In 2001, Barbara Ehrenreich published her classic Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, in which she spent months working as a hotel maid, waitress, nursing home aide, and superstore clerk. The national minimum wage at the time was $5.15 an hour.
In 2026, the national minimum wage is just $7.25. The highest state or local minimum wage, in Washington, D.C., is $17.95, all the better to serve our elected officials.
More numbers to consider.
The median annual income for a full-time worker in the United States is about $60,000. And a year’s forty-hour work week at the Washington, D.C., minimum wage totals $37,336, which means a full-time worker with a family of four is barely above the official poverty level of $33,000.
Ehrenreich died in 2022, celebrated for her fierce understanding of American inequality. By every measure, the inequalities have gotten greater in recent years.
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One of these days, and probably in the not-too-distant future, one of the approximately one thousand individual billionaires in the United States will be worth a trillion dollars.
So, here’s my imaginary challenge, imaginary only because I no longer commission new books, as I did for so long as a publisher. But if I still did, this would be at the top of my list: Find a billionaire willing to spend a year living on the national median income of $60,000, without access to all the splendor and resources that money provides the very rich.
If there’s a literary agent involved, I’ll leave it to that person and the publisher to wrangle over the advance, to be paid at the successful conclusion of the year, plus, of course, full royalties on the books sold in print, ebook, and audio.
I wonder what daily life is like for the approximately 1.3 million American households in the top 1 percent of wealth. Different in most respects from everyone else, except that they still use have to use the bathroom for its traditional purposes.
The idea for the book challenge came to me recently, on a day when I was on the phone changing a flight reservation, using points for a hotel room in New York, and driving to the auto dealership for help with a check engine light on the dashboard and also a warning that my tires needed air.
My wife and I live on annual household budget significantly larger than any of the national or median income figures I’ve cited. But we are responsible for the management of what we do, when and how and what it all costs.
We have all the conveniences of a comfortable life, a car (with indoor parking), central air conditioning, enough property and health insurance for peace of mind, savings and retirement accounts that (so far) have not been upended by the swings in equity markets and are managed by a responsible financial adviser. We can vacation on Lake Michigan at a family home.
In short, we are far from having to make do within the national income averages.
But we are responsible for keeping track of our expenses, making all our own appointments, reservations, and plans.
And that is where the test becomes real for our imaginary billionaires. If they use a computer, an iPad, or a smartphone, they are at the mercy of the disciplines imposed by technology. There is rarely a week when I don’t have to untangle some glitch on a device. I pay annually for Best Buy’s Geek Squad and often resort to YouTube, a younger family member, or a tech support name I find on the internet.
What if suddenly you suddenly had to do all this yourself? What if you had to apply for a mortgage or a credit card, or had to pay an unexpected tax bill in the thousands of dollars. What about a new roof or sewer system that was not in your budget?
Billionaires delegate most things to someone else.
Every so often, an item appears about a billionaire or politician who can’t handle something like a self-checkout at a grocery store. The most famous of these was actually unfair: When President George H. W. Bush was running for reelection in 1992, he seemed to be baffled by a supermarket barcode. His team insisted he was not.
The principle remains. What characterizes life in the median is how to make the most and best of what you have, and proficiency in day-to-day life.
So step up, Ms. or Mr. Billionaire, and take the challenge. I’m predicting the book would be a money-making bestseller.
Viktor Orban, the former prime minister of Hungary, had many fans in MAGA, led by Donald Trump and including organizations like CPAC and influencers like Tucker Carlson, who broadcast encomiums from Budapest.
Orban was the avatar for authoritarian illiberalism, in twenty-first-century parlance.
And then, summarily, the voters of Hungary ousted him on April 12, with an overwhelming election victory for his opponent, Peter Magyar.
Exactly what this will mean for Hungary will take time to evolve. Orban’s tentacles in Hungarian society and politics remain deep. But he has accepted his departure, resigning from parliament. His supporters seem to know their movement is done, at least for now.
The demise of Orban is significant for a number of reasons:
(1) He and his regime had done everything possible to manipulate the results in their favor. And the majority against him was so large that denial of the results was impossible.
(2) George Soros was deemed Orban’s political enemy, with the prime minister joining revanchists and antisemites elsewhere in demonizing him. Soros shrugged off most of these personal attacks, but Hungary was his homeland. Now, at age ninety-five, Soros has outlasted Orban. Bravo!
(3) The election results in Hungary, placed in the context of developments elsewhere in what had been the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites, reflect an important reality in the aftermath of the Cold War.
The fifteen republics of the USSR and the satellites have largely gone their own way since 1991. Many have reverted to their historical place in the world. Central Asia and the Caucasus nations, for instance, are truculent, varied in size, but no longer actually controlled by the Kremlin, although they are very aware of Russia’s regional dominance.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is in a different realm of consequences for the region, with Vladimir Putin capable, at any time, of unprovoked menace.
For many of the nations of Eastern Europe — Bulgaria, Romania, and the states that once made up Yugoslavia — it is challenging to keep up with their twists and turns. But their examples do not pose a threat to democracies elsewhere, as Hungary seemingly did.
My particular interest has been the most prominent of the former East bloc nations: Poland, what was Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. All have been wrangling with their identities.
Poland is an economic success and a major member of the European Union. It swings politically from liberalism to nationalism, with traditional splits among the church, urbanites, and (broadly defined) farmers and workers.
Czechoslovakia split in two in 1993. Prague seems to be where the young and cool congregate. Slovakia leans toward illiberalism.
I don’t know enough about Hungary to explain the developments there. So, I was referred to Tibor Dessewffy, the director of the Digital Sociology Research Center at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.
I put two questions to him by email:
Can you explain why Orban so readily conceded? That is not generally in the autocrat’s approach.
Were Hungarians surprised at the success of their popular will?
Here are his answers:
Orbán’s concession has to be understood in the context of what was truly a historic and unprecedented victory for the opposition TISZA — a genuine knockout blow for Orbán. In that sense, his quick concession was less an act of magnanimity than an attempt to bring a bitter evening to a close as swiftly as possible.
I am fairly certain that had the result been a narrow, neck-and-neck defeat, the reaction would have been very different. On a micro level, however, he was probably right to shut the evening down quickly and not allow the sense of shock and pain to deepen further. If reports are accurate, he had been prepared for a different kind of outcome — losing some support on the party list while still prevailing in the individual districts.
What he did not anticipate was a landslide of this scale.
This also leads to your second question. The result was genuinely astonishing for almost everyone. Although there were one or two polling institutes measuring a significant TISZA lead, after sixteen years of illiberalism and four painful opposition defeats, very few people truly dared to believe that such a moment, winning by supermajority could actually arrive.
The eruption of joy and the extraordinary emotional release on election night was partly rooted in this disbelief as well.
With these responses in mind, I wondered what the message for Americans and our “allies and partners” around the world would be.
Yes, the situation does seem dire. In the United States, the Democrats have yet to display the leadership style and the potential nominees necessary to defeat MAGA in 2028. In Europe and Asia, illiberalism is a threat or a reality. Hungary demonstrates that if the resistance and popular will align and mobilize, even the improbable can happen.
The U.S. midterm elections will be the first real test of MAGA’s enduring power, a forecast for Trump’s remaining years and the scale of popular demands for democracy over autocracy. I hope the results will be unequivocal, as they needed to be and were in Hungary.
I really, truly resist reading bleats among the aging or elderly about their aches and pains. Toddlers, teenagers, twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, everyone has issues.
But I have recently and conclusively understood the phenomenon that those of us born in the 1940s and 1950s (and now even the 1960s) are enduring: Being taken for granted — or worse, blamed.
This comes in two forms:
The Boomers Blew It and You Are So Done (Forget “Baby,” As the Oldest Are Turning Eighty This Year)
The author Marc J. Dunkelman (sorry, Marc) published a widely discussed book last year called Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — And How to Bring It Back. Because PublicAffairs, the imprint I founded thirty years ago, was the publisher, he asked me to lunch.
His opener was along the line that the vast Boomer generation, broadly speaking, is responsible for the situation he was describing, chapter and verse. I won’t do him the disrespect of summarizing his argument. For that, read the book. I bristled but I think I paid for the lunch at an Upper West Side diner.
The Boomer canard has taken hold, even among many Boomers themselves. An accomplished friend’s new book opens this way: “Well, we are now on the front stoop of old age. And good Lord, what a fuck up of a generation we’ve turned out to be. . . . A nation that used to be young and scrappy has gotten old and cranky. We’re aggrieved, tribal, stuck.” And on and on.
But ask yourself whether the rights of women, minorities, the disabled, the poor, and the disadvantaged are being ignored, as they were for so for very long. Living standards and healthy life spans in developed countries have increased markedly, and global poverty has dropped.
The process of change reached its most intense in the 1960s and 1970s, when the Boomers were in college, or in the streets.
Have the movements for civil rights, human rights, global environment solved those problems? No. Did we or our predecessor generations solve the bigotry, inequality, and injustice that are the underside of progress? No. But we did recognize the scale of these problems and have made headway, at least, in understanding them and doing what we can — yes, through regulations, affirmative action, and protests — to deal with civilization’s eternal failings.
The Boomers in power (Bill Clinton et al.), as in all political eras, coped with the political realities of the time, and with the fact that their, well, fallibilities were now exposed by a feisty media. FDR and JFK, among others, were spared the public embarrassments of infidelity.
Heroism is hard to maintain when then the main public themes are cynical and even despairing.
If you don’t want more of this, stop reading, now.
Being Taken for Granted, Superannuated, or Retired
I started to realize this in my seventies. The emails and phone calls I received from my generational cohort were about not being published, finding an agent, and feeling generally sidelined (except, it seems, in top-tier politics). The general sense among this broad circle of formers and has-beens was, depending on their personalities, a degree of ironic amusement at their predicament, chagrin, indignation, or fury.
“How dare they?” Well, they could and did.
Being taken for granted showed in different ways, from the routine to the existential. Dealing with doctors whose attention tended to be cursory until you stepped up for concierge service, the condescension of younger colleagues whom you had mentored and now were offering to support further, or a dismissive attitude from the staff at various places, especially when dealing with tech.
So how to manage this?
A seemingly trivial episode recently provided my forward strategy. While I was exercising one morning in our apartment building gym, a manager approached me, with a photographer in tow, and told me that pictures were to be taken for advertising. He asked me to wait outside while that was being done.
I paused to absorb the affront, smiled, and with brio declared, “No.” The photographer, to his credit, got the point and waited.
What was my valuable takeaway?
In dealing with the various forms of being taken for granted and blamed, instead of reacting with indignation and even (on occasion) anger, stand on your good-natured ground. Be distinguished to the extent possible, rather than demeaned.
If they are fortunate enough, everyone dispensing such an attitude and criticism will get to be older or even elderly.
But by then they will also be experienced and seasoned — and definitely not to be taken for granted.
*****
Paul Taylor’s book, quoted above, is This Is Getting Old: Two Boomers and Their Generation at Dusk. Paul and his wife, Stefanie, “have been together since childhood,” he writes. They have three children and five grandchildren. Paul had a great run at the Washington Post, where we met. He then served as executive vice president at the Pew Research Center. About herself, Stefanie writes: “Paul has written a lot of cool things about me. Take them with a grain of salt.”
Paul’s take on our mutual stage of life is different in many respects from mine as expressed above. Read his book and decide for yourself. That is our privilege.
“On his last state visit [in 1985], Charles was in the shade of Diana’s radiance. On this one, he radiated an élan of his own — a class act, shining next to the boorish Trump. At long last, Charles was in no one’s shadow. At 77, he has done what he always yearned to to do: make his mark on the world.”
— Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times, May 2, 2026
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In 1982 the Outlook section of the Washington Post published an interview I conducted with then-Prince Charles. Decades later, as King Charles III, some of what he said is worth recalling. The text was approved by Charles at the time.
In answer to my first question: What can you do to cope with the serious economic problems, particularly the unemployment in Britain today?
Charles replied:
“Often you sit there and think — what the hell can I do? The problem is enormous and its like banging your head against an immense brick wall: it never seems to have any effect. But its very interesting how if you bang your head against one bit of the wall, eventually you will dislodge a bit of the brick, or you might knock one out and at that point you are achieving something. My philosophy has been that its better to begin something in a tiny small way which has the possibility of growing into something larger, than not to attempt it all.
“Or, on the other hand to attempt something large which fizzles out rather ignominiously. Which is the other severe danger: that if you try and do something in too large and loud a way, you raise everybody’s expectations and then can’t fulfill them which actually [is] more dangerous I think because it increases possible bitterness and frustration.
“But I hope to now, through . . . various organizations — one I started about eight or nine years ago [is] called ‘The Prince’s Trust.’ I wanted to try and get at the areas which I felt at that stage were the most important. [They] were those of the rather alienated young, in particular some of them in inner cities of this country who felt very much neglected. [They] I suppose felt completely alienated from society and from anything to do with the establishment, as such. I think there is a growing proportion of people like that, not just the young, but those who have families and so on, who are frightened even of doctors and teachers — they represent authority and the establishment.
“How then do we get through to these people and make them aware that there are people prepared to try and help. So this is how the Trust started. As a result, I’ve built a large number of contacts, people in all walks of life, those who deal with social work, probation and aftercare for young offenders. All these people are very keen to see ways of improving the situation. And through a trust like mine, there’s an opportunity to get things done without too much red tape.”
As published, the Post singled out two of Charles’s comments for particular attention. They were:
“You see my problem . . . is I don’t actually have a role to play. . . . I am heir to the throne, full stop. That’s all. . . . I could go and play polo all over the world, I suppose.”
“It may sound silly, but I think I did have to struggle. . . . [It gives] me a different sort of outlook perhaps than some of my predecessors might have had. Purely because I had to struggle.”
***************
King Charles III, for so long a prince in uneasy limbo, accompanied by his well and true life partner, Queen Camilla, was duly rewarded for his patience and soared in comparison to his host, the forty-fifth and forty-seventh president of these United States of America. The king, examined by arbiters of such matters in Washington, was pronounced properly seasoned, proving that dignity refined over many years wears well (as do finely tailored suits).
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Recently, Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal was interviewed by Press Gazette, a widely read newsletter on journalism, based in the U.K.. Tucker reported on how much the Journal has grown in subscribers since she took over at the start of 2023, moving from the editorship of The Sunday Times in London. These are two of the flagship publications controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.
Overall, she said, print and digital subscriptions have increased by 20 percent to 4.68 million. While that is roughly a third of the number of the New York Times’s subscribers, it is about twice the reported number for the Washington Post.
Here is Tucker’s explanation for why that increase has happened:
The Wall Street Journal, she said on her arrival, would give readers the “new distinctive, useful, compelling, relevant journalism” they needed.
“I asked the newsroom to get behind that strategy. I also made structural changes to the newsroom to enable it to get behind that strategy. They did, and the results have been incredibly good.
“I would never rest on my laurels, and there’s still work to be done, but the strategy is working. It just goes to show you when a newsroom as, frankly, brilliant as the Wall Street Journal’s gets collectively behind a very clear strategy, you get results.”
There are two observations to be made about Tucker’s comments and her success.
I have only met her once, soon after she arrived, at a friend’s one-table dinner of probably sixteen people, most of whom were connected, one way or another, to the New York–based media. I was amazed at how critical Tucker was of the news organization she was leading. She took on Washington coverage, the foreign report, the Saturday review section (a particular favorite of mine), and the overall desultory vibe.
The editorial pages and book reviews are under the long-time aegis of Paul Gigot and adhere to a right-wing or conservative perspective that is usually less vituperative than the language and politics of Trump-era MAGA. She had no comments on that part of the Journal.
I wondered whether it was really a good idea for Tucker to trash her news organization among people who might well spread the word that could be embarrassing to her. I thought not, although I recognized that she must have been given a mandate from Murdoch to shake things up.
And that was my second thought. Stipulate that, on the whole, I think Murdoch’s impact on the media has been profound and negative. Fox News is the source, in many ways, of America’s crisis of politics and morality.
But Murdoch is driven by what he considers news values for his businesses, which is why in the almost twenty years he has owned Dow Jones and the Journal, the news organization has mostly maintained its stature at the higher end of American journalism.
One episode in particular impressed me. Murdoch had invested a reported $125 million in Elizabeth Holmes’s biotech startup Theranos, which she claimed would transform medicine. It was the Journal’s reporting that revealed her company to be a fraud and eventually sent her to prison.
As recounted in John Carreyrou’s brilliant book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, Holmes came to New York to plead with Murdoch to stop the Journal’s coverage. Among other things, she said, Murdoch had all that money at risk.
He refused, specifically telling her, according to Carreyrou, who was then a Journal reporter, that he would not interfere with the news coverage.
Again, Rupert Murdoch’s approach to journalism is far from pristine, but he does understand what makes news — and what drives subscriptions and advertising to his company.
Here’s my aside: As I have written before, Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneurial genius, but he has shown, conclusively, that he does not understand that successful journalism comes from the energy and distinctive quality of its content, even in the data-driven digital world.
(That The Washington Post won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service on May 3, the same day that Bezos is hosting the Met Gala does suggest ironic destiny. )
As a daily reader of the Wall Street Journal’s online news output and, leisurely, in print on Saturday, I look forward to it (after my daily absorption of the New York Times and Financial Times) because there are news and features I find intriguing and have not already read elsewhere.
A story about the “lewd” birthday greeting that Donald Trump sent to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003 led the president to sue the Journal for $10 billion, except that it turned out the greeting was in the extensive files on Epstein that were released over time. The suit was later dismissed.
Scandalous Trump revelations are frequent. But it was also the case that the most thorough coverage of Joe Biden’s aging was in the Journal and was immediately ascribed to the animus and bias of the Murdoch forces, a foray into pro-Trumpism.
In fact, the record and history shows that compelling journalism is going to be an equal opportunity offender of the powers that be, which Tucker clearly recognizes. And she and her invigorated newsroom are bringing that and more to the impressive news organization that the Wall Street Journal has become.
The link below is to a group of essays about the late Marshall Shulman, just published by the Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum at Columbia University. The authors were specialists in what a half century ago was the USSR and is now Russia, a nuclear-armed autocracy as menacing as it was then, perhaps more so. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Russia was deemed less central to global order until Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Compared to the expertise reflected in these writings, current official U.S. policy and understanding of Russia is a dangerous mess.
https://issforum.org/ISSF/PDF/JervisForum-Tribute-Shulman.pdf
Here is my contribution:
Marshall Shulman entered our lives on a rainy night in Moscow in early fall of 1974. We had recently arrived. I was the Washington Post correspondent with a three-year assignment. By then, my wife Susan and I already realized that because so little was available from official Soviet sources and the very circumspect US diplomats working at the embassy, even the most esteemed American visitors wanted to be in touch with journalists representing the major US newspapers and magazines as providers of information and insight. They also welcomed the modicum of hospitality we could provide, including dollops of black-market caviar.
Our apartment was in a foreigners’ compound on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where militia at the entrance monitored the arriving guests. The clear understanding was that visitors and residents like us would have to accept the KGB reporting the American connection, perhaps for retribution. On that night, Marshall was waved through routinely by the militia. But in the process he was soaked, head to toe, in the torrential downpour. So it was that our first session with an enduring friend, whom we considered among the wisest American experts on the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was conducted with him wearing a bathrobe that barely covered his knees.
US-Soviet relations in the 1970s, which in hindsight marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War that culminated in 1991 with the final implosion of the USSR, were a composite of intermittent forays at détente, navigating hardline American animus and the Kremlin’s defensive suspicions. There were many major issues: how to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet split, competition for influence around the developing world, the reality of enmity in the Indochina conflicts, and negotiations to restrain nuclear weapons, which everyone understood was essential to preserving civilization.
And what were broadly termed Human Rights. The movement in support of Jewish emigration was especially well organized. After the 1967 Arab-Israel war, a substantial portion of Jews in the Soviet republics sought the goal of a more enriching life, in every sense of the term, in Israel and the United States.
The emigration issue served purposes in both Moscow and Washington. Antisemitism had deep roots in Russia, and using exit visas to portray Jewish apostasy was cynically satisfying to the Kremlin. And, with the issue being led by Sen. Henry Jackson (D-Wash) and a fiercely anti-Soviet US political mainstream, measuring exit visas became a valuable asset in setting parameters for the relationship, particularly on trade benefits.
The Helsinki Accords in 1975 codified human rights as an area for East-West disputes and negotiation. With celebrated writers and scientists at the forefront, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov, the dissident movement was an asset for demanding changes in the USSR and an excuse by the KGB to crack down on critics and criticism.
What was exceptional about Marshall, and unusual among other American scholars and officials who were monitoring the USSR, was that he understood the complexities of ideology and competition which framed the way superpowers maneuvered for dominance.
Everybody had to be placed in the categories of that time: Anti-Soviet, soft on communism, socialist leaning, liberal, conservative, leftist, rightist, hawk, dove. Marshall recognized that the autocracy of Leonid Brezhnev and his Politburo was flailing in many respects, especially economic policy and chronologically geriatric.
That the USSR was a formidable military adversary with the capacity to encourage global tensions and wage unspeakable destruction was undeniable. But Shulman had aligned himself with George Kennan’s view that exaggerating the Soviet threat tended to serve US political interests by providing the reasoning for defense expenditure and a sprawling intelligence apparatus.
In the 1980s, when the head of the USA and Canada Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that in Perestroika and Glasnost that the Soviets were “doing the worst thing we could do to you Americans, denying you an enemy,” I heard truth in his sly appraisal.
After Jimmy Carter’s election as president in 1976 and his appointment of Cyrus Vance as Secretary of State, the realpolitik of Henry Kissinger’s years was replaced by the split between Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, which was marked by differences in personality as well as strategy. Carter’s emphasis on human rights, combined with Brzezinski’s deep anti-Russian animus, was a contrast to Vance’s more traditionally diplomatic approach. As a senior adviser to Vance on the Soviets, Shulman was on that side of the divide.
And here is a personal explanation for why Marshall’s assessment of US-Soviet relations resonated with me as it did: I admired and wrote about the dissidents and the repressive policies of the Kremlin. But I also sensed that focusing so heavily on those issues meant underestimating equally important aspects of Soviet reality. While the West tended to call the Soviet empire “Russia,” it was in fact an uneasy composite of nationalities and their histories that made Kremlin control less complete than it seemed.
In the twenty-first century, the war with Ukraine is the most striking example of the impact of the breakup of the USSR. From the Baltics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russia is no longer master of its once massive domain. In dealing with the Soviet Union as an indomitable and eternal entity, an imperial power that was comparable to Rome and Britain at their pinnacles, the US missed underlying weaknesses. The USSR did not work. It had an ersatz economy, its projection of unity was essentially superficial, and its leadership was sclerotic.
Shulman believed that engaging with Soviet society, within the broader context of the much-disputed term détente, served a positive purpose for the United States. He held that the US would gain much more than it could lose in that approach to the relationship.
An aside about the Kremlin’s cockeyed sense of wpower in that era: in the early years after the Soviet collapse, Central Committee archives were open to researchers. A friend found a Top-Secret Central Committee document signed by then KGB head Yuri Andropov about a 1977 Politburo meeting where the debate was about “Korrespondent Osnos,” Joseph Presel, who was a young diplomat at the American Embassy, and Natan Sharansky, a dissident who played a role in advocacy for democracy and emigration.
I was assailed in the Soviet media as a CIA agent but not expelled; Presel had a lengthy State Department career in the former Soviet republics; and Sharansky spent nine years in the Gulag after a trial for anti-Soviet activities before being released and moving to Israel. That the Kremlin’s most senior officials would devote so much attention to three young men with no discernible power, I concluded, reflected their profound insecurity and declining confidence.
Calling attention to the Kremlin’s weakness was less welcome in official circles than warning of the Soviet Union’s encroaching power. Preeminence in Washington is associated with ambition and an affinity for the limelight. Marshall was by nature soft-spoken and, from what we observed, genial. He was content to be a lodger at Averell Harriman’s Georgetown homestead, which made him ancillary to the capital’s elite. Combined with his sophisticated assessment of Soviet power rather than the reductive commitment to the Cold War that was then in fashion, Marshall’s influence was never great.
When Shulman became the first director of Columbia’s W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Susan and I continued to enjoy the company of Marshall and his beloved and formidable wife, Collette. We would discuss in depth what was happening in the USSR, but we were now observing this absorbing, infuriating country and no longer directly in the competitive fray for attention or impact.
Who knows what Marshall Shulman’s role might have been in managing President Vladimir Putin’s dangerously uncontrollable Russia? I am certain he would have advice and judgment that would be well worth taking seriously.
The history of Judaism has seen multiple cataclysms — the Inquisition, exclusion, expulsion, pogroms, genocide — but what is happening now is something different.
Israel is upending what it means to be Jewish in the United States, where the majority of the diaspora has lived and thrived. At issue is not Jewish identity. It is about how American Jews relate to the State of Israel.
The era that began after the devastation of the Holocaust, with the establishment of the State of Israel, is ending because the Jewish state has evolved into a land that many (probably a majority) of American Jews cannot fathom, given the scale of violence and vengeance that the government has chosen as policy.
This is not the place to argue who is most responsible for the Israeli-Palestinian enmity that is so pervasive and destructive, because that avoids what the inescapable consequence seems to be in the United States.
Biases toward and against Israelis and Palestinians are genuine, but they obscure the point: Israel is no longer, for many American Jews, the answer to Jewish hopes and aspirations. It has become instead the major source of angst, family disputes, and renewed broad-based antisemitism.
Every measure of the American Jewish population shows deep divisions by generation, by adherence to religious rituals, and by political principles from left to right.
The schism has been developing for decades, but the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s responses in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon are what have created an unprecedented crisis.
The protests on university campuses on behalf of Palestinians, the surge in harassment of Jewish students, the performative fostering of rage by Donald Trump and his cohort — all have combined to produce a deep divide between those who see Israel as a pariah led by a brutal despot and those who consider it a warrior state determined to protect itself and its interests.
The cause of Zionism has fostered disagreement for as long as anyone can remember or document. But Israel is an established and immutable reality, and that will not change. So what, actually, does Israel now represent to Jews who do not live there?
For the last half century, being Jewish in America reached an apogee of influence, prosperity, and acceptance in every sphere of life that in the past might have been restricted. Bigotry never fully disappears, but discrimination on religious grounds — quotas, enforced segregation in business and social circles — had become minimal.
For many American Jews, being Jewish did not have to be their primary identifier. How they were perceived in the whys and wherefores of politics was not tied tightly to their opinions about Israel. For decades, the percentage of Jews and non-Jews marrying and in every respect sharing their lives has increased dramatically.
The underlying issues have been simmering all along. Human Rights Watch, the largest and most important organization of its kind, was founded and strongly supported with money from Jewish philanthropists, and it has stumbled repeatedly on how to best monitor human rights in an Israeli democracy that avowedly discriminates against its Palestinian citizens and neighbors.
As foreign editor of the Washington Post in the late 1970s, a time when it appeared that there could be progress on an Arab-Israeli détente, I was assailed with complaints by readers about bias of one kind or another on this issue, more than every other matter combined.
The situation now is incomparably more contentious.
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I have just finished reading Nicholas Lemann’s soulful (meant as a compliment) new book, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries. The book portrays in breadth and detail the story of his family, who emigrated from Germany in the 1830s, settled in Louisiana, and prospered in many ways.
As time went on, the family moved away from its Jewish origins in pursuit of a social acceptance that being outwardly or observantly Jewish would make unlikely.
The Lemann family’s story is aligned with and recognizable to what I have seen and personally experienced in my lifetime among friends and family. “How Jewish do you want to be?” was the question.
I was born in a time when being Jewish was existentially threatened by Nazism and fascism. The threats now are of other kinds: values, respect, shame, obloquy, misapplied pride. Israel has been lost as a unifying feature, which it never completely was anyway, and has become corrosive to a dangerous degree.
Lemann’s personal response has been to embrace Judaism completely, which, as he describes it, is about religious ritual and association. His joy in doing so has shifted his life away from melancholy.
Adopting this as a solution is not applicable, from my perspective, for many American Jews, whose observances goes from rare to casual to regular, as a part of life but not its core, which is how Lemann now sees it.
And it does not answer the fundamental conundrum: What about Israel, the Jewish homeland, the refuge from centuries of persecution and isolation?
That is why this is a different Jewish crisis from those of the past.
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My good friend Steven Weisman, the author of The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion, is writing another book that addresses this theme. He summarized his thoughts for me:
“Judaism under Roman subjugation was rife with internal conflicts over how much Jews should assimilate, whether religious or civil authority should govern them, governance infighting among priestly class and heirs to the overthrown royal family of Hasmoneans (the ones that had ruled for a hundred years after Judah Maccabee kicked out the Seleucids).
“There were also class conflicts over objection to heavy tax burdens. These conflicts weakened Jewish society and allowed Romans to exploit their divisions and take over after the Jewish War of 67-70 CE.”
The challenge today is not from the Romans, the Arabs, or the Iranians. It comes from the Jews themselves, who find it so very hard to resolve what Israel means to them anymore.
“We believe that peace is at hand.”
— National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, signaling the end of a U.S. role in the Vietnam war, October 26, 1972
“We today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.”
— President Richard Nixon, announcing what he called the end of the war in Vietnam, January 23, 1973
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In the Paris Peace Accords, signed in January 1973, the United States recovered all of its prisoners of war from North Vietnam and from the Viet Cong in the South, and agreed to withdraw the remaining American forces from the country. Significantly, the agreement allowed North Vietnam’s troops to remain in the South, and the United States pledged continuing aid to its allies in Indochina to offset the North’s military presence.
On August 22, 1973, President Richard Nixon nominated Henry Kissinger to be secretary of state, in addition to retaining his post as national security adviser. He was confirmed by the Senate a month later. In August 1974, Nixon resigned under pressure from the Watergate scandal.
In a succession of votes over the following months, Congress blocked assistance to the Indochina countries. There was no interest in supporting them anymore. Entreaties from Kissinger and from the new president, Gerald Ford, were unsuccessful.
On April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese army captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and unified the country under communist rule. By then Cambodia had fallen to the communist Khmer Rouge, and in December the communist Pathet Lao seized power in Laos.
That is how America’s Vietnam war came to an end. Fifty years later, Vietnam is an authoritarian one-party state and economically strong. Cambodia and Laos are stable but essentially irrelevant in the global balance of power.
Tom Wells, a historian, has just published The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations, six hundred pages of transcripts of Kissinger’s phone calls with President Nixon and others, starting in 1969 and ending with Nixon’s resignation.
Kissinger had the original tape recordings destroyed (recognizing what they had done to Nixon) and resisted releasing the transcripts until he was compelled to do so.
I read (savored, to be honest) the book, to understand how Kissinger (who died on November 29, 2023, at the age of one hundred) maintained his stature as one of the most consequential diplomats — if not the most consequential — of his very lengthy tenure on the world stage.
What enabled Kissinger to sustain his aura for so long, and against a record of abject failure in Indochina? How did he pull off this reputational endurance?
Kissinger was brilliant at many things. But his greatest genius was at spinning, shaping every conversation, with the president and everyone else, to meet his always self-referential requirements.
What that meant was a masterful skill at dissembling, misrepresentation, flattering, gossiping, and what seemed to be self-deprecating humorous asides, but was actually a tactical device to engage a critical interlocutor.
I was especially interested in the Kissinger-Nixon conversations about Vietnam from 1970 to 1973, the years when I was a correspondent in Indochina for the Washington Post. I could see the real-world implications of what they were saying about the war, the U.S. military, the bombing of North Vietnam, civilian casualties, and the South Vietnamese leadership as the pressure for a deal increased, whether they liked it or not.
In their conversations, Kissinger’s cynicism was a clever cudgel encouraging Nixon’s brooding, with sneering references to, among others, Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and the “pansies” in the State Department.
With war raging and hundreds of thousands American soldiers on the ground, I was especially struck by the way Nixon and Kissinger talked about the military, including the top U.S. commanders.
Kissinger characterized General William Westmoreland, the Army chief of staff and previously the commander of American forces in Vietnam, this way: “Completely played out. All he remembers is what happened in Vietnam and how nearly he won the war at Tet” in 1968.
General Creighton Abrams, Westmoreland’s successor as U.S. commander and the man responsible for implementing the Nixon administration’s policy of “Vietnamization,” turning over military responsibility to the South Vietnamese and overseeing the withdrawal of U.S. forces, fared little better. Kissinger said he was “finished,” to which Nixon agreed.
Nixon and Kissinger’s complaints about Abrams tended to focus on his reluctance to use all-out air power to pummel North Vietnam into an agreement. Along the way, Nixon said that Abrams was “drinking too much,” and contemplated sending another general to outrank him.
(In 1980, the Army named its new main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, to honor him.)
As early as 1969, only months after his inauguration, Nixon told Kissinger that the Saigon government’s belief in eventual victory “won’t happen . . . it is impossible.”
And after the 1973 peace treaty, it was widely known that Kissinger had said that there would now be a “decent interval” for the South to survive before the ultimate triumph of the North Vietnamese.
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The full panoply of the transcripts include, for comic relief as much as anything else, discussions of Kissinger’s dating of actresses and flirting with other notable women, including his efforts to inveigh the television journalist Barbara Walters to join him privately in various venues.
My favorite of these concerned a story that was about to appear in the Washington Post that one of Kissinger’s starlets had made her name in soft-core porn. Kissinger pleaded with the Post’s executive editor, Ben Bradlee, not to run the story.
There is no indication that the story ever appeared.
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I learned of The Kissinger Tapes through an interview with Tom Wells on Brian Lamb’s weekly podcast, Booknotes+.
“Every living thing spends a great deal of time and toil in maintaining its own life and the life of systems it depends on. Plants tend the life of the soil they grow in. Beavers maintain their dams and thereby the pond that protects them. Humans maintain their bodies, their vehicles, their homes, and their cities, along with much else.”
— From the introduction to Maintenance: Of Everything by Stewart Brand
In 1968, Stewart Brand and his colleagues published the first Whole Earth Catalog, which was essentially a guide to self-sufficiency during an increasing complicated time. Steve Jobs once called Brand’s catalog a sort of “Google before Google came along.”
Brand is now eighty-seven years old. So, I was surprised in December 2025 to read a laudatory review in the Wall Street Journal of Brand’s latest book, Maintenance: Of Everything, written in his signature style — eccentric but completely accessible.
I was especially pleased because over the past year or two, I have used “maintenance” in my personal lexicon of definitions: “repositioning” instead of retirement; “offspring” instead of children, for those who are now adults (Donald Trump Jr., et al.); and recognizing that calling something “old” was rarely a compliment.
Maintenance is the effort and practice of keeping things in as good shape as possible, beginning most basically with “brush your teeth,” if you want to keep them intact.
But maintenance extends far beyond self-care. My approach is to wrangle the daunting complexities of modern life, to make them manageable when I can. Tim Cook, Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple, said it well, in reflecting on the company’s fifty-year history: “It’s hard doing simple; it’s easy doing complex.” The writer’s version of this is “If I had more time to finish this, I could make it shorter.”
I’ll get back to health.
But first, technology has become the dominant complicating factor for those of us who remember the before-times of analog. For example, when renting a car, I used to ask for roll-up windows and a simple dashboard. The more widgets, the more distractions, the more things that can go wrong: a loose gas cap and time spent at the dealership rebooting the safety systems.
How to be a safe driver? It took me decades to focus my total attention behind the wheel. The simple seat belt has doubtless saved millions of lives, just pull and click.
In the Vietnam era, GIs wore inexpensive “non-maintainable” watches — just the time, sometimes with the date and a night light. Those that remain are now vintage artifacts, fashionable and, as antiques, expensive.
Devices are indispensable but can be unfathomably complicated, defying even the experts employed by Apple. I recently replaced a pair of lost earbuds with a set that was slipping out of my ears; I went to the Apple store to get a pair with rubber tips. I had the receipt and the buds.
Over the next hour, as many as four Apple employees were deployed to figure out why my phone would not update the “find my phone” capacity, which had to be done for the buds to be exchanged, I was told. Finally, duffer that I am, I pointed out that my phone did not have the storage space for the just-updated app. I admit to leaving feeling superior on behalf of my cohort.
Segueing to health. When the first Covid vaccines for people over sixty-five became available, to get an appointment required uploading the front and back of a Medicare card. Under the circumstances, that requirement seemed to me ridiculous given the target constituency.
I now know how to upload, but I recently had a medical appointment cancelled because I did not meet a deadline in advance for uploading the front and back of my insurance cards. That provider earned a blistering one-star review on Yelp.
Maintenance in health can be manageable. Regular checkups, recognizing that when you take daily meds for high blood pressure or a statin for cholesterol — that does not mean you are frail or failing. Like any machine, the body needs maintenance.
Brand’s book is billed as “Part One” and is derived from a website called “Books in Progress.” The maintenance the book describes is specifically about a round-the-world sailing competition, in which the winner turned out to be the racer who was best at maintenance on the high seas and motorcycle maintenance.
Neither of these are relevant to me, but the principle certainly is, expanding the term “maintenance,” in Brand’s words, “beyond referring only to preventive to stave off the trauma of repair — brushing the damn teeth etc. Let ‘maintenance’ mean the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.
“From that perspective, occasional repair is part of the process. Close monitoring is part of the process. Changing the oil is part of the process. Eventually replacing the thing is part of the process.”
I’ll say here that there are some things that cannot be replaced. Body and soul are two. But they can be maintained.
This is how to buy Stewart Brand’s inspiring book.
There were more than four million books published in the United States in 2025 with an ISBN identifier, an increase of 32.5 percent over 2024, according to statistics compiled by Bowker, which tracks such data.
For all those who say that book publishing is dead, dying, deteriorating, or about to be overwhelmed by AI: clearly not yet.
What it does mean is an amazing democratization of how to be an author. Because most of the increase was in self-published books, for which the number of print and ebook versions rose to 3.5 million in 2025, from 2.5 million in 2024.
What used to be dismissed as “vanity” publishing (and still often is) has become a large and lucrative business, with a number of ways to publish, from a handful of copies to bestseller numbers, supported to one degree or another by the authors, financially and in spreading the word.
A bit more about the numbers to make sense of them. The total number of books published in traditional ways rose by 6.6 percent, to nearly 650,000; half of those had BISAC codes, which classify the categories, such as fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and self-help, to be sold, placed in libraries, and entered into databases to be searched.
So what does all this activity really mean in practice?
First, major commercial or trade publishers are increasingly being led by experts in technology, digital distribution, and data, with the books themselves acquired and edited by employee professionals.
In February I hosted a conversation with Jonathan Karp, the outgoing CEO of Simon & Schuster. Karp started his publishing career in the 1980s as an editorial assistant at Random House earning $17,000 a year. He rose through the editorial ranks to become a publisher and then a chief executive.
After a lengthy search Greg Greeley was named to succeed Karp at Simon & Schuster. Greeley worked for nineteen years at Amazon, in the distribution divisions of that enormous enterprise. “He and his teams pioneered print-on-demand publishing, launched the company’s self-publishing platform, and expanded the company’s global audiobook and books marketplace capabilities,” the corporate press release said.
I recently wrote a piece extolling Gayle Feldman’s new biography, Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, about the co-founder of Random House. The current CEO of what is now called Penguin Random House is Nihar Malaviya; his official biography says that he has “spearheaded the creation of a variety of industry-first capabilities in data science, supply chain, technology, and consumer insights.”
What do these executives know about the actual books?
Doomsayers will say that the companies see books as essentially roughage to be churned out, with minimal regard for content and quality.
Let me offer a different view. Books are commodities that people have to want to buy and read. It is the editors and publishers who acquire books and develop them into forms ready to be sold. Expertise in data and delivery makes the books more visible and accessible. Sure, crap will sell — it always has — but so will quality when consumers can find the books in the heaps that are appearing, in a format they want to read them.
Effective marketing a book from a single copy to millions is designed by people, assisted by the advances, for better and (alas) worse, in technology.
My belief has always been that the way to publish books well is to know who their prospective readers will be and then make sure they realize the book is available. Visibility and discovery are core to the process of reducing the enduring complaints of “I can’t find that book anywhere.”
What, then, is self-publishing in 2026, the overwhelming majority of those four million books last year?
The concept is still largely misunderstood. Explaining it fully requires much more than a post like this one. I can summarize it as follows: An author who writes a book finds a partner to render it in printed or digital form, with the costs partly or wholly carried by the writer. Self-publishing is not an author cranking out on a mimeograph machine or whatever today’s equivalent would be.
I am often contacted by friends (and some surprisingly notable acquaintances) who want to write a story, a memoir, a novel, a biography, or to share their experiences and expertise. This is a model I think can work for just about anyone:
Self-publishing in digital-only formats has its own infrastructure costs and reach, like the one developed at Amazon by Simon & Schuster’s new CEO. I know less about it other than that it delivers a finished text.
Books in print are still, for the majority of authors and readers, the preferred option.
Politics and Prose, a very popular bookstore in Northwest Washington, D.C., which I have written about before, has a service called Opus that offers a number of ways to publish a book at a base cost from $600 to $1,200, depending on what level of support the author wants, plus the cost of printing each copy, set by the page count and number of illustrations, with hardcover and paperback binding options.
Upheaval in book publishing aligns with the many other dizzying ways in which technology impacts our life and times. The reasons for concern, or even alarm, are apparent and emphasized.
The flip side is that if you want to write and publish a book, now you can.
Go for it!
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Matty (never Matthew) Goldberg, a good friend and esteemed member of the book publishing community, knows more about music than, I’m guessing, anyone you know. Every year he curates and sends out a playlist to his community. These are invariably excellent. He is now starting a Substack about music (about damn time!), and here is the subscription link.
