IT training new york magazine TruePDF 18 march 2019

TV. Streaming. On Demand.


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raister
p.16

Terry Gilliam / Ta-Nehisi Coates / Paul Cadmus / Pluss: Donald Trump’s Speed Dial
March 18–31, 2019

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march 18–31, 2019

features

M A K E U P BY PA U L E T T E CO O P E R

Stacey Abrams, ____?
She isn’t the governor of
Georgia. So what should she
do next? Abrams is conflicted.
By Rebecca Traister
16

The Great Pod Rush
Has Only Just Begun
But now that Big Money has
its grubby hands on it, will
podcasting ever be the same?
By Adam Sternbergh
and Boris Kachka
22

AACK!
Cathy Guisewite broke through
the glass ceiling by creating
a character for whom
disempowerment was a way

of life. She’s still facing
down that paradox today.
By Rachel Syme
36

Stacey Abrams

Photograph by Dan Winters

3


intelligencer

the culture pages

9

65

What the president’s
compulsive phone
habits say about him
By Olivia Nuzzi
12

100-Person Poll
Strangers on the
street tell us how the
presidency will end

14

Politics
Ta-Nehisi Coates on
race relations and the
Dems in the Trump era
By Eric Levitz

the cut
40

Report From
the Shows
Goth boots, RBG,
primary-color pantsuits, and Cathy Horyn
on Karl’s swan song

strategist
47

Best Bets
Rocking chairs for a
younger crowd; a store
designed for big boobs
49

Look Book
The Parsons student
who summers
at a larping camp

50

Micro-Workouts
Forget abs and
quads—show
your ears and toes
some love
By Katy Schneider
and Simone Kitchens
56

Food
What to eat at Hudson
Yards; Platt on Rocco
DiSpirito’s second act;
elevated hot pockets

6 Comments
90 New York

C
b
ey
92 The Approval
Matrix

4 n e w y o r k | nymag.com

march 18–31, 2019

The Man Who
Was Almost Killed
by ‘Don Quixote’
Terry Gilliam’s 30
years spent tilting
at windmills
By Bilge Ebiri
70

The Painting Our
Art Critic Can’t Stop
Thinking About
Paul Cadmus’s atlas
of American violence
By Jerry Saltz
72

Lady Killer
Jodie Comer plays
the kind of assassin
you might like
to go shopping with
By Allison P. Davis
74

The Hunter
Becomes the
Hunted
A former critic,
and co-creator

of Beetlejuice
on Broadway, can’t
shake the fear
By Scott Brown
76

Critics
movies by David
Edelstein With Us,
Jordan Peele’s horror
syntax keeps growing
theater by Sara
Holdren Be More
Chill does high
school with knowing
wickedness
tv by Matt Zoller
Seitz Kingdom
is resonant
and disturbing
80

To Do
Twenty-five
picks for the next
two weeks

on the cover:
Photograph by
Bobby Doherty for

New York Magazine.
this page:
Terry Gilliam.
Photograph by Jim
Naughten for
New York Magazine.

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The Swamp


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Comments

PETER
BOGDANOVICH

IN CONVERSATION

The director on his films,
marriage and
infidelity, and the deaths
he didn’t mourn
By

ANDREW GOLDMAN

46 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 4 1 7 2 0 1 9

In New York’s latest issue, Simon van
Zuylen-Wood asked, “When Did
Everyone Become a Socialist?” (March
4–17). Susan Simon responded, “The

answer to your cover question … resides on
the cover of your [Hudson Yards] issue,”
which featured stories that portrayed the
new development as a gilded community
for the one percent. Of the socialism feature,
Armin Rosen wrote, “Man, this is good.
Really illustrates the weirdness of environments where everyone more or less thinks
the same.” Others took exception to the
focus of the story, which opened at a party.
Maya Kosoff tweeted, “A more honest and
incisive and less decadent story would have
been one about organizers in New York and
not media people at a party.” Emily Cameron
wrote, “The stereotypes of ‘the nearly allCaucasian DSA left’ depicted in this piece
give the wrong view of socialism. As a
25-year-old queer Latina and co-chair of
DSA Fresno in California’s rural Central
Valley, I can assure you that the DSA I know
1

is not a circus of ‘white, 21-to-36-year-old
Tecate drinkers’ on dating apps, listening
to podcasts, obsessed with BernieSanders.
I wish DSA chapters outside the media
bubble got attention. DSA is growing pre-

cisely because the left as a whole is growing.
The American left is complex, diverse, and
beautiful. That’s why we’re winning.” In the
story, van Zuylen-Wood explains that when

social theorist Michael Harrington founded
DSA in 1982, the “group occupied the ‘left
wing of the possible,’ a sensible enough
mantra that excited nobody and helped the
organization stay minuscule for decades.”
Harrington’s biographer and DSA charter
member Maurice Isserman, challenged
that assessment: “Harrington’s DSA was
6 new york | march 18–31, 2019

peter bogdanovich is often held up as a cautionary ta e of Holly
wood arrogance, Icarus with big frames and a nec
ief In a hurry
since adolescence, at 16 he talked his way into a
g classes with
Stella A ler; at 20, he persuaded C ifford Odets to him direct one
of his p ays Off Broadway; and he went on to b end and write
about the golden age movie directors he idolized, like Orson Welles,
John Ford, and William Wyler As soon as Bogdanovich became a
director in his own right, his
assurance didn t endear him to
some of the towns young aute
old egends I don t judge myself
on the basis of my contempo
s, he told the New York Times
in 1971 I judge myself against the directors I admire Hawks,
Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Welles, Ford, Renoir, Hitchcock I cer
tain y don t think I m anywhere near as good as they are, but I think
I m pretty good And so, as the story goes, Bogdanovich directed two
arguab y perfect films, The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, along

with the h t screwball comedy What s Up, Doc?, only to see his career
run aground after a ser es of flops But contrary to the legend, Bog
danovich never disappeared or stewed in defeat for long, and he as
enjoyed no fewer than three critical y hailed comebacks with Saint
Jack (1979), Mask (1985), and Cat s Meow (2002), as well as signifi
cant late career success as a documentarian, as with 2007 s Tom
Petty documentary, R nnin Down a Dream Bogdanovich has also
shown himself to be a surprisingly supple actor in such roles as The
Sopr nos shrink to the shrink, Dr Ell ot Kupferberg, and Netflix
recent y released a comp eted version of We less long unfinished The
Other Side of the Wind, in which Bogdanovich, n the th ck of his 70s
success, played a version of himself named Brooks Otter ake, a role
Wel es wrote to explore the fraught Oedipal themes of their own
relationship Now 79, Bogdanovich s noticeably frail as he recovers
from a fa l he suffered while at a French film festival, where he col
lected a lifetime achievement award; he shattered his
emur
We talk at a cluttered dining room tab e n the modest gr
floor
To uca Lake apartment he shares with his ex w fe Loui
ratten
and her mother Mid interview, a diminutive, grandmotherly
woman with a Dutch accent sneaks behind him through the tight
dini
oom on her way to t
itchen Bogdanovich mot
at my
copy
he Killing of the Un
n, the book he wrote abo

e 1980
mur
of his then girlfrien
layboy Playmate Doroth
ratten,
Lou
s ster Hide that bo
ill you? he requests Th
Doro
thy s mother Nelly Hoogstraten appears several more times to de
liver h m pi ls, to ask if he d like her to make coffee, to see when he d
like h s dinner Thank you, darl ng, he answers every time
Photograph by Robert Maxwell

founded in the midst of the Reagan Revolution, not exactly a propitious moment for
any left-wing group—reformist, revolutionary, or otherwise. Harrington deserves a
little credit for creating what proved to be
the institutional base for today’s muchexpanded DSA. Moreover, what is behind
DSA’s recent growth, if not a variant of
operating as the ‘left wing of the possible’? Isn’t that what Bernie Sanders repre-

sents? And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
They are working within the Democratic
Party to push it leftward.”
Chicago journalist Alex Kotlowitz
revisited a murder that exemplifies
why so many violent crimes go unsolved in
the city (“Ramaine Hill Bore Witness,”
March 4–17). J. Brian Charles called it an
“amazing read … on an unsolved murder in

Chicago and why the witnesses won’t testify. It’s not some code of the streets; it’s
fear,” and Gus Christensen added, “This is
a solvable problem in the richest country
in the world!” UCLA law professor Adam
Winkler wrote, “Kotlowitz’s harrowing
2

account of gun violence in Chicago highlights the absurdity of the NRA’s favorite
shibboleths, like ‘A good guy with a gun is
the only thing that can stop a bad guy
with a gun.’ By using guns to silence and
intimidate crime victims and witnesses,
the bad guys ensure that lawlessness rules
a community. People know they will be tar-

geted if they testify in court and, as a result,
only one in four murders in the murder
capital of the country is prosecuted. Police
know who most of the killers are. But without cooperating witnesses, the wheels of
justice simply don’t turn. The community
profiled by Kotlowitz’s insightful and reveal-

ing article may best be described by another
adage about guns, this one from the Wild
West: ‘The only law that matters is the law
you carry on your hips.’”
Peter Bogdanovich, that notorious
director of Hollywood’s last golden age,
held nothing back in his interview with
Andrew Goldman (“In Conversation: Peter

Bogdanovich,” March 4–17). Bill McCuddy
tweeted, “This you gotta read. Cher can’t
act. Burt Reynolds is a prick. The list goes
on. Really terrific. And sad in a few spots.”
Channing Thomson said, “This is fascinating. He made a handful of great movies
in the 1970s, but he strikes me as being an
odd personality who hindered his own success through word and deed.” And Philip
Concannon wrote, “There’s an Odd Couple–
3

style sitcom to be made about the time
Orson Welles spent living in Peter
Bogdanovich’s house.” Other readers were

less charmed. @TheIndieHandbk tweeted,
“Bogdanovich comes across as something of
a scumbag in this interview, as do at least
half the people he talks about. And all I
can think is, Man, maybe the people of
Hollywood deserve each other.” Susan
Braudy took issue with the director’s characterization of his ex-wife and collaborator
Polly Platt: “I arranged to meet Platt in the
late 1980s partly because so many of my
Hollywood friends told me she was instrumental in the making of Bogdanovich’s
early and best films. If Platt had outlived
him, she would be much kinder about their
collaboration. The record speaks for itself:
Bogdanovich did his best films working
with her.”
L Send correspondence to

Or go to nymag.com to respond to individual stories.



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PHOTOGRAPH: MARVIN ORELLANA/NEW YORK MAGAZINE

inside: How will the Trump presidency end? / Ta-Nehisi Coates on reparations and 2020

The Swamp:
Olivia Nuzzi
Trump’s Rolodex
His phone friends
may be more important
than his staff.
What’s that about?

shortly after news broke this month that Bill Shine would

resign as the White House communications director and deputy
chief of staff, a person knowledgeable about his decision told me
the former Fox News exec had come to understand the counterintuitive dynamic that defines many of Donald Trump’s relationships: Proximity can be meaningless, as those who have his ear are
often out of his sight. “When you talk to him at night, you’re gonna
have more impact than sitting in a room with six people,” the person said, referencing the president’s after-dark practice of calling
and fielding calls from a vast network of informal advisers.
Trump abides by what I call the “Groucho Marx Law of Fraternization,” meaning anyone choosing to be near him is suspect, while
everyone else gets points simply for existing elsewhere. “He always
kind of wants what he doesn’t completely have,” the New York
Times’ Maggie Haberman once said. “You are never more valuable
to Donald Trump than when you’re walking away from him.”
What explains this social idiosyncrasy? Obvious answers, like
march 18–31, 2019 | new york

9


intelligencer

self-loathing, don’t quite feel complete. But whatever the
psychological cause, the effect is manifest in at least one
thing: his compulsive phone habits. His Rolodex is a Greatest Hits and Deep Cuts composed of (mostly) friends, associates, media figures, and tycoons. Although Trump is known
to call senior members of his staff at all hours, his informal
advisers share a common attribute: They’re not there and,
therefore, they can’t be blamed when things are falling apart.
Their praise sounds less sycophantic and, therefore, more
compelling; the president seems to grant the calls coming
from outside the White House an inherent credibility. They
are also a welcome distraction, a link to his old life in Trump
Tower, when concepts such as “executive time,” a term used

by aides to make it seem like the president is doing something productive when he’s fucking around and calling TVshow hosts to gossip about ratings (a subject of intense interest for him, even now), were irrelevant.
Over the last two years, current and former officials from
his campaign and White House, as well as his friends and
acquaintances, have provided information about Trump’s
Rolodex to New York. One source almost literally provided
a Rolodex, sharing an internal document from the Trump
Organization with contact information for 145 employees
and 26 individual departments within Trump Tower. In the
White House, a similar document exists: The switchboard
operators maintain a list of cleared callers, a few dozen outsiders whose contact with the president was sanctioned by
Trump’s second chief of staff, John Kelly. The list includes
Eric Trump, Don Jr., Sean Hannity, Stephen Schwarzman,
Rupert Murdoch, Tom Barrack, and Robert Kraft.
And then there are the unsanctioned callers. Outgoing
calls from the Oval Office or the residence are unregulated,
learned of only after the fact from the call logs kept by
switchboard operators, while those to and from Trump’s
cell phone are unknown—a mystery to the official staffers,
who long ago abandoned any hope of controlling who the
president speaks to when they’re not around. And mostly
they’re not around. Those who couldn’t call the president
directly often went through Hope Hicks, Trump’s trusted
communications director, until she resigned last year.
Often, information has come through Rhona Graff, the
longtime gatekeeper of Trump Tower, who has served as a
channel for those seeking to quickly get a message to the
president outside the official communications structures.
As Roger Stone told the journalist Tara Palmeri in 2017,
Graff was the route for “anyone who thinks the system in
Washington will block their access.” Others to endorse this

plan? Gristedes’ John Catsimatidis.
Last month, Trump’s former personal attorney Michael
Cohen testified before Congress and confirmed that “Mr.
Trump” doesn’t email or text. In 2014, the journalist McKay
Coppins wrote that Trump still used a flip phone “because
he likes how the shape places the speaker closer to his
mouth.” But by the time he was running for president, he
possessed both an Android and an iPhone, from which he
lobbed countless tweets and instigated international news
cycles. In Team of Vipers, Cliff Sims, a staffer on Trump’s
campaign and in his West Wing, described how, on Election Night 2016, as everyone else anxiously watched the
returns, Trump was “casually” accepting calls from random
numbers and, at one point, yelled out for someone to “get
Rupert on the phone” (Murdoch later called to congratulate
Trump, who told him, “Not yet, Rupy,” according to Sims).
The first time I walked through the West Wing, a few weeks
10 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9

The President’s
Party Line

“The vast
majority, he just
picks up,” a GOP
senator who
regularly
cold-called the
president told
the Washington
Post. “If he

doesn’t … he’ll
return them
within an hour.”

after Inauguration Day, I was confronted by a large photo
of Trump talking on his unsecure Android hanging in a
stairwell. He continued using unsecure personal devices,
allowing Russia and China to spy on his calls, according to
the New York Times. (In response to the report, Trump
tweeted, “I only use Government Phones, and have only one
seldom used government cell phone. Story is soooo wrong!”)
Most profiles of Trump since the 1980s have featured a
description of him making a phone call or a phone conversation between the writer and the chatty subject. Marie
Brenner, in her seminal portrait of Trump’s Chumbawamba
era, “After the Gold Rush,” said one such conversation went
on for two hours. My first interview with Trump, in 2014,
was by phone, which isn’t in itself unusual; lots of interviews happen that way. What was unusual was how much
of Trump came through the receiver, a level of comfort that
suggested he was picking up a conversation with someone
he’d known for years rather than not at all. Normally, distance can create a barrier, but with Trump, it’s almost like,
by removing the distraction of his physical being, he can
become something approaching human. I wrote then that
his voice conveyed a surprising sadness.
In February, Axios obtained three months of Trump’s
unofficial daily schedules, revealing that for a staggering
average of 60 percent of each workday, or the period
between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., the president engages in “executive time.” But what happens after 5 p.m.? The president
usually leaves the Oval Office around seven. His dinners
rarely take place “off campus,” meaning off the White House
grounds. By eight, he’s watching Fox News in the residence,

and by the time Hannity ends, at ten, he’s on the phone,
often with Hannity himself, or with one of the other members of his external cabinet, or with just anybody else he
feels like talking to. Politicians in Washington—and their
family members—have spoken about receiving calls from
the president with almost alarming frequency. So many
calls that they interrupt woodchopping or interactions with
constituents or, in the case of one call between Trump and
Mitch McConnell, a Nationals baseball game. Trump will
call if he sees you on TV and likes something you said. Or if
he sees you on TV and hates something you said. He’ll also
call to try to change your mind or to try to get you to change
someone else’s mind. Or to chitchat about golf. “I just feel
comfort in calling President Trump,” Senator John Barrasso
said to the Washington Post. Lindsey Graham told Mark
Leibovich this is the most contact he’s had with any president. And Graham is still answering the calls, even though,
during an antagonistic period, the president once read Graham’s private cell number aloud onstage at a rally, forcing
Graham to change his number.
Former staffers, whom Trump rarely banishes completely
from the outermost sphere of his orbit, have told New York
about receiving unexpected evening calls from their old
boss. One former campaign official said that, after not hearing from him for months, the president rang to ask if it was
a good idea to send a certain tweet. The ex-official said he
had the impression everyone else had told Trump no and he
was searching for someone who might tell him yes.
One person who has received late-night calls from the
president told me this: “If you’re Trump, the last thing you
want is a moment of self-reflection. That’s why he’s constantly on the phone at night. Everybody’s afraid of themselves. People fear silence because they don’t want to hear
■
voices. But Trump really fears that.”

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Malte, 30, Nolita

After the second
term, he might
face justice.

Think he’ll win
reelection*

Leslie, 54, Soho

He’ll run but won’t be

elected. Maybe
he’ll resign and Pence
will become president
for ten minutes
and pardon him.

Mindy, 23, Midtown East

Loses the 2020 election (wins the
primary). Closely gets impeached but
voted down by Congress.

Jezoen, 48, Upper East Side

americans come
to their senses.

Jonny, 24, Flatiron

His broken presidency
will have motivated
high voter turnout. Several
decades from now, he
will be the reason our ys em
shifts aggressively left.

100-Person Poll:
How Will the Trump
Presidency End?

intelligencer

%

Simona, 21,
Bushwick

Runs again but
doesn’t win.
Has a breakdown
on Twitter.

Rajendra, 21, Elmhurst

I doubt that America
will make the
same mistake again.

Jess, 31, New Jersey

unless the
democrats
can come up with
a really
great candidate.

Myliyah, 22, Bushwick

The optimist in me
say he gets impeached,

but then we’re left
with Pence, which
worries me because he
ctually knows
about government.
Realistically, he runs
again but doesn’t win.

Susan, 21, Lower East Side

I wish he
could be dragged
out of the
country right now,
but most likely
he will run again
and lose.

Think he’ll run
again and lose
in 2020

%

With Nancy Pelosi recently taking impeachment off the table—leading to consternation
among some Democrats—and the completion of the Mueller investigation looking
imminent, the question of how Trump’s presidency will and should end has never been
more contested, and more unknowable. We canvassed 100 people on the streets of New
York—at the Oculus,Washington Square Park, and Union Square—to find out how they
thought this would end. Here’s what they told us. interviews by kelsey hurwitz and yelena dzhanova

Samuel Moyn Yale professor | Donald Trump is likely to lose if he makes it to November 2020—and everyone on both sides of the political spectrum should want him to do so. Not only is it

12 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9

Allan Lichtman American University professor | In a Washington Post interview on September 23, 2016, I predicted Donald Trump’s victory, using my forecasting system. I also
d our daughters.

predicted Trump’s impeachment. I stand by that prediction.

critical for the people themselves to throw Trump out of office, but getting him out some other way will reinforce suspicions that “the deep state” and elite forces rule in the place of democracy.


march 18–31, 2019 | new york

13

Yasmeen, 18,
Jamaica, Queens

truly feel like
he will be
impeached.

New York Magazine writer

Frank Rich

New York Magazine writer-at-large

A mix-and-match of the Nixon and

to erode Trump’s support, already

Mueller report will be worse than
we can imagine and will continue

and in all likelihood spend his
golden years in prison. The

certainly be criminally indicted

I no longer believe Trump will
resign, as I long believed he
would. At this stage, if Trump
leaves office, he will almost

Ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal

Tony Schwartz

by laziness and lies about the
wall. Massive opportunity
squandered. From now on, it will
just be photo ops and depositions.

As for the Donald Trump
presidency, it already ended, killed

I assume you’re referring to some

future Barron Trump presidency.

Columnist

Ann Coulter

of luck to his successor, President
Elizabeth Holmes.

2024, with a peaceful transition
of power. He wishes the best

Kristina, 29, Soho

This is unknowable, but my
sense is that the likely outcome
will be, in descending order:
(1) He’s impeached but acquitted
and wins reelection; (2) the 2020
election is close, the Democrat
wins, but Trump insists he
won anyway, won’t quit, leading
to federal marshals removing
him from White House amid civil
unrest; (3) a catastrophe in
foreign or domestic policy (like,
say, Katrina or Iraq) breaks
the base; (4) he loses badly to

New York Magazine writer-at-large

Andrew Sullivan

If Donald Jr., Jared, and/or
Ivanka get indicted, there is a
remote chance Trump could
resign in a deal to spare them.
However, that would be an act of
selflessness—something Trump
hasn’t evidenced in his first seven
decades on earth.

whichever Democratic candidate
wins the nomination. One caveat:

the worst of any modern
president, and he will lose to

Stephen, 64,
midtown

He’s over the
pressures.

The end, in descending order of
probability: (1) Walks away January
20, 2021, as Democrat takes oath of
office; (2) dies or resigns owing to
health; (3) walks away January 20,
2025, after serving eight years in

office; (4) resigns after cutting deal
to avoid prosecution.

New York Magazine columnist

Jonathan Chait

a better shot at reelection if
Democrats and the media obsess
about his daily outrage, most
recent tweet-insults, and his
personal corruptions and offenses.

we expose how Trump is serially
betraying the very people
he claims to champion.He has

The Trump presidency ends when
he’s voted out of office in
November 2020. But for that to
become a reality, it’s vital that

cuts, Federalist Society–approved
judges, etc.—within Trumpism.
The welfare chauvinism, mutant
nationalism, and Idiocracy-style
rhetorical cretinism are here to
stay as items of public consumption, even if the old tax-cutsand-tax-cuts Republican agenda
remains dominant. This will
be the case irrespective of what

happens to Trump, who has
only shown himself to be what
we knew him to be: the
opportunist nonpareil.

learned that they can pursue
their top policy priorities—tax

dragged off in irons, or humiliated in 2020. What seemed to be
an anomaly in 2016 has proved
to be a revelation. In the same
way that Trump understood
he could run what amounted
to a third-party campaign within
the GOP, Republicans have

In an important sense, the
Trump presidency is not going to
end—even if he is impeached,

Author of The Smallest Minority

Kevin D. Williamson

Robert, 33, Chelsea

After Trump learns that the
recently submitted Mueller
report includes his (scandalous)
tax returns and damning

information about his family’s
and the Trump Organization’s
finances, Trump abruptly
resigns (via Twitter, of course).

Jack, 45, Greenwich Village

Loses next election
and claims
election is hoax. Needs
to be removed.

Jordan, 38, Bushwick

Not sure; he hurts my soul.

Ryan, 21, Washington Square Park

Editor and publisher of The Nation

Katrina vanden Heuvel

a currently nonexistent
Democratic candidate.

Think he’ll
resign

Think he’ll
become a despot

1%

%

even bother
running

% Think he won’t

Have no
idea

%

Trump runs again
and wins, based off of wild
MAGA diehards
and Russian interference
… again!

Heidi Heitkamp Former U.S. senator | The Trump presidency will end in January 2025 unless we unite behind a vision of civility to and equal opportunity for all Americans.

The Trump presidency ends, in

Brian Feldman

drip of indictments, congressional
probes, and state investigations
will mean that his approval ratings

stay flat. He will run again because
Trump’s gonna Trump. This is all
subject to several frightening open
questions, however: Will there
indeed be free and fair elections?
Will this president accept the
result of those elections? And will
Democrats resist the urge to eat
their own faces off?

I believe that Trump will run again
in 2020 and lose. The slow drip-

Slate legal correspondent

Dahlia Lithwick

Agnew templates may apply.
If Trump is made to believe by
federal and state prosecutors and/
or Robert Mueller that he, his
business, and/or his crime family
face terminal legal consequences
the moment he leaves the White
House, he’ll make a deal to save
his ass (if not necessarily Donald
Jr.’s or Jared’s), declare himself
a winner, and fade into house arrest
at Mar-a-Lago as part of the grand
bargain. If the Vichy Republicans

en masse are made to believe
that the 2020 polls are their
obituaries foretold, they may finally
man up to help grease the skids.

We also asked 14 pundits, journalists,
academics, and activists to weigh in on how they see the
r
inistr tion en in

Think he’ll be
impeached and
convicted

%

in 2020 and have to
be deposed.*

% Think he’ll lose

It does not end—he changes the
laws and becomes dictator
with inspiration from his idols
Kim Jong-un and Putin.

*(2 OF THEM THINK HE’LL FLEE TO
RUSSIA AFTER HE’S DEPOSED)

Stacey, 35, Queens

Hopefully it
will just end.
Like Brexit.

What the Professionals Say...

P H OTO G R A P H : M A R K P E T E R S O N / R E D U X

Gina, 23, Greenwich Village

The Cheeto-head angers
a militia of people
who then try to attack
him. In the end he flees
the country to Russia.

Julius, 64, Jersey City

Best president I’ve
ever seen. His
administration knows
the problems of
America and the world.
Americans will suffer if
they don’t follow
him. He’ll be reelected.

Natalie, 20, East Harlem

*(1 THINKS HE’LL
DIE DURING HIS
SECOND TERM)

Cecile Richards Former Planned Parenthood president | The same way it started: with millions of women coming together to demand better for ourselves a
MORE PREDICTIONS

He’ll probably get reelected
and die halfway through.
He’s old and sucks.

beyond the capacities of my imagination—as was its commencement.

Patricia J. Williams Columbia Law School professor | I conceive of my work as facilitating a system of governance by rules. Alas, we live in unruly times. The end of the Trump presidency is thus


intelligencer

Politics:
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Is an Optimist
Now
A conversation
about race and 2020.
By Eric Levitz

14 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9

What do you know about American politics today that you didn’t know on the day
Donald Trump was inaugurated?

I think I underestimated the left’s
response to Trump. I definitely underestimated the Democratic Party’s response.
I get this rap for being pessimistic, but it’s
inspiring to see. It’s really inspiring to see.
You can certainly see that movement in
how mainstream Democrats talk about race
and
ns of criminal justice.
Tha
oe Biden and Kamala
Harris are two of the leading contenders
for the party’s 2020 nomination—both

politicians who embraced some version of
“tough-on-crime liberalism” earlier in their
careers. Is it possible for them to earn the
votes of those who value racial justice?

Let me start by stipulating that I’m
always gonna be the guy that did not think
we would have a black president in my
lifetime. You need to take that into consideration when you hear any sort of prognostication from me.
That said, Biden and Kamala are different. Biden is really popular right now among
black voters, but it’s worth remembering
that Hillary Clinton was really popular
Photograph by Cole Wilson


among black voters early in ’08, too. And I

think Biden has more than just criminaljustice baggage when it comes to race.
I do think the implicit point you made
about there being a separation between
African-American voters and AfricanAmerican activists is a real thing. I was very
concerned about how Obama addressed
black audiences during his time as president. But I don’t think it ever hurt him in
any sort of demonstrable way. And I think
there’s a similar thing with Kamala: The
idea of threatening mothers of kids who
miss school with jail, under the notion that
you ultimately want to help them? That’s
really, really chilling.
But whether black voters will be concerned about it, though—I am not yet convinced that voters are gonna be as concerned
about it as I would like them to be. But then
I never thought reparations would be on the
Democratic Party’s discussion table, either.
On that point: Democratic presidential
candidate Julián Castro has come out in
support of reparations and promised a commission to study the best approach. Many
progressive commentators have insisted
that that doesn’t count.

When I say I am for reparations, I’m saying I am for the idea that this country and
its major institutions have had an extractive
relationship with black people for much of
our history, that this fact explains basically
all of the socioeconomic gap between black
and white America, and that, thus, the way
to close the gap is to pay it back. In terms of
political candidates and how this should be

talked about and how this should be dealt
with, it seems like it would be a very easy
solution. It’s actually the policy recommendation I gave in “The Case for Reparations,”
and that is to support HR 40. That’s the bill
that says you form a commission; you study
what damage was done from slavery and
the legacy of slavery, and then you try to
figure out the best ways to remedy it. It’s
pretty simple. I think that’s Nancy Pelosi’s
position at this point.
There’s a whole line of thinking that says
the recommendation for a study is somehow like a cop-out or weak. I don’t really
understand why that would be the case.
Look, if you have a sickness, you probably
start with a diagnosis.
White supremacy is a suite of harms
operating on multiple levels across the
board. In the piece, I was dealing with
redlining. Criminal-justice questions come
to mind. There are education questions,
there a
s.
What
t
up and
years of damage. And there are small-d
democratic reasons for why you should be

starting with a study instead of a plan. Have
you talked to the community? Has the community thought much about it? Has there

been much interaction with the community
about how they would like to be paid back?
Allow me to play white moderates’
advocate. The strongest version of their
argument, in my view, goes something like
this: It is very difficult to pass laws that massively redistribute resources from those
who have a lot to those who have little.

The first thing I would say is that the perspective you just outlined—it’s not new. It’s
basically been the white liberal approach to
race and to black America literally since
emancipation. People forget, for instance,
that the Freedmen’s Bureau was not just
some sort of racial set-aside; they actually
had to do it for poor whites also. So my basic
answer to that is quite simple: When I look
at the track record of programs enacted in
that way, it is not heartening to me.
What I’ve found, particularly in studying
New Deal policy—but not just New Deal
policy—is that people are not fooled by the
fact that you’re trying to close the racial gap
by including more people or doing it in such
a way as to not explicitly say “black.” They
know your motive, they know your aims,
and they oppose it exactly in that manner. I
mean, that was Obama’s approach for eight
years. The folks who voted for Trump
weren’t fooled by it. They weren’t fooled by
the fact that Obama employed this “rising

tide lifts all boats” rhetoric.
That’s the one part of your argument
I’m not sure about. Without question,
reactionary forces have leveraged racism
to try to defeat, undermine, or racially
circumscribe universal programs—and
they’ve often had success. Yet in 2017,
Social Security single-handedly lifted 1.5
million African-American seniors out of
poverty, according to the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities. Without these benefits, the black elderly poverty rate would
have been 51.7 percent; instead it was 19
percent. And Donald Trump can’t touch it.
George W. Bush tried and failed.

Right. But the case for reparations is not
a case against universal programs. It’s a case
against universal programs as the sole, total
solution to this matter of white supremacy.
It’s not a case against the social safety net;
that should exist no matter what, right?
Race aside, that stuff should exist. But I
think about my great-grandparents: It’s nice
that, at this point, we have a Social Security
program we would support, but the price of
that was my great-grandparents not being
e. I can’t in my mind
all worked out in the
end. Do you understand what I’m saying?
Absolutely.

That was fucked up how it was passed.
Period. And that doesn’t mean we throw it
out right now, but it means that we’re mindful, going forward, in how we design social
programs. I am deeply scared of any attempt
to close the wealth gap, to ameliorate the
broad socioeconomic disparity in almost
every field between blacks and whites in this
country that avoids talking about why those
disparities are there to begin with.
I take it you’re not 100 percent satisfied
with the way Democrats are talking about it.

You know, I am not shocked or even disappointed when those moderates basically
use “rising tide lifts all boats” rhetoric to
address race. But part of why I always considered myself a product of the left was
because that was the place where you could
try to reimagine society. And in 2016, we
had the most serious left-leaning presidential candidate I’d seen since I was a kid and
Jesse [Jackson] ran. But I have to say,
unlike in Jesse’s campaign—which supported reparations—there isn’t the same
level of consciousness of that history in
Bernie Sanders’s.
And to see a candidate like Senator
Sanders just hand-wave reparations away
like it’s nothing, who says, “I think there are
better ways of dealing with this than writing a check.” There’s nothing wrong with
writing people checks! Especially to those
who have had their checks taken from
them. Let’s start there. So it’s hard to have

a left-wing candidate who is pushing the
boundaries on almost everything else, but
when it comes to race—I have a hard time
distinguishing his policies from Obama’s.
None of this makes Bernie a racist, and
none of it is an endorsement of the unspecific, vague reparations talk I’ve heard from
Kamala Harris. But I think it’s fair to question whether Bernie, and more importantly
the people around him, even understand
the illness they think they can treat through
class-exclusive solutions.
There are left-wing critiques of reparations that I appreciate. But the point of
reparations is to destroy white supremacy, not displace its emphasis, not integrate black people into its most acquisitive functions. It’s to question and assault
the entire paradigm.
It seems to me that what might set you
apart from both moderate and Marxist critics of reparations is actually your optimism—
about what’s possible in a democracy or
what storytelling can make possible.

I just don’t have another choice. I just
don’t have another choice. I don’t know how
I go and look my mom in the face. I don’t
know how I go and look my son in the face
and ask him to accept permanent second■
class citizenship of black people.
march 18–31, 2019 | new york

15


Stacey

Abrams,
?
Governor (The job she wanted most.)
Senator (The job Chuck Schumer wants her to run for.)
Veep (The job another white guy might want her for.)
President ( )

The Georgian who is usually sure about everything
finds herself conflicted about her future.
By

rebecca traister

16 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9

Photograph by Dan Winters



podcast Why Is This Happening?, sold
out immediately after it was announced,
and in the hours before it starts, tickets
are going for hundreds of dollars on the
resale market. Abrams can see her excited
fans, but they can’t see her.
The hush isn’t unfriendly—she pulled
me off the street into the car, after all—
but it is disconcerting, simultaneously
intimate and slightly awkward. I’m dying
to ask some questions in these extra,

unscheduled minutes I’ve been granted
with my subject, whose time these days
is extremely limited. But I’ve known
Abrams for a few years; I’ve been in her
company often in recent months; I’m
familiar enough with the vibe in the car—
the “We’re being quiet now” vibe—that I
know better than to break the silence.
This is the same Stacey Abrams who, a
few weeks earlier, had deployed her winning gap-toothed smile and rousing rhetoric to break the curse of wretched State
of the Union responses. Her speech following the president’s was so effective
that even Fox News analyst Brit Hume
grumbled that she was “a person with a
lot of presence, [who] certainly speaks
very ably and well,” while his colleague
Chris Wallace noted that, in contrast to
network fave Donald J. Trum
e
seemed to get more to what peop
are like in the reality.”
Since concluding her 2018 campaign to
be Georgia’s governor—refusing to con18 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9

cede in a race marred by voter-suppression
tactics and won by Republican Brian
Kemp, Georgia’s former secretary of State,
who’d held on to his job managing the
election despite being a candidate in it—
Abrams has been busier than ever. She
and her team have filed a federal lawsuit

and launched an organization called
Fair Fight to challenge Georgia’s entire
electoral system; Lauren Groh-Wargo,
Abrams’s former campaign manager and
the CEO of Fair Fight, has compared the
suit to Brown v. Board of Education in the
scope of the injustice it aims to remedy.
Abrams has also recently published a
widely circulated essay about identity
politics for Foreign Affairs; shared a
stage with Ava DuVernay in California;
appeared in an ad touting Fair Fight during the Super Bowl; and been a guest on
Late Night With Seth Meyers, BuzzFeed’s
AM2DM, and NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t
Tell Me! On March 26, Picador will publish a new edition of her memoir–slash–
advice book, Lead From the Outside.
Everywhere she goes, she is surrounded
by people pulling at her sleeve, asking for
selfies, some trembling with nervousness,
some hollering “You’re my governor!”
across airport waiting areas. I heard one
woman exclaim, backstage at Late Night,
“I can’t wait to vote for you for president!”
Then there are the instances, as at the
Power Rising Summit for black women in
New Orleans in February, when a large

audience simply begins chanting, without
specificity, “Run, Stacey, run!”
Back in the car, Abrams takes an audible breath before opening the door and

greeting the whooping crowd with a
smile. That wordless transition between
private and public existence distills one of
Abrams’s many contradictions: She is a
serious introvert, yet her work requires
glad-handing extroversion; she is excruciatingly aware of the electoral challenges
that face her as a black woman who grew
up what she calls “genteel poor” in rural
Mississippi, yet she pushes forward politically with the drive and confidence of a
white man; she devours romance novels
and soap operas, yet she is also a sciencefiction, math, and tax-law geek; she can
come off as one of the most relatable politicians out there, yet she is a total egghead
who drops million-dollar vocabulary
words, once sending me to the dictionary
to confirm what panegyric means (I
mostly got it through context!). And she
is a woman who, having just run in a historic election that many of her fellow
Democrats expected her to lose, is now
being counted on to win, and perhaps
save her party, by prevailing in an equally
difficult Senate contest, or maybe the race
for the presidency. The deepest irony, of
course, is that what Abrams wants to do
is fundamentally rebuild the electoral system that failed her, just as the system
itself wants to pull her in.

P R E V I O U S S P R E A D : M A K E U P BY PA U L E T T E CO O P E R

am sitting in a car with former Georgia
House Minority Leader and recent gubernatorial

candidate Stacey Abrams. She’s just invited me in
from the cold outside Manhattan’s Gramercy
Theatre—where she’s soon to go onstage for an
interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes—but
Abrams is signaling in some ineffable way that
she’s not in the mood to talk. She’s checking her
phone and, every once in a while, peering through
the tinted windows at the long line of people hopping up and down in the February chill and in
anticipation of seeing her. The event, for Hayes’s


abrams’s penchant for silence may
occasionally make her seem sphinxlike,
but she is mischievous and wry with those
close to her. Once, one of her staffers and
I were marveling at the vast menagerie of
taxidermied animals at a gas station we’d
just left, when Abrams interjected, “They
stuff everything, including what you hit
with your car. Welcome to southern Georgia: Waste not, want not.” Backstage at
Late Night, I watch her fussing with her
special assistant, Chelsey Hall, about
what to wear on-air. Hall, whom colleagues describe as “basically Huma,”
presses her boss, 16 years her senior: “Stacey Yvonne Abrams. Put. It. On.” Abrams
grumps off to change.
Many have used the phrase “real deal”
to describe Abrams. “Donald Trump is
the warm-up act for the real deal: Stacey
Abrams,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer told the press in advance of her

State of the Union response. Afterward,
billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer
picked up the thread, tweeting, “Stacey
Abrams is the real deal.
Now everyone in America
knows it.”
The suggestion that
there is something inherently real about Abrams is
worth its weight in political gold in a media environment where the murky
assessment of authenticity
has become a precious
commodity that few
female candidates are
thought to possess. As a
45-year-old black woman,
she’s certainly part of the
real Democratic base:
African-American women
have long been the most
reliable Democratic voters
and organizers, though
you wouldn’t know it from
how rarely their priorities have been
addressed by party leadership, let alone
how rarely they’ve been provided the
financial and institutional encouragement to, you know, lead the party.
But when pundits, and even regular
people, talk realness, they’re talking
optics as much as anything. And some of
Abrams’s traits—her occasional social

stiltedness, her insistence on keeping her
natural hair, her self-described “sturdy”
body type—make her simultaneously
stand out and blend in, at least among
those Americans who aren’t used to seeing anyone who looks and sounds like

them up on the podium. “I’m not normative,” Abrams likes to say about herself,
citing her “race and gender and physical
structure, the way I approach things.”
Nonnormative as she may be, Abrams is
an almost old-fashioned Democrat, with
her ideological (and personal) roots in the
civil-rights, labor, and women’s movements. Her parents, a librarian and a
dockworker, both of whom would later get
divinity degrees and become pastors, were
civil-rights activists from Hattiesburg,
Mississippi. As an undergraduate, she was
trained as an organizer at the A. Philip
Randolph Institute of the AFL-CIO; she
gave her State of the Union rebuttal in an
Atlanta union hall.
A graduate of Spelman College, with a
master’s in public policy from the University of Texas and a law degree from Yale,
Abrams worked as a tax attorney and
deputy city attorney for Atlanta before
being elected, in 2006, to the Georgia
statehouse. She assumed the minority
leadership position—becoming the first

even a democratic socialist. Yes, she talks

forcefully about the chasm of economic
inequality in the United States, the moral
bankruptcy of a system that treats poor
people as if they don’t deserve the dignity
of health care or a functional social safety
net. During a Q&A after a Fair Fight rally
in Albany, Georgia, Abrams tore into
what she says is the underlying message
of state Republicans’ opposition to Medicaid expansion: “If you’re too poor to get
health insurance, it’s your fault. That is
not true, and that is not right … We live in
a state that has a minimum wage of $5.15
an hour.”
But while Abrams supports raising the
minimum wage to about $15 an hour in cities like Atlanta, she’d stop short of a statewide increase, explaining that Georgia’s
history of resistance to unions has kept
wages so low that a blanket hike would be
too much of a shock to the economy.
“I’m not going to do class warfare; I
want to be wealthy,” she tells the far-fromwealthy crowd at the Fair Fight rally.

The irony is that Abrams
wants to fundamentally
rebuild the electoral system
that failed her, just as the
system wants to pull her in.
black woman to lead either party there—
in 2011. In the midst of her legal and
political career, Abrams has published
romance novels (under the name Selena

Montgomery) and founded several businesses, including one that made
formula-ready bottles for babies and
another that helps small companies get
paid more quickly by buying their invoices.
Abrams ran on unapologetically leftfor-Georgia stances on gun control,
criminal-justice reform, health care, and
education. But her progressivism isn’t
completely in sync with today’s cuttingedge policy ideas—she’s not a socialist or

“You’ve probably got aspirations about
that too.” Many in the room nod in
recognition.
Where Abrams is the most passionate
is in her willingness to rumble over
remaking electoral systems that are
rigged to deny the country’s most vulnerable their only real route to civic power. It
may not be as sexy as free college, but it’s
definitely radical— and as Abrams likes to
point out, without full enfranchisement,
we’ll never get elected officials who’ll back
policies that materially improve the lives
of people who aren’t well off and/or white.
Even before voter suppression (argumarch 18–31, 2019 | new york

19


ably) kept her from the governor’s mansion, Abrams was obsessed with the question of who was being counted.
In 2013, she founded the New Georgia
Project, a nonpartisan group whose goal

was to reach into the state’s poorest corners to register its more than 800,000
qualified-but-unregistered voters. And it
is those long-overlooked new voters who
get at least part of the credit for her pathbreaking performance in November:
Abrams won more votes than any Democrat in Georgia history.
The success of her long game—despite
her failure to gain the office she sought—
is what has prompted everyone from
Schumer to assorted passersby to offer
their view of what she should do next.
Schumer is pressuring her hard to run
against the vulnerable Republican senator from Georgia David Perdue (she jokes
about the daily calls she’s been fielding
from “friends of Chuck”), assuming that
she has the best chance of nudging the
party along the precarious path to taking
back the Senate.
Meanwhile, activists and commentators
are imagining her role in the 2020 presidential race. During her SOTU response,
former Obama adviser and Pod Save
America dude Dan Pfeiffer tweeted, “Stacey Abrams should run for president.”
There’s also been online rustling about
how Abrams would make the perfect nota-white-guy vice-presidential foil for any
one of the white-guy presidential
hopefuls. Biden-Abrams? Or
how about Sanders-Abrams? On
the Intercept, Sanders enthusiast Mehdi Hasan wrestled with
his guy’s relative senescence by
sketching out a scenario in which
Sanders would agree to serve

only one term and pick as his
running mate Abrams, who,
Hasan pointed out, “is black
(check), a woman (check), progressive (check), and unites the
various wings of the Democratic
Party like no other politician in
the United States.” Check!
Many who’ve known Abrams for years
aren’t surprised by her ascent. The Times
journalist Emily Bazelon, who attended
Yale Law School with Abrams, remembers
one class in which they were “two of the
only women who raised our hands with any
regularity,” and also “that she was
son we all thought had a future i
… Her magnetism and ability were that
evident.” Ben Jealous, the former president
of the NAACP and himself a recent—and
20 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9

unsuccessful—gubernatorial candidate, in
Maryland, met Abrams when they were
training to be youth organizers. Last year,
he posted a photo of them together at 18,
recalling that back then “she told me … she
would be the first black governor of Georgia. I told her I believed her.”
That is the job Abrams wanted more
than anything. But it’s the one she can’t
run for right now, which leaves her with
some major decisions to make: Should

she risk the four-year wait for another
shot at the Georgia governor’s mansion?
Try for a Senate seat that was never part
of her plan? Or maybe take a bigger, earlier leap for the presidency, which she’s
unashamed to admit she’s long set her
sights on … just nowhere near this soon.
abrams is the second of six children.
Her elder sister, Andrea, is an anthropology professor in Kentucky; Leslie, just 11
months Stacey’s junior, was appointed in
2014 by President Obama as a U.S. District
Court judge in Georgia; Richard is a social
worker in Atlanta; Walter, who attended
Morehouse, struggles with drug addiction
and has been incarcerated; and her youngest sibling, Jeanine, is an evolutionary biologist who has been working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Stacey taught herself to read chapter
books by age 4, according to her family,
after Andrea got sick of reading to her.
She counts among her childhood favorites

Abrams says the spreadsheet
of goals she started 25 years ago
allowed her to “dare to want.”
books by the Brontës and all of Dickens;
she read Silas Marner at age 10.
“Basically, what kids were forced to
read when we got to high school, I’d read,”
she recalls. Later, she attended a
performing-arts school where she gravitated to chemistry, physics, and math.
(She also took guitar, but retains only the
ability to strum “anything by Van Halen.”)

After a high-school friend gave her a
novel by the black feminist writer Octavia

E. Butler, Abrams developed a passion for
science fiction. She’s a Trekkie who will
authoritatively rank series—“The Next
Generation and Voyager are about even; I
think Voyager is mildly superior, although
Picard is the quintessential captain. Then
I would do Discovery, Deep Space Nine,
and Enterprise. I don’t understand why
Enterprise was a show.” These days, she’s
into Doctor Who, having grown up on the
Tom Baker version. “Right before this
Photograph by Andres Kudacki


Abrams meets with supporters
at the Sonesta Gwinnett
Place in Georgia in February.

campaign started, I was sick and ended
up watching the Doctor,” she says. “Then,
over New Year’s, there was a marathon.
Now I’m watching all the new ones. I’ve
seen seasons three, four, five, six, and I’m
in the second half of seven.” Abrams
watched three episodes of Doctor Who to
chill out the afternoon before she gave her
State of the Union response.

Abrams’s precocity, and her impatience
with the less advanced, wasn’t always
greeted warmly. “I had a tendency to try
to help other children move faster, which
you’re not supposed to do. You’re not supposed to tell them the answers.”
With Abrams I’m reminded, as I have
been in encounters with several other
female politicians in recent years, of the

painful scene from Broadcast News in
which a crotchety old news executive
taunts Holly Hunter’s type-A heroine, “It
must be nice to always think you’re the
smartest person in the room!”
No, Hunter replies with despair: “It’s
awful.”
It was, perhaps, particularly awful for a
black girl in a predominantly white elementary school in Mississippi. “Stacey
may have read on the same level as the
teachers,” her sister Leslie recalls. “And she
wasn’t shy about correcting you. She was
never rude, but she’d say, ‘This is silly.’ It
was: ‘What is the purpose of this finger
paint? When I go home I’m reading Nancy
Drew. So why am I reading Dick and
Jane at school?’ ” Leslie laughs. “But you

couldn’t punish her for being smart! And
she wasn’t a bad child. So the teachers
were like: ‘Will you go do something useful then? Go make copies!’ Stacey made a

lot of copies.” That meant she spent a lot of
time with adults, like her principal, and
less time with her peers, whom she studied with a kind of distant curiosity.
“I was born trying to figure out why
other kids were just playing in a circle,”
Abrams says. “What are you doing in the
circle? Duck, Duck, Goose? What is the
goose supposed to do? You could be organizing; you could be producing products
that are for sale. You have a circle, but how
are you utilizing it?”
As an adult, Abrams made a conscious
decision not to hide (Continued on page 84)
march 18–31, 2019 | new york

21


THE GREAT

POD
RUSH
HAS ONLY

JUST

U

With 660,000 shows and 62 million listeners already,

1

How Podcasts
Learned
to Speak

The once-useless-seeming
medium that
became essential.
BY ADAM STERNBERGH

when you first heard about podcasts, do you remember how excited you
weren’t? Do you recall the first person
who said, “Did you know you can now
download audio files of people talking?”
To which you might have replied, “Talking
about … what?” To which they might have

22 n e w y o r k | m a r c h 1 8 – 3 1 , 2 0 1 9

replied, “About … anything!”—at which
point you realized that podcasts seemed
like radio but more amateurish, which
wasn’t the most compelling sales pitch.
I’m going to guess you’ve listened to a
podcast since then, maybe even a few. And
I’m going to guess that you’ve even become
obsessed with one or two. There are now
an estimated 660,000 podcasts in production (that’s a real number, not some comically inflated figure I invented to communicate “a lot”), offering up roughly
28 million individual episodes for your
listening enjoyment (again, a real number;

yes, someone counted). The first two seasons of the most popular podcast of all
time, Serial, have been downloaded 340
million times. In podcast lore, the form
was born in 2004, when the MTV VJ
Adam Curry and the software developer
Dave Winer distributed their shows Daily
Source Code and Morning Coffee Notes via

RSS feed. Or maybe it was really born in
2005, when the New Oxford American
Dictionary declared podcast the Word of
the Year. Or maybe it was born in 2009,
when abrasive stand-up Marc Maron
started his podcast, on which he interviews
fellow comedians and other celebrities in
his California garage, debuting a disarmingly intimate and bracing style that culminated in a conversation with Louis C.K.,
named by Slate four years later as the best
podcast episode of all time. Or maybe it
was born in 2015, when people realized
that Joe Rogan, a former sitcom star and
MMA enthusiast, had a podcast, The Joe
Rogan Experience, which started, in his
description, as “sitting in front of laptops
bullshitting” and was now being listened to
by 11 million people every week. Or maybe
podcasts were born way back in 1938,
when Orson Welles proved that a seductive voice could convince you of anything,

ERIC ISSELŽE/LIFE ON WHITE

the century’s first new art form is about to enter its corporate stage.