionaires to move here?”

Published: Sep 9, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,130 words)

The NYPD Division of Un-American Activities

An excerpt from Enemies Within, a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman on the NYPD’s secret spying unit:

“Police collected the phone numbers and e-mail addresses from the website. One was for Agnes Johnson, a longtime activist based in the Bronx. ‘We were women and mothers who said, “We’re going to hold our money in our pocketbooks,” ’ Johnson recalled years later. ‘That’s all we called for.’

“Confirmation that the activities of the Demographics Unit went far beyond what federal agencies were permitted to do was provided by the FBI itself. Once, Sanchez tried to peddle the Demographics reports to the FBI. But when Bureau lawyers in New York learned about the reports, they refused. The Demographics detectives, the FBI concluded, were effectively acting as undercover officers, targeting businesses without cause and collecting information related to politics and religion. Accepting the NYPD’s reports would violate FBI rules.”

Published: Aug 25, 2013
Length: 22 minutes (5,701 words)

The Hollywood Blockbuster’s ‘Save the World’ Problem

Screenwriter-producer Damon Lindelof reveals the formula—and challenges—facing big Hollywood movies: How do you escalate with any shred of originality?

“‘Once you spend more than $100 million on a movie, you have to save the world,’ explains Lindelof. ‘And when you start there, and basically say, I have to construct a MacGuffin based on if they shut off this, or they close this portal, or they deactivate this bomb, or they come up with this cure, it will save the world—you are very limited in terms of how you execute that. And in many ways, you can become a slave to it and, again, I make no excuses, I’m just saying you kind of have to start there. In the old days, it was just as satisfying that all Superman has to do was basically save Lois from this earthquake in California. The stakes in that movie are that the San Andreas Fault line opens up and half of California is going to fall in the ocean. That felt big enough, but there is a sense of bigger, better, faster, seen it before, done that.'”

Published: Aug 6, 2013
Length: 13 minutes (3,391 words)

The Blip: Was America’s Economic Prosperity Just a Historical Accident?

We’ve witnessed more than two centuries of unprecedented economic growth, powered by two industrial revolutions from the 1700s to today. Robert Gordon, a 72-year-old economist at Northwestern, argues that this incredible period of growth was all a fluke—and we are entering a new era where there’s no guarantee our children will be any better off than we are:

“There are many ways in which you can interpret this economic model, but the most lasting—the reason, perhaps, for the public notoriety it has brought its author—has little to do with economics at all. It is the suggestion that we have not understood how lucky we have been. The whole of American cultural memory, the period since World War II, has taken place within the greatest expansion of opportunity in the history of human civilization. Perhaps it isn’t that our success is a product of the way we structured our society. The shape of our society may be far more conditional, a consequence of our success. Embedded in Gordon’s data is an inquiry into entitlement: How much do we owe, culturally and politically, to this singular experience of economic growth, and what will happen if it goes away?”

Published: Jul 22, 2013
Length: 18 minutes (4,644 words)

Ancient Gay History

Rich remembers Clayton Coots, a man who was his “surrogate parent,” and also one of the many closeted men and women who died before the cause of gay rights made such huge leaps in America:

“This history is not ancient. My own concern about its preservation comes not from some abstract sense of social justice but from my personal experience. I grew up in the Washington, D.C., of the sixties, where the impact of racism was visible everywhere, front and center in my political education. But gays—what gays? No one I knew ever saw them or mentioned them. Not until the eighties—when, like many Americans of that time, I was finally forced by the rampaging AIDS crisis to think seriously about gay people—did I fully recognize that a gay man had been my surrogate parent in high school, when I needed one most. Not that I ever thought to thank him for it.”

Author: Frank Rich
Published: May 29, 2013
Length: 19 minutes (4,840 words)

Welcome to the Real Space Age

Despite fears that NASA and the United States have given up on space exploration, the focus has simply shifted to private companies like Virgin and SpaceX, which are preparing for commercial space travel:

“This was the International Symposium for Personal and Commerical Spaceflight. It had been co-founded eight years earlier by a New Mexico State professor named Pat Hynes, who had been studying and advocating for the commercial potential of space for twenty years. She has watched the conference grow in size and influence alongside the industry. Now, the facility buzzed with engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs and astronauts. Sponsors included Lockheed Martin and Boeing, a European company touting its ability to ‘launch any payload to any orbit at anytime,’ and another company claiming the authority to sell plots of land on the moon. Hynes, ecstatic, inaugurated the conference by shouting a ‘Let’s rock this house!’ welcome, before introducing Michael Lopez-Alegria, a recently retired space-shuttle astronaut who spoke of his conversion from ‘skeptic with outright disdain for the idea of commercial space” to a “Kool-Aid-pouring believer’ in the private space industry.”

Author: Dan P. Lee
Published: May 20, 2013
Length: 32 minutes (8,219 words)

I Tried Gwyneth Paltrow’s Diet

A writer’s 10-day journey into the life of Gwyneth Paltrow:

“While making the meatballs, however, I can tell something is up. No. 1: They are green (they are made of arugula and turkey). No. 2: I can’t put them in tomato sauce because I have eliminated tomatoes from my diet. Instead, I am serving them with a broccoli soup that tastes mostly like water. What is going on? Yesterday was so amazing! When my guests arrive and I feed them the meatballs, I can tell that they hate them. One of them pulls out a huge bag of chips and starts eating them in front of me. Another one leaves to ‘actually eat dinner.’ I am about to have a panic attack when I suddenly remember when Gwyneth went to a dinner party in America and someone asked her what kind of jeans she was wearing and she thought to herself, ‘I have to get back to Europe.’ America is the worst. I say nothing about anyone’s jeans, even though I was literally just going to ask everyone about their jeans.”

Published: May 9, 2013
Length: 9 minutes (2,339 words)

In Conversation: Robert Silvers

The founding editor of the New York Review of Books looks back on 50 years:

Danner: “I’m holding here the first issue, which declares, in a statement on the second page: ‘This issue … does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones. Neither time nor space, however, have been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation, or to call attention to a fraud.’ This is the only editorial statement that you’ve ever made.”

Silvers: “That’s it! And that’s still what we try to do. We shouldn’t pretend to be comprehensive. There’s no point in reviewing a book if you can’t find someone whose mind you particularly respect. And even so, we have to turn down every month or so a piece we’d asked for. But I left one thing out of that editorial statement: the freedom of those people to reply at length, to make their case.”

Published: Apr 7, 2013
Length: 27 minutes (6,995 words)

Long Night at ‘Today’

Turmoil at NBC’s “Today” show: How the dismissal of Ann Curry set off a chain of events that led to a ratings slump and now questions about Matt Lauer’s future:

“The producers of Today are employing every trick they know to rebuild the family’s chemistry, retooling the set, fiddling with the mix of stories, going for more uplift and smiles. But the show is still haunted by what happened, and is still happening, offscreen, the internal struggles and animosities casting strange shadows. Matt Lauer smiles for a living, but offstage he has been obsessed with the situation, brooding about his ratings and his enemies while trying to put forward his own version of events. If Lauer is guilty in the hosticide of Ann Curry (he’s certainly not innocent), he’s far from the only guilty party. For all the smiles, TV hosts often get offed, for all sorts of reasons. As Hyman Roth said in Godfather 2: This is the business they’ve chosen.”

Author: Joe Hagan
Published: Mar 24, 2013
Length: 26 minutes (6,556 words)

Back on the Trail

Former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who left office in 2009 after revealing an affair with an Argentine woman, is now running for Congress—and he asked his ex-wife Jenny to run his campaign:

“According to Jenny, she had already told Mark she would be taking a pass on the race the day before, at the funeral of a mutual friend. So when Mark came to visit her, he arrived with a proposal. ‘Since you’re not running, I want to know if you’ll run my campaign,’ he said. ‘We could put the team back together.’

“Jenny told him, in so many words, that wasn’t going to happen. Mark made one last appeal.

“‘I could pay you this time,’ he said.”

Published: Mar 4, 2013
Length: 16 minutes (4,227 words)