Five years ago, my wife, Susan, and I launched Platform Books LLC to share books and writing and to develop websites. We started by devising a Virtual Attic and over time added two others with background and perspectives on projects as they evolved in print, online, and audio.
The concept emerged as I ended my association with PublicAffairs, the publishing company I founded in 1997, which is now an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. Susan was serving as chair of CIVIC — Center For Civilians in Conflict and advising NGOs, including BSF — the Barth Syndrome Foundation , supporting research and a community about a rare disease affecting boys.
The books we have published are for sale everywhere in bookstores if you ask for them to be ordered and directly from online book retailers. My Substack, Peter Osnos Public Affairs Press , is free to subscribers, with revenues from a paid option donated to CIVIC and BSF.
Our thinking was that over the past half century, the method of delivering information, personal letters, photographs and mementos, reporting, news, and commentary have been transformed completely by the internet. Preserving all these artifacts and finding the ways to add to them in new forms was the objective, rather than allowing them to disappear or be discarded.
Also changed were the financial models that made distributing information possible and sustainable for everyone in the chain. Print advertising, the mainstay of so many publications, was disappearing. To support media in all forms subscriptions and memberships have become essential. Substack is one of the major innovations and the most widely read pieces attract significant sums for the writers.
Our plan was to learn to use traditional and emerging technologies in our work across the evolving platforms. “Platform” was the name I adopted for the media columns I started writing at the Century Foundation in 2006, (before the term became so ubiquitous). What were known then as blogs became posts, memes, and content. To me they are still pieces, columns, and narratives.
Going forward, Platform Books LLC intends to continue operating in all the available formats. What exactly that means will depend on our whims, curiosity, energy and resources.
I am asked regularly if I am retired. I call this period of work life repositioning: using time to do the things Susan and I want to do rather than what we have to do. Both of us are amazed at the schedule we had for almost thirty years as we raised our family in Greenwich, Connecticut, an hour or more from our offices in midtown Manhattan by train or car. Weekdays began around 5 am and ended, usually, seventeen hours later in what was a relentless cycle of activity.
Familiar?
Those days are definitely over, replaced now by work-from-home and time spent observing our family’s successes and challenges.
Here are the addresses of our three websites and a list of the people who have supported Platform Books LLC for these five years and counting:
https://anespeciallygoodview.com
https://thegardenofmemory.com/
Editorial: Paul Golob
Web Design: Deena and Matthew Warner
Graphics: Maryellen Tseng and Alex Baker
Managing Editorial: Christine Marra
Publishing Partners: Rivertowns Books and Harvard Business Review Press
Book Distribution: Louisa Brody, Two Rivers Distribution
Thanks to all for the help and commitment.
Contact: info@platformbooksllc.net
Thank you to the reader who pointed out that in 1972 The Washington Post did not endorse Richard Nixon (as I wrote ) or George McGovern. Here is the editorial explaining that decision as it appeared on November 5, 1972. Page B6
After reading this editorial, I was relieved to have been wrong and to again assert that editorials are opinions and you may or may not agree with them. What counts is the news and on that matter, the reader who pointed out my error, said with emphasis, now is not the time to cancel the Post. And for emphasis an exclamation point was added!
Year-end recaps are a seasonal feature. I want to write about two subjects I have dealt with before, adding comments reflecting how I think these issues have continued to evolve:
(1) The ignominious end of Joe Biden’s presidency.
After Joe Biden’s campaign for a second term collapsed and Donald Trump’s subsequent re-election as president, I wrote a piece headlined “So Long, Joe,” making the point that presidential legacies tend to change over time and that Biden was not necessarily destined to be remembered primarily for the way his presidency ended. More recently, I published a piece called “Our Vulnerable Presidents,” noting that every president since John F. Kennedy has, one way or another, left office dead, defeated, or diminished.
The political and personal consensus on Biden has been especially harsh, not including a diagnosis of aggressive cancer. Vituperation has been consistent across the media spectrum, and bipartisan, including Kamala Harris’s memoir of her election defeat, in which she assails the way she was treated as vice president.
Biden’s worst perceived offense was his insistence on running against Donald Trump when he was demonstrably incapable of fulfilling the demands of another term.
So, here’s an additional comment. Despite having received the largest number of votes of any presidential candidate in history, from literally the day of his inauguration Joe Biden was on a downward curve of respect. I considered it the universal Biden “shrug.” Legislative accomplishments, surprising midterm election results, parrying Trump’s relentless campaign of lies and insults — none of these ever gave him a popular lift.
A man proud and ambitious enough to have been in national politics for fifty years plainly chose to defy the narrative of his failings rather than acquiesce and announce his retirement. He was probably also hearing from his advisers that the naysayers were wrong about him. There was a tug of war between Team Biden, which thought it deserved a second term, and virtually the entire media and political establishment. By the time of his disastrous debate performance, Biden was exhausted, physically and I suspect spiritually.
Biden definitely was a loser in the end. By now there is no doubt that with the reelection of Donald Trump, so was the country. (Trump is now falling asleep in meetings, listening to his cabinet tell him what an amazing man he is.)
(2) The Washington Post in the Bezos era has lost its way, so cancel it.
Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, when it was in financial freefall, resurrected it for some years, and then for a variety of business and personal reasons has let it slide, while he concentrates on his passions for space exploration and his new wife.
There was particular criticism when Bezos revamped the Post’s opinion section to better align with what he said were his own beliefs and joined the tech elites in their obeisances to Trump.
On the matter of the Post’s editorial page positions, here are two things to remember about the Post during what is now considered its ascent to national prominence. In the 1960s, as the Vietnam war escalated, under the executive editorship of J. Russell Wiggins, the newspaper was such a staunch a supporter of Lyndon Johnson’s ultimately tragic pursuit of victory that in 1968 Johnson named Wiggins as his last ambassador to the United Nations.
And as the 1972 presidential election approached, and months after the Post began its historic coverage of Watergate — arguably its greatest achievement — the Post endorsed Richard Nixon for reelection, one of 668 newspapers across the country to do so. Only 38 newspapers endorsed the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, who lost in a forty-nine-state landslide victory for Nixon.
I have written about the Post twice this year. In “Jeff, You Own the Post. Pay For It.” ( I argued that as the owner and with his enormous resources Bezos should be doing everything possible to support the Post as a business and to maintain its indispensable role in delivering the news so essential to our democracy.
I also wrote “You Too Can Be a ‘Star,” making the point that the “stars” now leaving the Post for what they considered better options meant that there is room for newcomers to achieve stardom, by doing great work as their predecessors did.
I have never judged news organizations by their editorial-page opinions, or else I would have stopped reading the Wall Street Journal years ago. I rarely agree with its editorials, but I have always admired its news sections — and by the way, the Journal’s weekend book review pages are excellent.
The Washington Post’s news coverage is impressive in depth, range, and quality. To cancel a subscription, as so many readers have done because of their antagonism to Bezos, is a mistake when news of consequence is, let’s agree, not all that easy to find on social media and television news programming, which are now dominant as sources of infotainment. The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Economist are all holding their own, and I contend so is the Post, which appears in full 365 times a year.
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Ubiquitous criticism made Joe Biden more defensive than he might otherwise have been.
And disparaging the Washington Post in my view encourages Jeff Bezos’s indifference.
In both cases, the more I thought about these subjects, the more I believe certain public attitudes and actions have been corrosive, contributing significantly to the overall sense of living in extremely troubled times as we close out 2025.
Back in January.
Whenever I reflect on my four decades in publishing I am amazed (choose your own reaction) that I was responsible for Trump’s autobiography in 1987, and Vladimir Putin’s life story called “First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self Portrait by Russia’s President” in 2000.
I contend professional exculpation in having also published Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father” a half dozen books and memoirs by ex-President Jimmy Carter and two Bill Clinton books, among many other honorable notables of distinction.
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To my handul of subscribers when the Russian invasion of Ukaine started in February 2022, I described a book PublicAffairs published called “First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Portrait” by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin” just after he succeeded Boris Yeltsin as the leader of post-Communist Russia. Here’s that story, again.
At my suggestion, three Russian journalists arranged to conduct twenty-four hours of open-ended interviews with Putin – this at a time when real questions could be asked. The transcripts became the book, along with a remarkable trove of personal photographs that were all credited “Courtesy of Vladimir Putin.” Those here have been copied from the book. One of the best is this one with Toska the family’s pet poodle at their dacha.
I wondered whether anyone would discover the book as a means of understanding the Vladimir Putin who has just eradicated the world’s belief that a brutal territorial war would not be a factor in the twenty-first century as it has been in the past. Carlos Lozada, The Washington Post’s excellent nonfiction book critic did just such an appraisal this weekend, drawing on First Person and other Putin writing. It is a invaluable addition to the news flow.
My approach to the book is different. Yes, there are hints to be found of what he thought two decades ago that have new resonance in the light of current events. For instance, Putin said that the Kremlin’s devastation of the breakaway province of Chechnya was essential to prevent other parts of the former Soviet Union from seeking political independence from Russia. His discussion of NATO reflected a deep sense that Russia was being demeaned, as perceived losers usually are. The book is still available to buy. There is even an ebook version.
The most striking parts for me are the photographs, like this one with his parents, and the vivid description of Putin by his wife, Lyudmila; his daughters, Masha and Katya; his friend Sergei Roldugin, a musician who calls him “Vovka”; and his early colleagues in the KGB, where Putin was employed before going into politics. He came from an ordinary Russian family and pursued what he considered a patriotic career, with some prospect of adventure. Judo was his determined athletic activity.
“Sometimes,” said Roldugin, who stayed friendly with him after he joined the KGB, “Vovka and I would go to the Philharmonic after work. He would ask me about the proper way to listen to a symphony. If you ask him about Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, he can tell you a lot because he loved it terribly when he first heard it and I explained it to him. And then Katya and Masha took up music. I’m the one to blame for that.”
Putin’s wife, Lyudmila, was a stewardess. The interviews with her reflect a measure of warmth as she watched her husband rise in the KGB ranks while she ran what seems like a conventional household.
She describes how she and Putin met, “My girlfriend and I flew to Leningrad for three days. She was also a stewardess on our crew, and she invited me to the Lensoviet theater to a performance. . . . She had been invited by a boy but was afraid to go by herself, so she invited me along. When the boy heard that she was inviting me, he brought Volodya.” (Another diminutive of Vladimir.)
The courtship was protracted: “I spent three and a half years courting him!” she said.
“One night we were sitting at his house,” Lyudmila remembered, “and he began, ‘You know what kind of person I am by now.’ . . . It sounded to me like we were breaking up. But then he said, ‘Well, then, if that’s the way it is, I love you and propose that we get married.’ . . . Three months later we were married. We had our wedding on a floating restaurant, a little boat tied up at the riverbank.”
Putin divorced her in 2014 and took up with younger women including, it was reported, a star ice skater.“Lyuda,” as he called her during their marriage, and his daughters are thought to be beneficiaries of the billions Putin has profited from being Russia’s president.
But in 2000 he said, “Lyuda is still basically running the finances, and I won’t start now. I’m not very good at saving money.”
So, how did this book come about?
At the millennium, on December 31, 1999, Boris Yeltsin, exhausted from the decade he had spent reinventing Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, resigned as president and named Vladimir Putin, then his prime minister, as “acting president.” Putin was elected to the position a few months later.
At the time I was finishing work on Yeltsin’s book Midnight Diaries and was visiting him at his dacha outside Moscow. Also present was his literary agent, Andrew Nurnberg, and his close adviser Valentin Yumashev, effectively Yeltsin’s chief of staff. Why did you choose Putin? I asked. Because, Yeltsin said, he was the only one of the would-be successors who was not a lackey. That is as close an explanation of what happened as we are likely to get. There was certainly no process described. Yeltsin said that he considered Putin tough enough to handle a country that, incredibly, had gone through a largely bloodless revolution but was still reeling from the upheaval.
And Clinton was also very tall…..
The next morning, Yumashev joined Nurnberg and me at breakfast at the former KGB guest house where we were staying. We were the only guests, attended on by a large and attentive staff.
“How can Putin introduce himself to the world?” Yumashev asked us. “Should he write a book?” After all, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader and Yeltsin had done so and been published around the world.
No, I said, because no one would believe he actually wrote it while running the country. Instead, it was then I proposed that three prominent journalists interview him with no conditions, and PublicAffairs would publish it as a form of self-portrait. Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov were recruited. I never met them, but found their biographies on the internet this week. It would be interesting to talk to them now.
When the transcripts arrived, PublicAffairs retained Catherine Fitzpatrick, a Russian specialist who had worked at Human Rights Watch to translate them, and the book was edited by Kate Darnton of our staff. I asked Kate what she recalled about the process. She said, “I do remember when you were advocating for us to publish it. Nobody knows about this Putin guy, you said, people need to know who he is. I remember giggling at the photos. How absurd they seemed. . . . Totally goofy in its overblown machismo.” The world has now come to know Putin’s favorite shots of himself – bare chested and on horseback and in various other manly poses. No more shots like this:
First Person was published as a paperback, and the reception was generally positive, reflecting the fact that Russia seemed no longer to be a threat to the United States or to the West in general. In retrospect, the most perceptive review was by Robert G. Kaiser,a former Moscow correspondent, a colleague of mine from my Washington Post days. He wrote, “The ideal leader for Russia in 2000 would be a resourceful and courageous figure who could help his countrymen understand and appreciate what a free Russia could be. . . . Measured against this standard, sadly, Vladimir Putin appears on the compelling evidence of this volume, to be the wrong man at the wrong place at the wrong time.” To read the full review search Robert G. Kaiser, Vladimir Putin.
The book came and went, as so many do, which is why reading it now – almost twenty-two years later – is so striking. Vovka, Toska, Lyudya, Masha, Katya framed against the persona of a man committed to unrestrained war on Ukraine, with all the mayhem that entails.
First Person is truly astonishing. This picture from the book of Putin in his KGB uniform shows the young man becoming what he has turned out to be.
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So what are we to make of these two autobiographies now? The basic life details could probably withstand factchecking -birthdates etc.. But while Trump’s book had much evidence of self-aggrandizement and Putin’s book did reflect his attraction to authoritarian institutions, neither of these accounts were declarations of the powers they intended to amass in two great nations and exercise with such brutality and, so far, impunity.
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On September 11, 2001, Zohran Mamdani was nine years old.
On January 1, 2026, he will become mayor of New York City.
A great deal has happened in the nation’s largest city in the last quarter century. Mamdani’s ascension is surprising, dramatic, and with vast and unpredictable impact.
OK, there was Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg, Bill DiBlasio, and the weird reign of Eric Adams. But the persona of Mamdani and the enthusiasm that led to his victory set a new standard in city politics. Richard Kim, the editor-in-chief of The City, a leading metro news organization, told me that in the 2021 election, only 11 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 bothered to turn out.
In 2025, that age group, the future, voted at 43 percent, which was the basis of what was a landslide.
I qualify as bona fide New Yorker. When I was a child, my parents lived in the Belnord on the Upper West Side, the setting for the hit series Only Murders in the Building. So many decades later, I know less about New York City’s politics than I do about how the news gets covered in this metropolitan region of about twenty million people.
I am also aware of the closest comparison to Mamdani as a phenomenon, Barack Obama. In 2002, he was a forty-one-year-old Illinois state senator who had been defeated in a 2000 congressional primary race. In 2008 he was elected president of the United States.
A much larger electorate, but very similar enthusiasm, elevated that man of color and charisma. Obama did serve two full terms in a presidency completely free of scandals.
But when he left office and in retrospect, Obama himself and a majority (I am convinced) of his supporters were disappointed and frustrated. Worse yet, the rebound on the national scene was the election of Donald Trump.
By the very nature of political leadership, disappointment is inevitable. There have to be compromises. There are large challenges — affordability and education — and small ones like snow removal. Successes tend to be elusive, especially if your ambitions are the idealistic platform of Democratic Socialism.
How well Mamdani performs in office will to some extent be measurable in data. But how well he is thought to be doing will be measurable by how he is judged by the media and a hard-to-please public. After three productive terms as New York’s mayor, Mike Bloomberg left office, I think, essentially unrecognizable to the people he served, on the streets or in the subway.
Thanks Mike, soon forgotten, an outcome Zohran Mamdani is unlikely to have.
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So, what is as close to the right way to cover Mamdani, as journalism can manage?
The media ecosystem of New York City is enormous. My view (offered many times in recent years) is that each of us is now editor-in-chief of our own news consumption, choosing where, when, and how we get information, from the loftiest source to the least reliable. The dominance of daily newspapers and local broadcast media has been greatly diminished. There are hundreds of news organizations operating — for communities, special interests, multilingual, print, digital, video and audio.
There may be news deserts around the country, but New York City is emphatically not one of them.
And yet, my sense is that the New Yorkers most interested in what is happening in their city aren’t satisfied with what they are getting. And there are reasons for that. The New York Times is a global brand with many more reporters assigned to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada than covering beats in the Bronx.
The Times’s metropolitan desk, smaller than it once was, still does an excellent job, focusing mainly on big pictures, trends, and overall atmospherics and investigations.
What is missing is the reporting closer to the ground that has the same quality of detail and sophistication that the Times brings to its coverage of the nation, the world, and culture. (Pause here to say that everyone I know can describe with intensity what they see as the Times’s shortcomings. And then imagine what it would be like if — as almost happened earlier this century — the company were in financial trouble.)
Which is where The City comes in. Founded in 2019 with mainly philanthropic money, its output is impressive in scale and style, given that its newsroom consists of about two dozen people. It has a new chief executive, Carroll Bogert, whose most recent leadership role at the Marshall Project, focused on criminal justice, was a prizewinning success.
Richard Kim had an eclectic background at The Nation and the Huffington Post. In an interview with an admittedly friendly questioner (as I was), he gave all the right answers about accountability journalism, a commitment to avoiding bias, and responsible growth. The challenge is visibility — Kim reports that there are about one million visitors a month to its website and other places where The City’s stories turn up, like Apple News.
But in the maelstrom that is news in New York, The City — to be blunt — has to have greater impact than it has now. And with impact will come funding resources to expand. (A rebranding of the name to something less generic than The City is also under discussion.)
The mayoralty of Zohran Mamdani offers a great opportunity for The City, along with enormous risks. Kim is determined that coverage will reflect the reality, the victories and defeats. The question is whether readers will be ready for what certainly will be seen as criticism, not opinions but reporting based on results.
Free buses? Affordable housing? Very big objectives.
Some of the most memorable improvements in New York life were much smaller, as in the 1980s, when the leadership of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority devised ways to all but eliminate subway graffiti, which made travel feel less menacing and has been largely sustained in the succeeding decades.
Overall, I have admired the mantra of Michigan’s two-term governor, Gretchen Whitmer: “Fix the damn roads!” Focusing on people’s daily hassles is not ideological. Will Mamdani’s voters be satisfied with that?
A final thought: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected to Congress in 2018 with the same meteoric momentum as Mamdani. She got star treatment with all that entails — including the dangers and suspicions that she was abandoning her principles. By any measure, she has grown in public and political stature because she is very smart, has proven to be effective, and hasn’t succumbed to the excesses of self-glorification, which may be the hardest part of all.
Zohran Mamdani has doubtless noticed.
“Eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
An executive order from the White House on March 14 mandated the dismantling of “elements of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary.”
I was particularly interested in the United States Agency for Global Media, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution. I knew their impact from experience.
Other institutions had already been targeted, reduced in size or stature, or closed altogether, including USAID; the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor; and the Department of Education.
These agencies were all in one way or another established to enhance the life and/or spirits of Americans and people around the globe, where the “indispensable nation” (as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the United States) is meant to provide support and social services.
What they do not do is expand the autocratic powers of the executive or enrich moguls and his family, the priorities that are the focus of Donald Trump’s presidency. In effect, a firing squad has been established for the losing side in MAGA’s takeover of politics and how we live.
Is there a strategic vision for what has been happening, a gospel or creed, like Marxism or National Socialism (the scourges of the twentieth century), or protection of our democracy, the avowed objective of every president since Washington?
No, all of this of is an amalgam of the instincts of one man and his relentless pursuit of retribution against those who underestimated him or laughed at him, because in so many ways he had been laughable. And if he thinks that what these agencies do is “unnecessary,” why should Americans pay for them?
(I should add that no matter how cleverly Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, et al., skewer him now, what he’s doing to the country is definitely not laughable, even if you think what he’s doing is right.)
I have to wonder how many of the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 did so to crush the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, or the Open Technology Fund.
To anyone who did vote for that reason: Congratulations, you have been successful.
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The “radios,” as they are collectively known — even though they are (or were) available in latter-day formats like video, podcasts, and the internet — began during World War II and continued into the Cold War. They expanded to other regions of particular importance as U.S. interests evolved.
I came to know them well during my time working in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Washington. Because my stories in the Washington Post were translated and broadcast over the radios in Russian and other languages, correspondents like me were the “free press” in countries where there was none. (I described what that was like in this short piece.
The Voice of America by tradition was non-ideological, meaning that while it was an American voice, its programming avoided rhetoric and propaganda. For many years, ending in 2003, VOA’s most popular program was Willis Conover’s jazz hour, and jazz continued to be a mainstay. VOA correspondents, wherever I knew them, were excellent and bristled at the suggestion that because they were employees of a government agency, they were suspect in some way. (I was not a listener to the dozens of foreign language programs but was told that they maintained standards similar to the English-language ones.)
Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were different. They were established specifically to broadcast to the countries behind the Iron Curtain. The staffs were primarily exiles or area specialists. After it was disclosed in 1967 that both stations were funded by the CIA, their resources came from congressional appropriations.
RFE/RL was also a research organization and produced reams of material — notably reliable — about the countries it covered.
Leadership of the radios tended to reflect the U.S. presidential administrations, as they came and went. Edward R. Murrow was director of what was then called the United States Information Agency and oversaw the VOA in the Kennedy years. I looked at the list of VOA and RFE/RL directors over the decades. A number were my friends, and I can vouch for their distinction in journalism.
The history of the radios has not always been smooth. Any institution dependent on government funding and the goodwill of politicians is at risk from changing moods and interests. In Trump’s first term, his emerging animus led to the appointment of a loyalist hack, who left in disgrace.
The executive order of March 14 eliminating soft government agencies is now being tested in litigation. The remnants of the radios are doing what they can. At least the United States has a court system. Russia and China, which maintain massive and slick global propaganda media, face no such obstacles. Doing away with values and voices means a much-diminished United States, here, there, and everywhere.
In the midst of what is AI mania — considered more disruptive than the twentieth century’s television and computer takeovers and the explosive arrival of the internet — there is another less noticeable phenomenon around today: the endurance of analog, which I think of, less technically, as tradition.
There has been data accumulating for some time, but it was the revelation that Taylor Swift’s album The Life of a Showgirl sold 1.334 million vinyl records in its first week that conclusively made the point. The total of all album downloads was about four million.
As a book publisher, I was prepared for the digital transformation that took place around the turn of the millennium. The results are now in. Seventy percent of books are bought in print, ebooks are about 20 percent, and audiobooks (the fastest growing sector) are 10 percent of sales. Even among younger readers, from all accounts print is the decisive favorite. Turns out that growing up reading Harry Potter books and now following Tik Tok recommendations has been a major plus for old-fashioned turning of pages.
Over the summer, for my first ever foray there, I went on eBay to buy vintage polo shirts because newer versions have less cloth and fast fashion lasts barely a single season. Then In The New York Times I learned there is a boom in the sale of vintage clothing, including among younger style-setters.
Another Times story (this news purveyor is definitely no longer its former fuddy-duddy self) reported, surprisingly, that broadcast media is where live shows, mainly big-time sports events, are drawing audiences and advertising that streamers are trying to match. Cable and networks are in decline, but they still pay a lot of bills.
Following up, I wrote to A.G. Sulzberger, the Times’s publisher, to ask about the print newspaper as a business asset since the daily circulation is now so small a fraction of the global digital circulation. “Yes,” he answered, “print is still profitable, comfortably so.”
He explained: “I’m a big believer that the next new thing never fully replaces the last big thing. But also, that the last thing tends to decline — more slowly than conventional wisdom — until it reaches a steady state among niche devotees.”
Here is what else I have noticed. Hollywood now considers launching movies “only in theaters” as code for “this is a major motion picture” whereas going straight to streaming is a signal that a film is of lesser importance. Small screen is just not big screen or an IMAX extravangza, which has expanded significantly.,
A musical about Bobby Darin (who died in 1973) is Broadway’s biggest hit this fall. Tickets are going for $700.Podcasts are radio programming on demand, which the pervasive use of earbuds have made omnipresent. Walls, bulletin boards, and lampposts are covered in printed announcements of events, political slogans, and lost pets. Old-fashioned photo booths, where teenagers squeezed in decades ago and made funny faces, have reappeared in malls.
Yes, your “phone” is indispensable, although texting in bursts far exceeds making calls. Social media is dominant in spreading information, falsehoods, and corrosive messages. Everyone of all ages, from toddlers to oldsters, is connected.
There is, however, reason to believe we are reaching a turning point in which resistance to bombardment by stimuli is being mandated or personally chosen. Outside my apartment window is Bethesda Row, a pedestrian pathway among downtown buildings lined with restaurants, cafes, and, significantly, lots of seating around firepits on chilly fall evenings. This is a popular destination for teens, families and anyone with an urge for in-person experiences.
Of course, there are phones everywhere, but the good time vibe is traditional.
Shopping online is unquestionably convenient. Strolling weekend farmers’ markets is much more fun and very popular with buyers wherever I see them. They can also be lucrative for sellers. They are, in their way, another reassuring reminder of the benefits of casual experiences.
(Here is where there needs to be a disclaimer about how shopping and entertainment are enjoyed by people with the means to pay for them, which too many Americans seem not to have. Acknowledged.)
Sports in schools and community teams, from pee-wees to varsity, have never been bigger now that girls have a full share and more. Traditionalists are appalled by what has happened to college sports which has become more a business than a competition among amateurs. Watching sports at home is great and more Americans are doing that than ever because of the popularity of soccer, gymnastics etc.. But seeing games in person is unforgettable, especially because tickets are so expensive.
I have my own measure of what people still take seriously in journalism. Write a piece for the online version of a magazine with a significant print circulation, of which there are some of note, and people will invariably ask, “But will it be in the magazine also?” Still, I am committed to writing for digital readers, on Substack these days. Stars who made their names in print —Tina Brown, for example — are attracting large (and paying) audiences.
If something of mine appears in print, the books I have been writing, the sensation of seeing the pages is different from my digital output, and I’d wager a great many people who write regularly would agree with me. Letters delivered by snail mail, because they are so unusual, will get attention that email does not — and are likely to be remembered.
We all seem to agree that AI is a very big deal and while a crash of one kind or another is inevitable with consequential regrets, I am equally convinced that the benefits of what is time-honored are nowhere near over or ever will be.
Harder than it looks.
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Consider the fates of these men:
John F. Kennedy — Assassinated.
Lyndon B. Johnson — Broken in spirit by Vietnam.
Richard Nixon — Resigned rather than be impeached.
Gerald Ford — Never elected.
Jimmy Carter — Defeated after one term.
Ronald Reagan — Badly wounded in an attempted assasination at the outset. Key aides considered removal via the Twenty-fifth Amendment at the end.
George H. W. Bush — Defeated after one term.
Bill Clinton — Impeached.
George W. Bush — Left behind two wars, one of choice.
Barack Obama — Promise unfulfilled. Rolled by the GOP.
Donald J. Trump — Chaotic, impeached, and defeated.
Joe Biden — Defeated and humiliated.
Donald J. Trump — To be determined.
There are a great many reasons for this pattern which historians and political savants will be pondering as they consider how Trump has so far defied every challenge to his ascendancy and power.
Here’s an explanation to debate: The principles that frame our politics — ideologies and beliefs — have come undone, replaced by messes of confusion, corruption, and a debilitating crisis of leadership.
The Grand Old Party is in thrall to Donald Trump’s brand of self-serving nationalism, which uses tariffs, taxpayer money, and the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security to violate the rights of Americans, from the once powerful to those least able to defend themselves.
The Heritage Foundation, where the blueprint for Trump’s second term, Project 2025, was developed, is now in turmoil, unwilling or unable to distance itself from Nick Fuentes, an avowed antisemite whose interview on Tucker Carlson’s podcast was heard by millions.
Two thirds of New York City’s Jewish voters, long the bastion of Democrats voted against Zorhan Mamdani in his successful race for Mayor in large part because he has reviled Israel. The Gaza war — and the resulting surge in antisemitism — has split American Jews so profoundly it is hard to fathom how they can be reconciled in support for the Jewish state..
The Democratic Party of the working class is now the home of coastal elites. Our former presidents have done remarkably well in their retirements. The Clintons summer in the Hamptons and the Obamas have estates in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii.
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I have just read The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer by Daniel J. Flynn, after having heard the author’s fascinating interview on Brian Lamb’s podcast Booknotes+. Meyer went from youthful Communist Party membership to “naming names” of his former comrades, and becoming one of the mainstays of William F. Buckley’s magazine National Review.
The biography of Meyer and Sam Tanenhaus’s massive new biography of Buckley describe in detail how the conservative political movement came together around anti-communism and limiting the role of government in social and economic policy. There was a philosophical basis for that strategy, avowedly opposed to the precepts known as socialism.
Suffice to say that Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is not conservative by any accepted use of the term, as defined by Buckley and Meyer.
It is absurd to call Mamdani a “communist,” as Trump has done, especially when today’s ruler in the Kremlin is Vladimir Putin, whose tenure shows that Karl Marx’s vision for the triumph of popular will failed completely in reality.
Mamdani’s “socialism” is better framed as idealism, a renewed effort to improve the lives and lot of the urban citizenry, where minorities once discriminated against are now increasingly in charge.
Here’s an upside comment. The resounding gubernatorial victories of Abigail Spanberger, formerly of the CIA, in Virginia and Mikie Sherrill, retired military, in New Jersey demonstrate that success for women in politics is (almost) complete.
Spanberger defeated Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears, a Republican who is Black. Coincidentally the election took place in the same week that former Vice President Dick Cheney died. Cheney, the GOP stalwart, was the architect of the Bush-era War on Terror who, in his last vote, chose Kamala Harris, a woman of color, for president over the Republican standard-bearer.
Liz Cheney, his daughter, is a Republican apostate for her stance against Trump and received the John F. Kennedy Library’s Profile in Courage award in 2022. This year the award was given to former Vice President Mike Pence, in recognition of his actions on January 6, 2021. A Kennedy who was not present at the ceremony was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services at Trump’s right hand.
Right. Left. Liberal. Conservative. Progressive. Reactionary, Fascist. Communist. What do all these labels actually mean now?
The longtime goal of the country’s two parties was to maintain a “Big Tent,” which in the past meant that Democrats included segregationists from the Solid South and at the same time labor and social activists from the northern cities. Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, as recently as the 1980s was the home of iconic liberals like Senator Jacob Javits of New York and Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland.
That American presidents are as vulnerable to the vagaries of circumstance as the record shows, is not just because our principles and politics have gotten so messy. But when the parameters of American life are polarized and in so many ways contradictory, it turns out that to be a leader carries exceptional risks which — as has happened repeatedly — overwhelms their power.
After a recent event in Washington, I started to chat with a person I will call Sam. He had my complete attention when he said his years of work at USAID had ended abruptly when he was given minutes to clear out his office and was fired with a mandatory sixty-day period for that to take effect.
Sam’s career was spent working in hard places. (Trust me.) I said I wanted to write about him with assurances that his identity would be protected. In return, he gave me a complete, unvarnished account of how Elon Musk, DOGE, and designees from the Trump administration obliterated USAID only days after the inauguration on January 20.
Until 2024, USAID had an annual budget averaging $23 billion, with programs in education, food, health, environment, and democracy support, less than 1 percent of the federal budget. Estimates of lives saved every year was in the millions. There were about 10,000 employees around the world — most are gone. There is a remnant of about fifty people working on the closeout because as an independent government agency, only Congress can eliminate it altogether.
Aggregate numbers of job losses tend to be impersonal. But every one of these people has had their livelihood — their paychecks, their sense of security, and their dedicated mission — ended at the whim of a president and his cohort, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a professed admirer of USAID over the years.
Getting back to Sam. He became interested in sub-Saharan Africa as a student, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees as his focus. After arriving in Washington, he held a series of positions that deepened his interests and broadened his knowledge before arriving at USAID.
With experience and energy, Sam was given more responsibility. He considered himself a professional and not an advocate. If priorities in Washington changed, he would adjust his field work accordingly. Sam is an idealist with a commitment to progress. During the presidencies of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden, he persevered through war zones, famines, terrorism, and threats to his personal safety — always working toward goals that may have seemed out of reach yet were worthy and admirable.
As in every government agency, USAID’s bureaucracy was frustrating. But unlike their counterparts around the world at the State Department, the CIA, or the military, USAID’s work was harder to quantify in terms of lives saved, services rendered, or democratic structures advanced — or whether its funds were well spent or squandered.
Each administration had its achievements. George W. Bush’s success in establishing PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, was as meaningful as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were violent and costly.
The Obama and Biden administrations were well staffed. But the stature of celebrities like Hillary Clinton at State and Samantha Power at USAID were distractions when their roles collided with politics and media fascinations.
Donald Trump’s tumultuous first term reflected his skepticism of USAID’s objectives and its loyalty to Trump’s agenda. Career staff at the agency were criticized for being “too close” to their issues or too much “in the weeds.” Upheavals elsewhere meant that relatively little attention could be paid to monitoring foreign assistance.
The Biden years were mostly smooth. The regions of Sam’s specialty continued to roil, and it was increasingly clear that America had moved its focus elsewhere. For instance, the once widely recognized famines and genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan largely receded as a cause célèbre.
And then came Trump’s second inauguration, with the issuance that day of Executive Order 14169: “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid.”
As Sam recalled: “The overall guidance from our superiors was, paraphrasing, to ‘keep your head down,’ ‘keep doing what you are doing,’ and ‘let’s make this as painless as possible.’ There was certainly internal denial and wishful thinking. The feeling was that this couldn’t happen and that Congress and/or the courts wouldn’t allow it. In retrospect, the outcome was clear.”
The full, harrowing story of those early weeks was in the New York Times in June and a Daily episode in October
Sam’s termination took effect July 1. He and most of his colleagues were now unemployed.
I asked Sam how he felt USAID could have been improved. He mentioned procurement reform; greater efforts at having local organizations involved in planning and activities; understanding the complexities of politics and conflict, wherever they were working; reaching out to an American public largely unaware or indifferent to USAID’s mission.
None of that is now possible. The demolition of USAID was accomplished with pretty much the same speed and ruthlessness as what was done to the East Wing of the White House to make way for Donald Trump’s $300 million ballroom.
