On Sunday, April 17, 1960, a four-column headline at the top of the front page of the New York Times declared:
Knopf, Random House in Publishing Merger
Deal Made on Handshake Over Luncheon
— Cerf’s Company to Buy Stock, but Knopf Will Stay on Job
The byline on the story was Gay Talese, who amazingly in 2026 is still doing journalism of distinction.
This was clearly a big deal, although the sale price was about $3 million.
In fact, Random House had acquired Alfred A. and Blanche Knopf’s illustrious publishing company, which had been established in 1915. Bennett Cerf and his partner, Donald Klopfer, had founded Random House in the 1920s. Random House was itself a major book publisher, but with a bit less literary panache than Knopf.
In 2026, Penguin Random House, which still includes Knopf, is owned by Bertelsmann, a family company based in Gutersloh, Germany, and is the world’s largest book publisher, with billions in global revenues and solid profits.
What was a transaction small enough to be agreed over lunch was arguably the beginning of the modern corporate multi-billion-dollar business that book publishing has become. Whereas the media and technology companies are enormous business stories, book company finances are now mainly footnotes.
Gayle Feldman has recently published Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, a masterwork of biography and a history of the evolution of book publishing in the twentieth century that in narrative and meticulous detail reflects the two decades Feldman devoted to writing the book.
For my purposes, I want to focus on the question of what made Bennett Cerf a great publisher — and what that means in today’s era, in which more books than ever are being sold.
The portrait Feldman provides of Cerf is of a man who wanted to enjoy life (and succeeded) and who had the talent for choosing which books to publish and how to do that best.
From James Joyce’s Ulysses, the controversial book that gave the fledgling publisher an initial boost, until Cerf’s death in 1971, with Klopfer as his less colorful but rock-solid partner, an extraordinary outpouring of books of quality (mainly) and notice appeared.
There were authors whose fame endures, from Gertrude Stein to Ayn Rand and literary geniuses like William Faulkner, John O’Hara, and William Styron. Cerf’s nurturing of Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and James Michener provided Random House with a stream of vastly popular and profitable books long past his death.
There was a flip side to Bennett Cerf. He wrote bestselling joke books, which were published by other companies. He was a regular Sunday night panelist on the game show What’s My Line?, which made him a recognizable, national celebrity.
(His equally formidable and entrepreneurial wife, Phyllis, originated “Beginner Books,” which established Random House as a leading children’s book publisher — a market that was then and is now indispensable to its business success.)
Cerf didn’t just publish books, he made them into events, drawing comparisons to Broadway and Hollywood producers. There was zeal in every format and in the advertising, publicity, and relations with booksellers.
I spent a dozen years at Random House in the 1980s and ’90s, hired by Cerf’s successor, Robert L. Bernstein, also a publisher of flair, when the company was owned by S. I. Newhouse of the Conde Nast dynasty.
These were the years of increasing consolidation and corporate domination in book publishing, but the industry still could generate media fascination and headlines. I especially remember the day when on the front page of the Times it was reported that Joni Evans, the publisher of the Random House trade division (not the whole company), was being replaced by Harry Evans. (The two were not related.)
I chuckled at the notion of the New York Times editorial meeting that day: “Evans is out! Evans is in!”
The era when book publishing had that level of fascination and notoriety is definitively over. There are famous authors, but the publishers and editors responsible for them are rarely visible, except when they are caught up in scandals or takeovers, or when the legendary ones die.
So, what does it take to be a great book publisher in 2026? I recently spoke with Jonathan Karp, the outgoing CEO of Simon & Schuster, and in my view the closest comparison today to Bennett Cerf.
Jon started at Random House as an editorial assistant in 1989, earning $17,000 a year. Over time and with demonstrated skill he rose through the editorial ranks and was made CEO of Simon & Schuster following the death in 2020 of Carolyn Reidy, herself an exemplary book person.
What is the comparison to Cerf? In our conversation, Jon described every phase of his publishing career as “fun,” sharing stories of acquiring and wrangling books and coping with author egos and literary agents’ demands that others found stressful and even excruciating.
He took a brief detour working for Scott Rudin, a famously difficult film and theater producer (with whom he got along), although he quickly decided he preferred books. Jon also wrote a musical called How to Save the World and Find True Love in 90 Minutes and had it staged off-Broadway in 2006.
Cerf imagined how to publish in a variety of ways. Aside from Beginner Books, there was a young-adult history series called Landmark (which as a boy I read assiduously) and other innovations.
In 2005, Jon devised what he called Twelve, a publishing imprint that would release and promote one book a month, as a way to focus closely on each title, in recognition that getting the public’s attention for books was growing more difficult.
And now, as he leaves the CEO position, he is launching Simon Six, with a similar concept. In 2026, it is even harder to reach readers than it was when reviews and advertising drove sales, unless you understand social media and fragmented audiences.
This is what I consider the most significant aspect of my Cerf-Karp comparison. A great book publisher also has to be a very savvy businessperson. Cerf dealt with RCA when it acquired Random House in 1966, and Karp contended with Paramount’s determination to sell Simon & Schuster and the failed merger with Penguin Random House, which collapsed after a protracted antitrust trial.
A publisher has also to be able to select books that will sell, mass as well as class, and across our political and cultural divide. That explains how S&S could publish Mike Pence and Kamala Harris and the enormously popular genre called “romantasy” — romance mixed with fantasy.
Bennett Cerf would never have heard of romantasy, but like Jon Karp he would have known what to do with it.
This is how the decrepit tenement would look, restored with AI imagery.
With the assistance of a genealogist, I traced the branch of the Osnos family that lived at Twarda 28 to around 1740, when Jews in what was then the Russian empire, including large swaths of Poland and Ukraine, were mandated to add surnames to what had been only first names and patronymics, as in Ivan Ivanovich (which means “son of Ivan”).
The explanation provided was that individuals could now be added to tax rolls under a surname and thereby be available for the draft into the czar’s armed forces.
Osnos is an adaptation of an Old Testament name: Asenath, the wife of Joseph. The name is rendered in English in various spellings — Osnes, Osnoss, and so forth. We found Osnos families (with baptismal certificates) as far removed as Norway and Nebraska.
Over the years, I gathered fragmentary information from my father about his family. He expressed pride in their heritage, generations of university education and business prosperity.
Only now do I realize that he did not include their tragic demise. And I did not ask for more.
On a visit to Auschwitz in 2019, I encountered the scroll of names of people who were killed during the Holocaust, on which there are nineteen Osnos names. I now realize that this list certainly includes members of my father’s family, as enumerated on the headstone in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery.
I had known that my father’s brother Jakub, a doctor who lived at Twarda 28, became a Polish army officer at the start of the war and was murdered at Katyn Forest, the massacre of Poles carried out by the Soviets in the spring of 1940, while Stalin was still an ally of Hitler.
This was a particularly notorious and much-studied episode of the war.
After the Nazi-Soviet pact collapsed in June 1941, another brother (whose name I so far haven’t found) became a Red Army officer and survived the war, the only sibling aside from my father who did. I was told that he was exiled to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 1948 and that my father had been able to reach him at some point, years ago.
In 1977, while I was in Moscow for the Washington Post, I received a telephone call at the office from a person who identified himself as my “cousin from Siberia” and who said his name was Piotr, Russian for Peter.
At the time, the Soviets had launched a campaign against Western journalists, and I was repeatedly identified in the press as a “secret agent of the United States,” allegedly working for the CIA. A call from a “relative” on an open phone line seemed unlikely, and for his sake, mainly, I said I had no cousins in Siberia.
In 2020, I tracked down a man named Vladimir Osnos in Moscow, who I was told was related to us. He was the son of one of Russia’s most celebrated chess masters. I asked him by email whether in the 1970s he had ever been contacted by “authorities” about me. His response was classically ambiguous: “I can say nothing about that.”
My father had a nephew in New York named Zarka. In an oral history he said he had made it out of Poland to New York because he spoke fluent German and “did not look” Jewish. There was doubtless much more to that story, but, frustratingly now, I never asked and he never offered.
Finally, my great aunt Bassya Osnos married Nachman Syrkin, a leader in Socialist Zionism, of sufficient stature for Israel to name a naval vessel after him. When Bassya died at thirty-eight, Nachman, who was living in New York, went to Warsaw and married her younger sister Machette. Nachman’s daughter, Marie Syrkin, had an illustrious U.S. career as a writer, professor, and biographer of Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.
All these details amount only to clues about the Osnos family. I would have known much more had I asked or if my father had not been so focused on his full life in the United States. After my mother died and he was nearing ninety, he would talk to my wife, Susan, a bit about the past. By then the details tended to be confused.
Readers: While it is possible, get as much as possible about your background. It helps to explain your own life and character, and for second- and third-generation offspring of immigrants or refugees it can be of great interest and benefit.
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Twarda 28 in the early months of the war was something of a sanctuary for my mother and brother, in particular. My father had left Warsaw, initially to join a military contingent; when that became impossible, he made his way to Bucharest, where he succeeded in arranging a way for his wife and son to escape Poland.
As described by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier in In the Garden of Memory: “In June 1940 Robert Osnos and his mother left Poland. . . . Very few people managed to get out of Warsaw so late in the day in the day; it is a miracle that they succeeded. To bring it off, two superhuman powers combined forces: his father’s and his mother’s.”
It was at Twarda 28 where much of the miracle unfolded. There are three sources for what happened. One is Joanna Olczak-Ronikier’s book. The others were memoirs written by my mother, Marta, and my brother, Robert, describing the months in Warsaw after the war started and how they finally escaped. The full versions can be downloaded at the “virtual attic” of anespeciallygoodview.com, in the memoirs section.
Robert attributes his memories to the personalities of his parents: “Optimistic, very strong willed, amazingly competent, and resourceful. That is why I could write this, rather than being buried in Auschwitz. . . . As far as I know they were pillars of integrity.”
At Twarda 28, Marta wrote, people from elsewhere in the building moved into the ground-floor apartments, thought to be the safest, “so they would slowly move down, bringing pillows, covers, food, and advice. In a way it was good for Robert. He has children to play with all day long. . . .
“The last 24 hours before surrender, we spent all 18 people in a small bathroom in the middle of the apartment. Somebody had a pocket full of raisins, so from time to time, we nibbled some.”
With the immigration papers my father had managed to obtain in Bucharest, and my mother’s conversion to Catholicism in order to be able to travel, Marta and Robert left Warsaw on June 9. My father greeted them in Bucharest with roses.
Those in the Osnos family who did not leave were the ones whose names are engraved on the headstone and who are listed at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem as victims of the Shoah.
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When the boundaries of the Small Ghetto were drawn in 1940, after Marta and Robert had left Warsaw, Twarda 28 was included. Conditions in the ghetto have been collected in great detail. In the 1970s Marta herself was the translator of the major study of hunger disease carried out by Jewish physicians about conditions in the ghetto.
The study’s leader, Dr. Israel Milejkowski, wrote that the symptoms of hunger “consisted of crowds of beggars and corpses often lying on the street covered with newspapers.”
Somehow after the war, Twarda 28 was refurbished and once again became an apartment building. Professor Jakub Lewicki’s account reports that in the 1960s it was taken over by the State Treasury, and a general renovation was carried out, removing the decorative elements of the building’s exterior — which explains why the building now is so grim an apparition in downtown Warsaw.
A news story in the spring of 2025 reported that the district including Twarda 28 had submitted documentation to Warsaw’s Office of City Property and to the State Treasury about preparing the building for sale. The district “argues that private investors have funds for renovations, which local governments do not. It is worth emphasizing that the new buyer of the building will be obligated to maintain it in accordance with the guidelines of the historic preservation officer, and if they decide to remodel or add to it, they will do so in consultation with the preservation officer.”
So, once again Twarda 28 will escape destruction, if a sale happens and the buyer has an interest in Warsaw’s Jewish history.
The history of the building and the family that owned it, or those few that survived the war, is a tribute to their resilience against enormous odds.
An abandoned building is their legacy.
The all-white Museum of Modern Art . . . gleaming beside the hulking Stalin-era Palace of Culture and Science. . . . For decades, the Polish capital has been seen as pragmatic rather than magnetic . . . it demands to be seen anew.
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This building, close to the museum and the palace in the center of Warsaw, is called the Lieb Osnos Tenement. In the process of publishing In the Garden of Memory about my mother’s family, I began to learn more about my father’s family, who had built it in the early years of the twentieth century. There were fifty apartments, eleven stores on the ground floor, and a doctor’s office.
I found out that it was the only building in what was known as the “small ghetto” that remained standing after the end of World War II. And in 2019 it was included in the official Registry of Objects of Cultural Heritage, protecting it from being demolished.
I assembled a history of the building and the family that owned it, including the discovery that my grandmother Rachela Olga Osnos did not die before the war, as I had always believed. She died in the ghetto or in a concentration camp, as did so many others in the family.
Their fates were not really a secret. But except for the gravestone my father had erected in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery decades after the war, the subject was never discussed in any detail by my parents, and I never asked for more. Here is what the gravestone says:
LIEB OSNOS
CITIZEN OF WARSAW
LIVED 67 YEARS
DIED 20.VII.1939
RACHELA OLGA OSNOS
CHILDREN
JAKUB MARIA ANNA
MAREK FRYDA
GRANDSONS AND GRANDDAUGHTERS
DIED
A MARTYR’S DEATH
MURDERED BY
NAZI BARBARIANS
1940-1944
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The building is badly in need of renovation, shuttered completely and adorned with graffiti, with bits of plaster falling on passersby. No funds have been available to get this work started.
I had only been vaguely aware of the building. In family papers, there was correspondence in which my father was approached by lawyers in the 1960s, urging him to seek some compensation for the state seizure. That did not happen.
Against all odds, the building was not destroyed by bombings in 1939 as the Nazis occupied Poland or by the continued barrage of attacks as the war progressed. In the severe housing shortage in Warsaw after the war, it was resettled by tenants. The last residents left in 2009 because the building was no longer safe.
Controversies surrounded what had become a decrepit concrete eyesore until it was registered as a monument by the authorities as a vestige of pre-war Warsaw and the thriving Jewish community that had been virtually annihilated.
On a visit to Poland in the spring of 2025, I mentioned to the concierge at the Hotel Europejski, itself an elegantly refurbished remnant of pre-war café society, that I was planning to visit Twarda 28, showing him a photograph that I had found in, of all places, a Wikipedia entry.
Startled and clearly impressed, he called over a colleague and exclaimed that I was of the Lieb Osnos family. That was when I realized that while this structure may be shabby and uninhabitable, it was symbolically significant. I decided to find every shred of information I could about what it was like when my father’s family owned it.
I was shocked to realize for the first time that my grandmother and most of my aunts and uncles had disappeared after the war started and were Holocaust victims. Because in my mother’s family everyone had managed to survive, I chose to think that my close relatives had been exceptions to the greater catastrophe.
My father, Josef, as formidable in his way as the family building, never reflected on the tragedies, leaving only the symbolic gravestone in a prominent place at the front of Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery.
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Over the years, Polish publications have written about the building’s history, reporting on its symbolic importance and/or complaining that it is now a blight in the midst of skyscrapers and high-end retail.
The most detailed description was provided by Urbex Travel, a website run by a couple who describe their “passion” as visiting “abandoned places . . . houses, mansions, warehouses, factories and many others.” Their portfolio of interior photographs shows that the apartments were spacious and ornamental, homes for families with the means to live in comfort.
Quoting from a book called Roots of the City: “In 1936, the building generated over 5000 zlotys in rental income. The owner charged 180 zlotys for a four-room apartment, with a kitchen and bathroom, and 19 zlotys for a single room apartment in the basement. The ground floor housed numerous shops, a butcher shop, a dairy shop, a hairdresser’s salon, and a wine shop.” A document written after the war by a lawyer in Canada who had represented Lieb Osnos reported that there were fifty apartments in the building and eleven stores on the ground level.
The doctor’s office and apartment belonged to my father’s oldest brother, which my mother described in her memoir of that period as “beautifully furnished.” Of particular note,” she wrote, there were “green velvet chairs” in the dining room. The premises were on the first floor, which meant that they were a relatively safe place during the Nazi bombing in 1939.
Urbex’s account says the building was a “center of Jewish life and business, and everything was owned by Lieb Osnos,” who had made an apparently prosperous living by “trading textiles.” This had enabled him in around 1910 to buy the land and develop the property.
The technical description of the building from Urbex said it had “architectural features typical of a 19th century tenement house,” which in modern terms indicates that it was not a single-family mansion but rather the residence of a successful upper-middle-class businessman and his family.
A report by Professor Jakub Lewicki, the Mazovian Voivodeship (the Warsaw district) Conservator of Monuments, calls the building a “priceless relic of its heyday . . . a valuable document of the history of old Warsaw, particularly the history of the Jewish community and the ongoing stylistic and formal transformations, which are clearly visible within the confines of a single building.”
Lewicki wrote: “Despite the damage sustained during World War II . . . the building possesses significant artistic value . . . particularly noteworthy are the exceptionally rich stucco decoration and the introduction of parquet flooring in most rooms . . . and above all the entrance doors and joinery inside the apartments.”
The windows have been shuttered with concrete. Of course, I was moved to see it as an uncanny connection to my ancestors, but to other passersby it would be just another glimpse of a world that had been destroyed between 1939 and 1945.
Before the holidays, we happened to be driving by the Kennedy Center in Washington with our grandsons, Ben, twenty-one, and Pete, twenty, the morning that a crew added Donald Trump’s name to the building.
l sensed that this close-up look at the Trump presidency could be as memorable to them as images of John F. Kennedy’s assassination was for their grandparents so long ago.
Then, days after Trump’s rebranding of the nation’s memorial performing arts center, Kennedy’s granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg died of leukemia at thirty-five. The message Trump chose to share on Truth Social was: “The Trumps have always been supporters of the arts. The Kennedys are supporters of the Kennedys.”
By now we should be attuned to the scale of Trump’s multiple obsessions and stunning insults. Once in possession of the Kennedy Center, he ordered it closed for construction under his direction and presumably to his taste. Trump wanted a Nobel Peace Prize so badly that he eagerly accepted someone else’s prize and then told the prime minister of Norway that he would seize Greenland because he had deserved the prize. In his remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he confused Greenland and Iceland.
And his press secretary insisted that, despite video evidence, he had not been confused. Claiming the prize, the Greenland demands, denying irrefutable video of what he had said — it’s all bonkers.
Did anyone vote for Trump to take Greenland or so that he could get the Nobel Peace Prize?
Having Trump’s name emblazoned everywhere has been a long-standing fixation. The shimmering Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan was built in 1983, followed by additional high-rises in New York and casinos in Atlantic City. Then he started licensing his name around the world, including to buildings he did not build.
Placing your name on edifices and a range of other things because you paid for them or squeezed the recipients into awarding the distinction has always been a function of some deep-rooted, primordial need for recognition in your lifetime.
By his own personal designation, and in amassing things with his name enshrined where he could bask in the glory, Trump is the all-around GOAT (“greatest of all time”).
In recent years, others in our gilded age have been similarly prodigious in having their names attached to their philanthropy and activities as they were launched. I have noticed two in particular.
David M. Rubinstein, a co-founder of the Carlyle Group, a major asset manager, is an American history buff, and he has made significant contributions to preserving our heritage. Thank you.
He is also omnipresent by name as the chair of organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Kennedy Center — the latter before Trump ousted him and took the position for himself. Although not a natural media presence, he hosts interview programs on C-SPAN, PBS, CNN, and Bloomberg, and in leading public venues in New York and Washington — always with the imprimatur of David M. Rubenstein.
Repeat the same word over and over, and after a while it sounds silly. The same with names.
Stephen A. Schwarzman, the CEO of Blackstone, is another billionaire and serial brander of his many activities, buildings, and programs. His penchant for naming glory does not guarantee admiration from people he doubtless would like to impress.
Some years ago, Paul Volcker, the great former chair of the Federal Reserve, was invited to the grand Fifth Avenue home of the New York Public Library to talk about his new memoir in its largest venue. He declined.
“I don’t go into the Schwarzman building” (which is what the NYPL building is now called), he told me, his publisher, when I informed him of the offer.
Excessive glorification can become self-parody, raising the question of why it is so ardently pursued by rich notables in their lifetimes, rather than postmortem, as was generally the case in the past. Is it vanity, insecurity, vulgarity? It could well be all three.
As regards the president, the Washington Post is keeping track. Aside from the Trump imprimaturs already adopted, there is the projected class of Trump battleships and a Trump fighter jet called the F-47, for the number of his presidency.
And these being bruited: A Washington NFL stadium, a triumphal arch on the National Mall, the grandiose White House ballroom, and, it has been reported, the rebranding of Dulles Airport and the people movers there to be called “Direct Jet Transports” — DJT, get it? Just this past week, Trump tried to pressure Senator Chuck Schumer to rename Dulles Airport and New York’s Penn Station after himself, as a condition for freeing up federal funding for a rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey.
The coming question is what happens after he is, one way or another, gone from the scene. Whose role will it be to rename so many artifacts of his era? Can the names be resold, as happened when Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center’s main concert hall, became David Geffen Hall in exchange for a donation of $100 million?
Names can also lose luster as selling tools. When Trump was still a developer, he bought up industrial lands and abandoned railyards on Manhattan’s West Side along the Hudson River and erected a string of high-rise apartment buildings that dominated that stretch of skyline.
The buildings had Trump-style accoutrements, including his name. After Trump became president, condo owners and tenants removed the nomenclature. What was known as Trump Place is now a series of numbered buildings on Riverside Boulevard.
Trump had intended to put up the world’s tallest building there. That did not happen. The swankiest residential, office, and retail area on the West Side now is further to the south. It is called Hudson Yards, named for the majestic river discovered by the explorer Henry Hudson more than four centuries ago.
And there is a stretch of the West Side Highway along much of this same route, which is named after another icon closely identified with New York, Joe DiMaggio, an honor justly bestowed after his death.
Naming rights that are legitimate honors should be awarded, rather than solicited, demanded, or just outright paid for.
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I should explain that this Substack is branded with my name as a condition of its being called Public Affairs Press, to distinguish it from the publishing imprint I founded, which is now owned by Hachette and is still called PublicAffairs.
Used appropriately, I am in favor of names as signifiers, not as cockeyed displays of self-anointed eminence.
What a journey this has been. Serving as the Executive Director of the Port Authority has been one of the great privileges of my life.
Tonight, a short reprise: a reprise of how we approached the challenge and thanks to all of you who helped along the way.
The Port Authority is a storied, century-old institution that was built to do hard things across borders, across rivers, and across political cycles.
History
Just in its first decade alone, it built three iconic bridges and an astonishing tunnel under the Hudson River, all still in use today.
Over time the agency’s portfolio expanded to include the Region’s airports, the four bridges and two tunnels that connect New York and New Jersey, the world’s busiest bus terminal, the second largest Seaport in the US, the PATH commuter railroad, and the 16-acre World Trade Center campus that has become a gem of lower Manhattan.
But somewhere along the way, the Port Authority began to falter and lose the public’s trust.
Scandal hijacked the agency’s mission. Controversies and disagreements started to dominate the agenda. Crisis intervened in the form of the 1993 bombing and the 9/11 terrorist attack. Time, resources, and focus rightfully shifted to rebuilding the World Trade Center. Development stagnated and projects stalled.
Think back just a decade ago.
The Midtown Bus Terminal was an embarrassing eyesore in the heart of Midtown Manhattan with no plan to rebuild it or even where to start.
All three major airports were consistently ranked at the bottom of every single passenger satisfaction survey. They were regularly mocked by the media, comedians, and even a Vice President.
The Port Authority had become synonymous with dysfunction and gridlock.
The World Passes Us
In contrast, places like Shanghai or Dubai and other Asian and European cities became symbols of best-in-class, efficient transit hubs – especially their airports, which stood as shining, welcoming beacons.
In contrast, the Port Authority had been written off. The public did not believe that the agency could deliver the best-in-class infrastructure needed to compete with the great cities of the world.
New Leadership
Thankfully, the region was fortunate to have leaders emerge who believed in a strong infrastructure agenda.
Leaders like Governor Kathy Hochul, who has kept me on as Executive Director when she became governor; Governor Andrew Cuomo, who appointed me originally and introduced me to the infrastructure industry; and Governor Phil Murphy, who provided essential support.
And Governor, knowing that you delivered your State of the State speech yesterday and the demands on you surrounding that event, I want to say that I am particularly grateful for your being here tonight.
And a key part of the turnaround story was that, the same day I was nominated to serve as Executive Director, Kevin O’Toole was selected by the Governor of New Jersey to chair the Port Authority’s Board of Commissioners.
In what was frankly an extraordinary break with the past, Kevin and I formed a true and uniquely fruitful partnership that focused on getting things done in service of our region and ending the agency’s paralyzing conflicts and dysfunction.
New Standards
World class
The next step towards change was to insist that the agency embrace and publicly commit itself to a new quality standard – that standard was to be best in class, best in the world.
No matter how difficult and no matter how distant that goal might have felt when Kevin and I first took office, we were intent on applying this standard across the agency, including not only our employees, but also our partners, contractors, and consultants.
True believers were few and far between back then when we started, including I suspect, many if not most of you here this evening.
Action not words or promises
We had to also drive home a harsh lesson to the agency – particularly in public service, there is no credit for effort, planning, or promises.
There is only credit for results.
There is only credit when something is built, completed, and put into service in the real world.
And best in the world meant new approaches
Taking risks and doing things differently – all in the interest of achieving results better or faster – needed to be the order of the day.
The phrase “But we’ve always done it that way,” needed to be banished from the agency’s vocabulary.
That empowered the agency to operate differently. Integrity was non-negotiable.
What did that mean in practice?
Public private partnerships
We focused on the scale and role of public-private partnerships across our ambitious agenda. Without these partnerships, we would not have been able to achieve the true best-in-class transformation we are making at the airports and at the Seaport.
Five different large-scale public-private partnerships at the airports enabled us to leverage tens of billions of dollars of private financing – a scale never seen before – and without which the scale of our $50 billion dollar airport redevelopment program would never have been possible.
It’s not just about the money they brought to the table – they also brought expertise. We have been able to draw on the skills and knowledge of these private companies. They, in areas like customer service, have experience and capabilities that are not the bread and butter of government agencies.
At the seaport, we focused on restructuring our marine terminal leases with the private operators who run our public port facilities. These new unprecedented lease arrangements tied long-term leases to higher performance expectations, more favorable revenue sharing, higher capital investment, and shared responsibility for keeping the system competitive.
During Covid, our Port became the second busiest seaport in the nation and outperformed virtually all of the ports in the nation in avoiding congestion. Our new lease provisions put us on an ambitious path to even higher standards and are setting the gold standard around the country and around the world.
Elevated focus on customer experience
We also focused on the experience of the customers and the travelers that we serve, and the airports are probably the most visible and relatable example to most of you in this room.
They are a prime example of our new playbook, which is now our standard practice, with results that showed what achieving best-in-class meant in the real world.
We made customer experience a daily test and constantly asked ourselves – does this best serve the public?
The answer meant demanding excellence in the big things — dramatic, appealing design and architecture: bright natural light, floor-to-ceiling windows, inspiring views of the airfield, the city skyline, or the waterfront.
We focused on creating a signature “sense of place” — meaning New York and New Jersey — at each of our new airports that reflected the character of the region.
We focused on putting public art front and center – commissioning respected local and international artists to create New York– and New Jersey–themed artworks that energize and delight travelers.
We elevated another key element of the customer experience, which is the level and variety of the concessions – food, beverage, and retail – again with major participation by local New York and New Jersey shops and brands.
Serving the public also meant obsessing over the small things that shaped customer experience and perception. It meant bright, spacious bathrooms — not the dingy, stainless-steel prison-style facilities of decades past.
And it meant elevators and escalators that actually worked and are consistently monitored remotely with maintenance crews on call 24/7.
Because those are the things people remember, and the clearest proof to the public that the traveler comes first.
We backed these changes with measurement: credible third-party surveys, real tracking of wait times, coupled with serious work to identify and focus on addressing other pain points.
Keep facilities open during construction
Given their role as gateways to the region, we had to keep LaGuardia open and are keeping Kennedy and Newark Liberty open and operating while rebuilding them. This is an extraordinary feat of engineering and planning.
We acknowledged that short-term disruptions would be difficult for our customers but continually reminded them that they would ultimately be rewarded with major long-term benefits.
Safety, security and sustainability
Across our facilities, we raised standards around safety and security. We raised the headcount of the Port Authority Police Department to its highest level in history and, with our federal partners, we embraced every cutting-edge security technology we could find.
We treated sustainability and innovation as fundamental responsibilities that should be baked into our redevelopment projects from the outset, not future aspirations with distant implementation dates.
We recognize climate change is an existential threat. We design to the highest resiliency standards in the business to protect against seawater rise, higher storm surges, and intensified storms. We have one of the largest solar and renewable programs in the business. We remain intensely focused on converting our fleet vehicles to electric.
To put it plainly: we are committed to being Net Zero by 2050. And, I’ll add, we just hit our 2025 greenhouse gas reduction target of 50 percent.
Concern for Community
In today’s world, in order to succeed, large infrastructure projects simply must have significant support from the surrounding community. Too often in the past, the Port Authority was perceived as arrogant and unengaged.
So, we set out to change that: we showed up, engaged with the communities where our facilities operate, and delivered tangible benefits in return.
At our airports, for example, we delivered record-setting levels of contracts and business opportunities to local, small, and diverse businesses. Specifically, these record-setting efforts delivered: $2.3 billion of contracts to minority-and-women-owned businesses at LaGuardia and a staggering $3 billion of such contracts at Kennedy.
And beyond the airports, the $11 billion transformation of the Midtown Bus Terminal that is now finally underway may be the clearest example of what it means to listen to and work with the community.
Originally, the reaction to our plan from the community and the city for our initial design was…I think the technical term is…”no fucking way.”
Criticism focused on a lack of attention to getting idling buses off city streets and the omission of sufficient street-level amenities and green space that would contribute to the revitalization of the surrounding Hell’s Kitchen community.
So, we listened. We held hundreds of meetings. We assessed the feedback. And we decided the community comments were right and we methodically changed the design. Dramatically!
The result was nothing short of astonishing.
After being mired in community controversy and deadlock for decades, our new plan won the support not only of the local community board – a major feat in and of itself – but also of every elected official (many of whom are here tonight) whose districts encompassed the project – from City Council member all the way to its congressional representative.
This 10-year, multi-billion project, in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the world, broke ground seven months ago and is now at long last moving forward.
It showed our new approach was working.
Results and awards
Port Authority employees began to take pride in delivering best-in-class, and soon that standard became a habit.
What once seemed impossible became simply the next thing to do.
Through the hard work of our re-energized team, and our partnership with the private sector, the Port Authority actually transformed LaGuardia from America’s worst to best, literally.
Ten years ago, LaGuardia was a punchline. Fast forward, LaGuardia has won almost every award in the book, including the Forbes Travel Guide having now named LaGuardia the Best Airport in the United States for two years in a row. And that designation was based off of the feedback of five thousand frequent flyers and travel experts
And if anyone thought that LaGuardia was a fluke, we immediately moved on to produce those same best-in-class results at Newark Liberty Terminal A when it opened, which was recognized as the best new airport terminal in the world by SkyTrax, the leading airport rating organization.
And finally BOTH LaGuardia and Newark Liberty Terminal A subsequently earned Skytrax’s highest award, its coveted five-star rating. In the entire United States, only three airports have facilities with five-star ratings – and two of them are the Port Authority’s. That’s never happened before. That’s best-in-class.
And we’re not stopping. Like I said, what once seemed impossible becomes simply the next thing we do.
We’re bringing best-in-class to the transformation of Kennedy, to a brand-new Newark Liberty Terminal B, and with the agency’s newly approved capital plan – our 10-year financial roadmap – we’ve set the stage for another decade of transformation across the agency.
These are not just construction projects.
They are statements.
Statements that public institutions, when led with conviction and integrity, can deliver generational change.
Statements that the Port Authority can deliver best-in-class results time and time again, which is what the people of our region deserve.
Today, the agency is once again delivering some of the most consequential infrastructure projects in the world.
As I pass the Executive Director responsibility to the extraordinary Kathryn Garcia, I know the Port Authority will keep boldly pushing forward.
Thank you to ABNY for this evening and your partnership over these years. Thank you to the business and political leaders and elected and civic advocates here who supported our important work.
And, of course, thank you to my family for their love and support, and especially thank you to Betsy, with whom I enjoy the very best version of a public-private partnership.
Our region, and our Port Authority, are both thriving. And the best is yet to come. Thank you.
Rick’s tenure at the Port Authority has finally ended. There was recently a four-hundred-person reception at the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center in his honor, hosted by the Association for a Better New York, a prominent business group, where Rick delivered his valedictory.
Betsy sent the text of Rick’s speech to me, and I want to finish this piece by urging you to read it, at its full length. Here it is.
Thanks to those who asked for it.
There have been famous and notorious public figures in twenty-first-century New York.
Rudy Giuliani went from heroic to cringe. Mike Bloomberg was a formidable technocratic (and in my view underappreciated) three-term mayor. There was blustering Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams, dapper and deficient when it came to integrity.
We are just getting to know Zohran Mamdani, whose meteoric ascent from obscurity has brought him to the city’s highest office.
Raise your hand if you knew that for the past eight years Rick Cotton has been the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, a longer tenure than any executive director in more than fifty years. He is retiring, and his departure should be worthy of more than routine notice.
Along the way, he oversaw the rebuilding of LaGuardia Airport, which went from an embarrassment to a paragon of travel convenience and style.
For that alone, Rick deserved accolades, but there was much more. Appointed to a key position in the governor’s office by Andrew Cuomo who had an ambitious infrastructure agenda, he played an instrumental role in completing the first phase of the Second Avenue subway in time for its opening on New Year’s Day 2017. He got an unruly bunch of four public agencies and two of the city’s real estate “masters of the universe” to finally come to terms, enabling Moynihan Train Hall to move forward. He helped push the new Tappan Zee bridge (now the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge) across the finish line.
Then Andrew Cuomo named Rick to the Port Authority in August 2017.
When Kathy Hochul became governor in 2021, she maintained Rick’s role at the Port Authority, renewing the mandate to finish the LaGuardia work, launching the JFK and Newark airport revamps, and finally embarking on the long-delayed $10 billion rebuild of the scandalously dilapidated Port Authority Midtown Bus Terminal.
In his last days at the helm, Rick was immersed in handling the largest winter storm in the metropolitan area in years.
As Rick departs, the Port Authority is committed to rebuilding JFK and Newark airports, with JFK headed this year to finish the roadway rebuild and open the first new gates of two brand new international terminals.
Considering it all, with the benefit of a full record of his tenure, the Port Authority defied the overriding belief that regulations, corruption, and inertia are the metropolitan area norm.
I know Rick as a friend and demographic contemporary. He launched in the 1960s, was educated at Harvard College and Yale Law School, clerked for distinguished jurists at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court and was executive secretary to Joseph Califano, the rambunctious secretary of health, education and welfare during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
He was then recruited to what was in its heyday the leading corporate legal department in the country at General Electric and spent twenty years as general counsel and executive vice president of NBC Universal.
Rick could easily have coasted. His wife is Betsy Smith, whose own illustrious resume in city government was followed by her role as president and CEO of the Central Park Conservancy, responsible for that beloved asset of urban living. But instead, when Andrew Cuomo called on Rick (then in his seventies) to join his administration and later to run the Port Authority, he stepped up.
Here is where I make the point of this tribute. Rick took on arguably one of the most onerous roles imaginable, willingly and then brilliantly.
Why did he do it and how?
I would like to answer those questions by revealing valuable detail to anyone else who might consider rounding out his or her career with a seemingly impossible job.
But I can’t.
When I solicited Rick to explain his choices and evident mastery, he was consistently elusive. He exhibited none of the self-effacing humility behind which I often detect the irritating aura of “humblebrag.”
So, I will resort to surmise instead.
Success in corporate and government work is attributed to ability, and dexterity in managing your bosses, employees, and colleagues, who may watch you with a less than charitable perspective. And to some extent luck, being in the right place on the upswing and getting out of the way of downturns.
I asked Rick if he had ever lost his temper with a boss. Once, he said, with Joe Califano. Reason not disclosed. I know (and admire) Califano and have published several of his good books over the years. But his reputation for achievement has been matched by his known capacity to be difficult and demanding. President Carter fired him, at his first opportunity to do so.
Equanimity and inner confidence are personality traits. These are what I think Rick has. The closest I was able to get to an understanding of what it means was in a conversation about Cuomo and the subway project.
By the time Rick took it on, the Second Avenue subway was billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule, and almost certain to miss its promised opening date.
Cuomo was known to be especially tough with his staff, especially if things were not going well. But Rick told me, when I pressed him, that Cuomo and he had a consistently smooth and productive working relationship. Why? My conclusion is that the governor knew that Rick did not need the job, and he didn’t want to risk losing him.
The idea of writing this series of pieces about people who get hard things done came to me as I wandered through the concourses of the reinvented LaGuardia Airport. I asked Rick to tell me how he did it. Eventually, I concluded Rick had more important matters to attend to than providing me a self-portrait.
Rick’s tenure at the Port Authority has finally ended. There was recently a four-hundred-person reception at the World Trade Center Performing Arts Center in his honor, hosted by the Association for a Better New York, a prominent business group, where Rick delivered his valedictory.
Betsy sent the text of Rick’s speech to me, and I want to finish this piece by urging you to read it, at its full length. Here it is.
The concept of “Repositioning”appeals enough for me to have written about it before, most recently here. Some time ago, I was commissioned by a publication to write a piece for a feature called “Ancient Wisdom”. It turned out that my particular wisdom wasn’t what the editor had in mind. Hence:
“Are you retired?”
“No, I’m repositioned.”
“What does that mean?”
“I will explain…”
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I am of the generation who made our careers in journalism in the 1960s, taking advantage of what was, in retrospect, the apogee of preeminence for newspapers and magazines.
Decades later, most of us have moved on from what are, alas, largely less formidable enterprises. We are retired, bought-out, laid off, and in the chapters of our life stories that are generally considered conclusions.
But wait!
By the time I turned seventy, I was called the “Founder and Editor-at-Large” of PublicAffairs, the book publisher I had launched in 1997 (and still going strong today as an imprint of the Hachette Book Group).
It was around this time that I started getting the “R” question.
I looked up the word in Oxford Languages and learned that the term originated in the mid-sixteenth century, in the sense of a withdrawal to a place of safety or seclusion, from the French retirer, from re “back” + tirer “draw.”
This was not my intention. Instead, I devised the concept of being “repositioned,” for what I hoped would be many more years of consequential activity in my chosen fields: reporting, writing, editing, and publishing. The difference would be that I would be doing all these things not to be making a living, but rather to be living in a way that sustained my brain, social, and emotional faculties— which sounds more pompous than it really was. Think of “Being Alive,” as Stephen Sondheim counseled in the great song from his 1970 musical Company.
In the fall of 2020, during my last months of involvement with PublicAffairs, my wife, Susan (whose field was human rights and NGO leadership), and I established what we called Platform Books LLC, reflecting the name of a column — I never called it a blog — that I had been writing as an extracurricular activity for many years.
The purpose was to have an organizing principle for my plan to “read, write, and pontificate,” with Susan as my co-executive, manager, and muse.
I pause here to say that those of us who came of age in the 1960s and stayed in journalism, achieving some success, had a good shot at a defined pension, a reasonable 401(k) balance, and other assets, as well as, hopefully, a loving spouse or partner. In all, enough resources to support a lifestyle, adjusted but not altogether depleted.
At PublicAffairs, I had published a number of books by the brilliant Marc Freedman, a social entrepreneur whose Encore movement defined what I had in mind. Marc had framed retirement as essentially a marketing term, to promote senior communities in sunny locales. Instead, he and his colleagues created things like “Experience Corps” in schools, Encore fellows in major corporations and the Purpose Prize for people over fifty whose nonprofit enterprises had some traction. My favorite was the New England used car dealer who opened a storefront advising people on how not to be cheated by used car dealers.
A major aspect of repositioning is knowing when the time has come to begin planning for it.
After PublicAffairs was acquired by the Hachette Book Group in 2016 and relocated to its headquarters, I realized that our staff, talented and devoted as they were, found my involvement and energy, well, intrusive. When I proposed initiatives to support our books, the message seemed to be that I didn’t trust them to do it as well themselves.
Sometime after, an officious Hachette bureaucrat told me to give up my open-plan desk to a new employee. I had the good sense not to have a full-on tantrum.
Without making a pronouncement, I gradually stepped back, and I left at the end of 2020. I was given a genuinely warm send-off by my colleagues — after all, I had started the company.
The office of Platform Books LLC was our Upper West Side apartment. Our “team” consisted of people I had worked with over the years, expertly seasoned and themselves outside the confines of full-time work. We considered what we paid them to be an investment in ourselves.
There would be no golf-course condos (neither of us play) or lavishly outfitted safaris. Our financial adviser has kept tabs on our expenses, and our accountant looks after the tax requirements.
We arranged for the books we planned to publish to be handled by a national distributor, whose general manager had risen through the ranks at PublicAffairs’ original parent company, the Perseus Books Group. And here’s where reality comes in. My memoir, An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, was our first book, and four more have followed, one in collaboration with Harvard Business Review Press and another two with Rivertowns Books, a small independent press started by my friend Karl Weber. We have issued in paperback two books I especially admired when they were PublicAffairs hardcovers. (That was a one-and-done experiment.)
All these efforts were satisfying and even successful in their own way. Sales have been modest by profit-making standards, and while any sales are welcome, they are not our main measure of the effort.
A Substack called Peter Osnos Public Affairs Press is posted weekly, with subscription revenues going to two NGOs: the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), where Susan has been the chair, and the Barth Syndrome Foundation, which funds research and services for a very rare genetic metabolic disorder affecting boys.
Paul Golob is the editor for all Platform Books LLC content. That he has the time and inclination to handle this role is invaluable.
By now you may be thinking, That’s fine for you, Big Shot, but what thoughts do you have for the rest of us who want to reposition?
While I do not display a shingle offering advice, I am regularly asked by authors how to get an agent, a publisher, an editor, a publicist, a reviewer for a proposed book, which tend toward memoirs. My compensation, saccharine as it may sound, is gratitude.
Coming off their high-flying years, a shrug of disinterest or an outright rejection tends to undermine aging morale. My counsel can be summarized with the quote I have on my wall, from the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins:
“Just get it down on paper and then we’ll see what to do with it.”
There are a great many ways to publish a book in this multi-platform digital era, even if the only readers turn out to be friends and family.
As for news gathering as a repositioning option, my vision is to deploy experience where it will be most valued, generally but not always pro bono.
The record to date is persuasive as to the need but I have yet to find the means and enough other people who are similarly determined to make Encore journalism broadly understood and accepted.
When I was the vice chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review, serving under the estimable Victor Navasky, we received funding from Atlantic Philanthropies to establish four Encore fellowships and chose reporters who had been at major newspapers to write features for the magazine. Over my fervent objections, CJR’s editor insisted on calling them “downsized” journalists, a sufficient downer for me to drop the concept after one year.
Over the next decade or so, I got encouragement to develop Encore programs in association with Long Island University’s highly respected George Polk Awards, the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University, and the Newmark Journalism School at the City University of New York.
None actually happened, because enthusiasm evaporates unless there is guaranteed funding to have an infrastructure to recruit journalists and arrange places for them to work as reporters, editors, and coaches. Note to anybody who wants to pitch the idea going forward: Even the best ideas will work only if they can get beyond the gauzy vision to line up solid start-up money.
(I’ve heard rumblings of interest in Encore among the emerging and increasingly robust nonprofit journalism enterprises around the country that seek to replace the thousands of local newspapers that are no longer viable. I’d be happy to talk to anyone who is serious about this, but not if you’re susceptible to disappointment.)
Repositioning means recognizing that you are no longer in a career ascent, with ambitions for further fame and fortune. The traditional pattern of work followed by a precipitous drop should be replaced by a gradual lessening of responsibilities, and you may find yourself offering support to someone you mentored in the past.
Accepting this change of status, depending on your personality and level of pride, is not for everyone.
What is widely possible is to choose where, when, and how to take advantage of expertise or even to try something very different. When I asked an AI overview for a definition of an Encore career, it responded: “The primary motivations are often purpose and a desire to give back.”
This explanation was doubtless scraped from the writing of the professionals who shaped it and it is now being dispensed robotically for free. Oh well.
I certainly enjoy getting respect and appropriate recognition. But these days the question I’m asked most often in doctors’ offices and wherever I am filling out forms is date of birth. Mine is 10/13/1943.
Taylor Books in downtown Charleston, West Virginia, is a great place to visit — which I recently did. On a cold winter afternoon in light snow, the store was full of browsers, and in its café people were schmoozing, tapping laptops, and lingering, in some cases for hours, over a cup of coffee.
Books were arrayed on tables and a tangle of shelves. There was a section for second-hand books and a well-lighted adjoining room for book-related sidelines and gifts, as well as an events space.
Just the place to shop and linger if books and community are your thing.
When my perusing became inquisitive, Dan Carlisle, the owner, introduced himself. It turned out we had a lot to talk about. For an hour so, we meandered around the store. He told me the store was founded in 1995 by Ann Saville, after the opening of a Town Center mall had badly impacted stores in the downtown district.
In 2021 Saville turned over the store, and its lengthy lease, to Carlisle, a long-time employee. She died in September 2025, at the age of ninety; her memorial service was held at the store. Ms. Saville made a good choice. The store seems to have thrived — although bookselling is not the way to get rich quick.
By almost any measure, Taylor Books is what you want in an independent bookstore. It is a cherished destination for all those in the area who consider books and what they represent essential to their lives.
The only shortcoming at Taylor is that the selection of books available in the store for consideration or purchase is limited.
Bookstores have to be curated, meaning that what is for sale reflects the interests and resources of the owner and the staff, along with the square footage of the store itself. So, in the vast universe of what is published yearly and over time, only a tiny fraction can ever be available for sale at Taylor Books.
The recurring bleats about the decline in book variety, quality, and publishing seem to miss how much there is to choose from — in genres as old as time and what is exceptionally popular now, like “Romantasy,” a combination of romance and science fiction selling multimillions of copies.
Carlisle told me that at the urging of his staff, a romance section has been added. Sales are robust.
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This is where efficiency becomes so much more important in buying books now.
In the long history of the printed word, it has never been easier than it is now to find, buy, and read books. The one-word reason, dreaded by owners of beloved brick-and-mortar bookstores, is Amazon.
When you order a book from Amazon, it will arrive in a day or so, usually at a discounted price. Or if you are among the millions who prefer a digital book on a Kindle or an audiobook from Audible, you can download and start enjoying them instantly.
The irrefutable numbers show that more Americans today are buying books — with efficiency — from Amazon than from all other retailers combined. The question for readers is this: What is more satisfying, the experience of shopping at Taylor Books or at one of the 2,500 other members of the American Booksellers Association or tapping the buy button at Amazon?
From as far back as Amazon’s early years in the 1990s, I have been interested in finding and developing ways for bookstores to compete with the efficiency and access that online retailers guarantee.
I may be well-meaning, but I have not made meaningful headway.
The “indies” will tell you that their website, Bookshop.org, makes it possible to order books to be delivered, with a commission paid to member stores. I read recently that Bookshop.org will be selling downloadable ebooks also.
And audio books are available from Libro.fm or directly from distributors of what were once known as “books-on-tape.”
But here’s the challenge. Until the advent (or onslaught) of Amazon, when most people felt the urge to read a specific book, their thought was, “I’ll see if I can get it.” With the exception of the biggest bestsellers and classic children’s books, this meant making an effort to buy it locally or waiting for your order to be filled and either picked up or mailed (plus postage) to your address.
“Certain and overnight delivery of a book” versus “leaving a store without the book you came in to buy” is, let’s face it, an easy choice for most of us.
Here’s my latest thinking about improving this situation, based on my foray to Taylor Books and my lively exchange with Dan Carlisle. To make clear, Carlisle and other owners of independent stores are heroic in their commitment to books.
I gave Carlisle three books to look up on the database that he and most independent stores rely on for ordering titles. One was a bestseller published last spring by Scribner and two were books published by Rivertowns Books, a small independent publisher whose orders are filled by a major distributor.
None were in the store, although the bestseller had been and sold out. All three were available for delivery from the distributor in a matter of days.
Suppose stores posted prominent notices, on colorful signage, telling customers to ask for ANY and ALL books they want to buy, with the assurance that they could be ordered. I have repeatedly tested my belief that books that carry ISBNs, the universal book identifier (the equivalent of grocery-store barcodes), are for sale everywhere if you ask for them.
Digital books and downloadable audio have been around for decades, but most stores have effectively left the vast majority of those sales to Kindle and Audible. Why?
The explanation is that the indies have not found digital and audio sales significant enough to be worth the challenge of making them easily available. How do they really know?
For me, as just a passing visitor to the store, the concept of ordering any book wouldn’t work at Taylor Books — or at the other independents I visit wherever I happen to be traveling. (Tom Martin’s Book Plate in Chestertown, Maryland, is definitely worth a stop if you are in the vicinity.)
I very much value the experiences available in all these book meccas. I hope that with the right incentives, the owners will make efficiency their goal also. Thirty percent of book sales in all formats are downloadable digital and audio, a market well worth reaching.
My mantra for our times is “Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now.” (Or in a couple of days.)
BENTON HARBOR — The national teacher shortage is hitting Benton Harbor Area Schools hard, with half of the district’s classrooms not having certified teachers.
— Louise Wrege, The Herald-Palladium, Oct. 16, 2025
Benton Harbor is a small city on the shores of Lake Michigan in the southwest of the state, known mainly for its intractable social and economic problems.
The Herald-Palladium, the local daily, reported that Proximity Learning (link), a company based in Austin, Texas, had signed a $1.1 million, ten-month contract with Benton Harbor’s school board.
Sheila Dorsey-Smith, the director of human resources for the school district said that eighteen core teacher positions needed to be filled, many of them math and science positions in the middle school and high school, and the district had chosen to fill them virtually, through the services provided by Proximity Learning.
Whatever the other factors, shortages are doubtless greatest where salaries are too low, given the rising costs of housing, health care, and child care. Teachers are professional educators. Available statistics for Michigan show a pay scale starting (before taxes) at an annual salary of about $40,000 and reaching $70,000, except in the wealthiest districts. Can anyone really contend that this is enough?
The concept of virtual classroom teachers as a solution was new to me. I wanted to know more and sought out experts.
How widespread is it across the country? What does the data show about how this practice impacts students? And with an administration in Washington, D.C., in the process of abolishing the Department of Education, does our national leadership recognize or care about the issue?
An Associated Press story during this fall’s government shutdown titled “Government Shutdown Offers Schools a Glimpse of Life Without an Education Department” declared, “Schools and states are on their own. That’s the vision President Donald Trump has promoted since his presidential campaign.”
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Benton Harbor is adjacent to St. Joseph together they are known as the “Twin Cities.”As Alex Kotlowitz writes in his book The Other Side of the River, (link). As long ago as 1989, Money magazine hyperbolically “anointed the Benton Harbor metropolitan area, which includes St. Joseph, the worst place to live in the nation. Everyone, of course, blamed Benton Harbor for the rating.”
Then as now, “St. Joe” residents are overwhelmingly white. Benton Harbor is overwhelmingly Black, with a minority of newer Hispanic immigrants. Typical family income, Kotlowitz wrote when his book was published in 1998, was one-fourth of that in St. Joseph. That gap remains. Data USA reports that in 2023 median household income in Benton Harbor was $29,652. The comparable figure for St. Joe is $77,765.
An extensive Time magazine essay (link) by Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy program at New America, reported that according to the nonprofit Ed Build, the border between the two cites’ school districts is “one of the 10 most economically segregated school boundaries in America.”
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I was referred to Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington, an expert on educational data, for a national assessment of virtual teaching. Goldhaber said that the practice is mainly used in rural areas to fill specific needs — where, for example, four students want advanced subjects and no local teacher is qualified enough.
Goldhaber said he was not aware of any recent comprehensive survey of virtual teaching, but on balance even a remote teacher is better than no teacher at all.
A lengthy Wall Street Journal piece (link) from 2023 reported that “virtual teachers are beaming into thousands of classrooms this school year from Nevada to Alaska to New Jersey in subjects such as world languages, special education, science and math.”
The Journal describes a teacher who spent a semester working for Proximity Learning, “trying to teach an eighth-grade life-skills course in Texas. The classroom had no dedicated laptops, and there was never an adult present, . . . so each day she logged on and hoped students would find a way to tune in via their phones. ‘It was kind of soul crushing,’ she said.”
Conditions doubtless vary across the country, but everyone I talked to was startled to hear that Benton Harbor needs to use so many virtual teachers. Benton Harbor is among forty-seven school districts in the state where the Michigan Department of Education is in an agreement to improve student performance. Prior to that, the state had to bail out the district’s debilitating debt problem.
Kotlowitz, who is still following developments in Benton Harbor and St. Joseph, pointed to another factor that has impacted the schools: contiguous transfers, which enable students to switch districts or attend charter schools. He and others have said that it is the better students who are likely to choose this option.
School enrollment in Benton Harbor has dropped significantly over the years. In the 2013-14 school year, the number of students in the district was 2,689; in 2024-25 it was 1,253. According to the Herald-Palladium, the state provides $9,608 for each student, so the loss of enrollment means a significant loss of support, adding to the downward spiral.
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So, what’s to be done? The obvious answer is money. As I understand it, over the years various projects to upgrade public facilities in the city have been developed and funds allocated by local and state government, some developers, and businesses. The largely abandoned downtown now has an Arts District, for example. Residents of both cities want outsiders to know that their long-term hope is to improve Benton Harbor in all respects.
On a visit to Benton Harbor High School, I saw the trophies and the black-and-orange trappings of “Tiger Pride,” the school’s colors and motto. Whatever the infrastructure needs in the schools may be now, the greater concern has to be the astonishing lack of qualified teachers in the district.
To address this situation, it is urgent for the district to find the money for salaries and benefits that make the jobs and careers appealing. Modern Michigan is awash in taxable cannabis, Native American casinos, and booze. What was once thought to be sinful now produces cascades of cash. Demand more from those establishments.. Would there be political obstacles? Of course there would be.
Providing educational quality in places like Benton Harbor is essential if the deeply ingrained crises of life there can ever be resolved. Filling classrooms with stopgaps — virtual teachers and substitutes — is a symptom of how bad the situation has become.
The social engineering of racial and economic integration are goals to be honored and implemented. In the meantime, there is incalculable value in certified resident teachers, always on hand, available for assistance, and to the maximum degree possible being treated with tangible (and bankable) respect in the communities they serve.
