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.
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.
