This series is about people who, while fully aware of the upheavals underway in so many institutions — government, media, education, business, NGOs — have personalities that enable them to confront challenges that have engulfed this era and get things done.
Among the ways that genius is defined, one of the best is the ability to shape data and dots into coherence so their meaning and impact can be understood.
In 1999, I was invited to a gathering of people to consider what to expect in the twenty-first century in technology, the environment, politics, entertainment, and social norms. Esther Dyson was a presenter.
She said we were entering “The Attention Age,” in which opportunities, sensations and distractions were expanding so fast that focus was becoming harder — and this was years before the loaded handheld smartphone arrived in 2007 and made everything accessible and in many respects overwhelming.
As an editor and publisher of books, my takeaway was that that the task of choosing good books and making them better would become inextricable from getting them noticed by readers. And this has been my mission ever since.
Thanks for that, Esther Dyson.
**************************
Esther Dyson grew up in what she calls the “unique bubble” of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where her parents — a distinguished physicist and a mathematician — worked under J. Robert Oppenheimer and mingled with Nobel Prize winners and occasionally Albert Einstein.
As a teenager in the mid-1960s, she persuaded her parents to let her go to London and attend Loughton County Grammar School for Girls, in the fifth form. Enrolled at Radcliffe with what she describes as “pretty poor” grades, she took an administrator’s hint and traveled to Morocco, where her boyfriend, Timothy Crouse (later the author of the journalism classic The Boys on the Bus), was a Peace Corps volunteer. She recalls “hiding under the bed when one of Tim’s bosses showed up.”
Dyson started out in journalism but decided to go to Wall Street, where she believed — “mistakenly” she now acknowledges — people were interested in “facts and outcomes.” Here is her self-description, written with characteristic brio:
Conference impresario and tech analyst (Release 1.0 newsletter and PC Forum tech conference 1982-2007). Author of Release.2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age. Broadway Books, 1996. Best seller. Founding chair of ICANN [the NGO that administers the domain names for internet sites]. Cosmonaut in training Star City outside Moscow (2008-2009). Healthcare investor and then health philanthropist (Wellville.net project 2014-2024). Board seats including past, 23 and Me, WPP Group, Yandex and currently, Avanlee Care, Nebius, Press Reader. More on request. Portfolio of 100+ startups, widely recognized as leading angel investor.
So, her activity is extensive but, nearly as I can judge, more engaged than frenetic.
Does Esther Dyson’s have “oblivious confidence”? This is the trait I associate with the ingrained belief that accomplishments are to come, and challenges met, based on intuition, energy, and resilience. Luck happens but is not necessarily to be expected. Curiosity is certainly a prerequisite. But there is something else. In some people, success can mean arrogance and condescension towards others, and so knowing how to create, innovate, advise, and lead without a know-it-all demeanor is complicated.
Esther Dyson certainly seems to meet that standard.
I hadn’t been following Dyson when I came upon this podcast hosted by Andrew Keen, Episode 2313 of “Keen On.” Her role after a forty-plus-year career in technology, she told him, is to provide honest feedback to the tech powers-that-be while maintaining independence.
“In this role Dyson expresses concern,” Keen said, “about society’s vulnerability to ‘information diabetes’ — addictive content that, like processed food, provides short-term pleasure but long-term harm.”
For those of us who muddle through pervasive techno-jargon, Dyson’s accessible way of portraying ideas is welcome — which takes me back to The Attention Age before it had even really started.
***************
What is Dyson’s next project? She sent me her proposal for a book she is writing, to be called Term Limits. Our life spans have extended by a third in the past century or so. The range of information we have available and the opportunities to use all that information one way or another has never been greater.
Quoting from the latest version of the proposal:
“The purpose of the book is to use the constraints ‘Term Limits’ to examine trends…in our world today. There’s a certain conflict between the financial markets’ obsession with exponential growth, AI’s infinite scalability and society’s obsession with abundance…and the finite nature of life and attention.”
How to know when you have reached enough of anything? How to recognize and take advantage of limits.
Dyson’s generation, which is mine as well, is the first that needs to reckon with this yet-to-be-understood period of life, decades beyond what was traditionally thought to be a turning point from ascension to, well, something else.
Dyson says her approach to term limits is how best to take advantage of our accumulation of experiences and activities. Is more always longer and better?
Esther Dyson is a thinker who is also a doer, a combination that when properly deployed can get things done.
John Thornton was co-founder of the American Journalism Project and founder of The Texas Tribune. He died on March 29. His legacy is a remarkable vision for the reinvention of an indispensible resource of our national life and democracy and was essential to devising the evolving new business model for journalism.
It is with great sadness that we share the news that John Thornton, co-founder of the American Journalism Project and Elsewhere Partners, and founder of The Texas Tribune, died on Saturday, March 29. He was 59. What follows is a tribute to John from the American Journalism Project, Elsewhere Partners, and his wife, Erin Thornton.
Over the course of a remarkable career that spanned, improbably, from venture capital and private equity to the emerging world of nonprofit local media, John Thornton was known for a rare mix of entrepreneurial zeal, moral urgency, and infectious humor. He devoted himself to helping entrepreneurs realize their visions — and he developed a vision of his own that transformed the business of local journalism.
Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1965, John graduated first in his class at Trinity University in San Antonio and went on to earn an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He began his professional life at McKinsey & Company before joining Austin Ventures in 1991, where he led nearly 50 software investments. He ultimately served as managing partner, leading a firm with over $4 billion in assets under management. He later co-founded Elsewhere Partners, an investment firm focused on bootstrapped software companies outside traditional venture hubs.
Through his work as a venture capitalist, John stumbled on what would become his greatest passion and define his legacy. In 2006, as the news business faltered, John assembled a team at Austin Ventures to explore newspaper investment opportunities. “Our team very quickly determined that there had to be easier ways to make money,” he recalled, dryly, to a class at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He came to see news not as a business opportunity, but as vital to the health of American democracy. “I was left with this sinking feeling that something was wrong,” he said.
He became a crucial early and influential voice making the case that local news was a “public good,” and that commercial markets could not sustain it. “Maybe public-service journalism — whatever you want to call it, I call it capital-J journalism…maybe this stuff is a public good just like national defense, clean air, clean water,” he said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review.
In 2008, in his first journalism venture, he founded The Texas Tribune, recruiting Evan Smith, the president and editor in chief of Texas Monthly, to run it as his co-founder alongside Ross Ramsey. John assembled $4 million in seed capital, and contributed over $2 million to the organization in its founding years. The Texas Tribune would become the gold standard in nonprofit news, garner broad recognition in the industry, and inspire the founding of dozens of similar organizations in other cities and states.
A decade after starting the Tribune, Thornton co-founded the American Journalism Project, a first-of-its-kind “venture philanthropy” to raise money and fund local newsrooms across the country. He brought an investor’s discipline — ambitious, strategic, and built for growth — to a civic mission. Alongside co-founder Elizabeth Green, he recruited prominent national philanthropies to support local news at the very moment it was teetering. The premise, as he often reminded staff, was that every dollar the American Journalism Project gave local news outlets would generate three new dollars in local annual recurring revenue. His theory worked: The first 22 organizations funded by the American Journalism Project have, on average, doubled in size since they received their grants; collectively, they have added over 200 journalists to their staffs. The American Journalism Project has raised more than $225 million to fund local news and now supports a portfolio of 50 nonprofit newsrooms in 36 states.
“John was the godfather of nonprofit local journalism,” said Sarabeth Berman, CEO of the American Journalism Project. “He had the radical clarity and moral urgency to see that saving local news wasn’t just necessary — it was possible.”
But those who worked with John often noted that he was, perhaps, proudest of his investments in people. He mentored a broad range of leaders, offering his guidance with generosity, humor, and conviction. He was impatient when it mattered, and embraced fights he believed worth having. As an evangelist for the idea that a healthy democracy depends on a free and independent press, John liked to inspire others by inducting them into what he fondly called the “Democracy Hall of Fame” — and made them proud to be a part of it.
John died Saturday, March 29, in his hometown of Austin, after a long struggle with mental health.
He engaged in life so wholeheartedly that few knew the depths of his suffering. Despite his internal battles, he chose to meaningfully participate, to be in service to others, and to fiercely love the people in his life. That intense commitment was John’s essential characteristic, to the enduring benefit of his family, friends and co-workers.
John gloried, above all, in his family. He was devoted to his wife, Erin Thornton, and to giving his step-sons, Wyatt Driscoll and Wade Driscoll, a family life that he was not as fortunate to have had. He leaves behind not just a legacy, but a movement — one that will continue in his spirit. Plans for a memorial to honor John’s life will be forthcoming.
We will miss him immensely.
Read all about it! The American Journalism Project
******************
The documentary Becoming Katharine Graham portrays her reign as publisher of the Washington Post with all the distinction it deserves, especially impressive as the Post in the Jeff Bezos era seems so troubled. (The film is on Amazon Prime, and I was told that Bezos said he had watched it and found it inspiring.)
Many years ago, I heard Graham, in a speech extolling the newspaper’s strength, assert, “The Washington Post is Woodward and Bernstein” the great Watergate duo. Also, she said, it is “Woodward and Lothrop,” a major downtown Washington department store and a major advertiser, which was liquidated in 1995.
That summarizes what has happened to journalism in the twenty-first century. The pillars of what paid for news gathering and presentation in the heyday of print — display advertising and the classifieds — were essentially demolished and nothing comparable as a revenue source has yet to be devised.
For the Post, which was so dominant in the Washington market, the collapse was devastating — highlighting the irony of Katharine Graham’s insight in better times.
But if you are anywhere in the media world, the impact of lost print advertising is completely obvious — which doesn’t mean it is widely understood.
Around 2000, I was told by the publisher of the New York Times that the company had reached a billion dollars of annual revenue. Three quarters of that came from print advertising and the balance mainly from subscriptions, he said. Today the equation has been more than reversed — it is the readers who pay for the bundle of news, cooking, puzzles, and sports at the Times. Subscription revenue provides the overwhelming part of what in 2024 was $2.6 billion in revenue.
The reinvention of economics for something as central to our lives as the media — from micro providers to corporate behemoths — is a civilization-scale change. The consequences are, not surprisingly, incalculable.
The number of print subscribers to major newspapers is a fraction of what it was: the Boston Globe has fifty thousand, the Dallas Morning News has forty-five thousand, and the Denver Post has under thirty thousand, according to a list on the website Mediagazer. I’m guessing print news will always be available as a pricey premium for legacy publications that are now primarily digital. (The New Yorker and The Economist are among the most prominent media organizations holding on to substantial print readership.)
And the digital for-profit sector is now larger than perhaps people realize, including Politico and Axios and specialty sites like The Information, along with Substack, the aggregator of newsletters that come with a subscription option. Others have come and largely gone, Vice being among the most memorable.
Such is the nature of business. Journalism is an essential component of democracy and also a commodity.
As advertising-supported small and medium-size print newspapers have been depleted or have vanished, a new model has emerged. It is in the nonprofit media realm, particularly at what is usually described as “local” or “accountability” journalism, where the activity is the most innovative.
Philanthropy is a major source of support for emerging enterprises. Press Forward, a consortium of foundations, has committed $500 million to nonprofit news. The American Journalism Project is acknowledged as the leader of the field, investing, mentoring, and evaluating the resurrection. I asked Sarabeth Berman, the CEO of AJP (and I am proud to say, my daughter-in-law), to give me her assessment of how well the process is going. Here is her response:
We’re seeing nonprofit news organizations grow and find sustainability, produce vital journalism and thrive in their markets. With the right support, diversified, renewable revenue is within reach.
To give you a sense of what this looks like in practice: In January 2022, we gave Block Club Chicago a $1.6 million grant when they were a $1.9 million organization. They used our support to invest in their business team and digital revenue strategies, and by the end of 2023, had grown into a $3.5 million organization with stronger membership (8.3% growth), revenue from foundations (200% growth) and earned revenue streams (192% growth).
Similarly, Spotlight PA has grown from a $1.7 million organization in 2021 to a $4 million organization; by the end of 2023, they had grown their membership by 71%, earned revenue by 466%, support from major donors by 18% and philanthropic support by 90%.
While not underestimating what philanthropy and the support of billionaires can mean, capricious as that tends to be, I think it is not yet the case that an all-inclusive replicable model exists for a mix of subscriptions, events, sponsorships, and donations to equal what advertising had so long provided. We will be encountering successes and failures as the enterprises reach inflection points of substainability. What matters are the trends.
Gara LaMarche, a former president of The Atlantic Philanthropies and a major figure in civil society for decades, wrote a widely read piece on the subject in March titled “Overreliance on Foundations Is Unhealthy. Foundations Can Help Fix That”in which he argues that matching large donations with smaller ones from members (or, in the case of news outlets, readers) to establish a continuing revenue flow, can move a nonprofit organization beyond the need to regularly renew grants.
The clearly defined lanes of news and advertising (“church and state” was the shorthand) that prevailed in the twentieth century is being replaced. The reinvention will prevail over time because there is so much effort and innovative talent being deployed to make it succeed and because it is so important.
Galas are few and none are fashion-forward, but journalism’s award season is an inspiring — and much needed — representation of what is happening in the trade now in ways that count, the work they represent.
John Darnton is the long-time esteemed curator of the George Polk Awards, one of the majors in prestige. After this year’s judging of 493 entries, John wrote for the Columbia Journalism Review:
“I can vouch that the year’s publications and broadcasts, when seen in their entirety, are wide in scope and deep in substance. The rambunctious spirit of street reporting and editing is still very much alive.”
Here are this years winners. The ceremony is a lunch that will take place on April 4 at Cipriani 42nd Street. As a fundraiser, Long Island University sells tickets.
The winners of the National Magazine Awards will be announced on April 10. Recognizing the realities of our era, the American Society of Magazine Editors has decided to host a conference instead of a lavish ceremony, as in the past.
The Pulitzer Prizes in journalism and books will be announced on May 5. There are also the duPont, Emmy, Peabody, Livingston, Mirror, and Overseas Press Club awards, along with others less famous, and it is still an honor if you get one. Even if you are not yourself a recipient, being at the ceremony provides a lift.
John Darnton’s and my invocation of still to signify continuing quality carries the implication that this may not be as true in the years ahead. Based on the history of the past one hundred years or so, I’m going to assert that journalism and counterparts in nonfiction books will not be as undone as the pervasive gloom now predicts, contending with the real pressures of politics and business.
There was great investigative reporting in the “muckraker” era of Nellie Bly, Lincoln Steffens, Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, et al., written with style and flair to attract an audience. But many of the leading twentieth-century publications of Henry Luce, William Randolph Hearst, and Colonel Robert McCormick were so infused with ideological bias and questionable goals that they would be compatible with today’s hard-right outlets online and on the air.
Under the broad banner of investigative and explanatory journalism, the awards recognize extraordinary work, and it is especially encouraging when so many of the winners come from places like ProPublica, the Marshall Project, Mississippi Today, and the San Antonio Express-News, which won a Polk Award this year for Sara DiNatale’s four part series on “door-to-door scam artists who lied about energy savings, promised nonexistent rebates, and sometimes left customers with gaping holes in their roofs,” in Darnton’s description.
Marc Duvoisin, the editor-in-chief of the newspaper, gathered his editors and described how the Polk Awards “honor ‘intrepid, resourceful, and influential’ reporting and how that credo reminds of the high purpose that should lie at the heart of our work, and how that purpose can be served with even modest acts of journalism that tell citizens things they might not otherwise know. I wasn’t sure how my little speech would be received, but I was gratified to see looks of wonder.”
By instinct, journalists are skeptical of earnestness and of any predilection for the positive. Nonetheless, Bill Grueskin, a stalwart of journalism’s upper echelons, has revived after a decade the Columbia Journalism Review’s “Darts & Laurels”feature, intending to emphasize the laurels.
“Here we are in 2025, at a moment when journalists under far more legal and financial pressure than we could have imagined in 2015, while the need for independent, fact-based reporting has never been greater … It’s not hard to find a boneheaded story, headline, tweet, or editorial call. Why, I’ve been known to do it myself every now and then. At the same time, there’s a lot of great journalism out there, much of which is coming from non-MSM, non-Beltway news organizations, from Wired to Government Executive to Mississippi Today.”
Grueskin is asking for submissions at laurelsanddarts@cjr.org.
Here are examples from a early list:
Yes, much of significance has been lost in these tumultuous times. Great metro dailies across the country that were once as important to their region as major league sports teams are depleted or gone altogether. There is an overall job loss count that is undeniable. Applications to Columbia’s journalism school are down, a discouraging data point.
Jelani Cobb, Columbia’s dean, reportedly had to warn students on visas to be careful what they write lest they get crosswise with Donald Trump’s deportation zeal.
Yet the momentum of hundreds of aspiring start-ups in cities as large as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles and hyper-locals in smaller places is genuine. The formidable challenge — to be dealt with in next week’s piece — is how to pay for them and make them sustainable. And how to attract a readership of scale that is willing to pay for what it can get free. Advertising-supported media (broadcast television, most memorably) had and still attracts the largest audiences.
In the streaming age, with the continuing need to add subscribers, Netflix and YouTube, among others, are betting big that viewers will accept advertising in exchange for a lower price.
Awards are a recognition and celebration of good work. If they meet the standards of people like John Darnton and Bill Grueskin, let’s accept the merits as they are and, with determination, do better. One characteristic that journalists have always had is support for the underdogs.
Media underdogs unite!
Next Week: Serious but Definitely Not Hopeless: Devising the New Business Model
In the Soviet era, the Kremlin blocked the Russian-language service of the Voice of America with heavy static. People still found a way to get it on shortwave radio. When Mikhail Gorbachev ended the jamming, the change was celebrated as a symbol of the Soviet Union’s social transformation.
Years before, when I was a correspondent in Moscow in the mid-1970s, a Russian (who turned out to be a KGB informant on dissidents) gave me an official report from the Ministry of Meat and Milk Production showing how the content of sausages was being degraded with fillers. This was a ploy to maintain my interest in him, but the document was genuine.
I wrote a story that ran deep inside the Washington Post. As so many of my pieces were, it was played back on the Russian language service of VOA.
The next morning our housekeeper, Irina, a stalwart for Post correspondents and their families, asked my wife, Susan, “Can it really be our sausages are so bad?”
This was the only time she revealed that she listened to VOA, but sausage content was clearly an exceptionally serious matter for her.
Playbacks of stories from American newspapers and magazines on VOA — and its counterparts across the Soviet bloc, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty — were a welcome glimpse of the free press, which of course the Kremlin media was not.
In our three years in the USSR, I often encountered exclamations when in introducing myself to Russians as Osnos of the Post. “You’re Osnos? I thought you would be older.”
After all, that was fifty years ago. The radio had made me, in a way, well known.
Now Donald Trump has done what the Soviet Union could not: shut down VOA.
Watching Donald Trump ride the wave of The Art of the Deal in the 1980s as the book’s editor, I was amazed by his self-discipline, especially when it came to alcohol. We did not exchange confidences, but I was told his older brother Fred’s descent into alcoholism and his death at age forty-two had a profound effect on him.
In the orbit of cigar smokers, I never saw him smoke. And he was disgusted by detritus. The only time I saw him lose his temper was when a freelance photographer glued black garbage bags on the ceiling of his Trump Tower office.
He threw him out.
On the day in 1990 when The Wall Street Journal reported he was billions of dollars in debt, I was flying east from Las Vegas with him on his private jet. He canoodled with his paramour Marla Maples, seemingly without a care in the world.
So far in this second presidency, Trump’s personal flailing and blustering demeanor are its main characteristics. Whatever else is on display, it is not self-discipline.
This series is about people who while fully aware of the upheavals underway in so many institutions —government, media, education, business and NGOs — have personalities that enable them to confront challenges which have engulfed this era — and get things done.
In 1992, Lev Sviridov was ten years old. His mother, Alexandra, worked on a Russian investigative television show called Top Secret, exposing KGB agents in the early post-Soviet years. After an apparent poisoning and other harassments, her colleagues urged her to leave the country for short-term fellowships in the U.S. and Canada.
A year later, Alexandra and Lev were scheduled to return to Moscow when an unsuccessful coup was launched against Boris Yeltsin with tanks in the streets. Lev says he pleaded with his mother for them to stay in the United States. He still has their unused Aeroflot tickets.
For the past twelve years, Lev Sviridov has been the director of Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, in the City University of New York system. Each year 120 applicants are chosen for guaranteed free tuition, extensive counseling, and other benefits. The acceptance rate, he says, is less than 10 percent.
Overall, Hunter enrolls about 17,000 undergraduates.
Sviridov was an acquaintance when he invited me to interview Macaulay applicants in tandem with undergraduates, and to rate the applicants’ potential. To get an interview, high school seniors should have an excellent academic record. To be selected, they need to be exceptional.
Being a college administrator in this contentious era is a high-risk career. Sviridov seems to relish the job, and the students seem to return the enthusiasm.
(Caveat: I guarantee I could uncover grumbling at Macaulay, but the upside prevails. When every institution seems to be grappling with the impact of political clashes and social norms, something of it is doubtless happening at Macaulay, but it is not — nearly as I can judge — the dominant mood as it is elsewhere.)
************************
With the encouragement of well-intentioned American friends, Lev was accepted with a scholarship to the private Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Riverdale, where, he says, he was miserable — an immigrant, economically and socially consigned to the minority outsider group of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.
(Though the Sviridovs have a Jewish background, they were not part of the wave of Soviet Jewish emigration of the 1970s and ’80s. Their passports listed their nationality as “Russian” and not “Jewish,” the case with those earlier arrivals, an identifier they understood to reflect a deep-seated Russian antisemitism.)
After a period of what Sviridov calls essentially homelessness and couch-surfing, Alexandra won a $5,000 grant from the literary estate of Lillian Hellman, enough to rent a comfortable apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, which Lev describes as “transformational.”
When it came to college, Lev chose City College not wanting, he says, to repeat the sense of exclusion he felt at Fieldston. And there he flourished. As a chemistry major he received a Barry Goldwater Scholarship, intended to courage a career in research science. He was also elected president of the student body.
On a web search during his senior year, he encountered the Rhodes Scholarships and noticed that the application deadline was a week away. The Rhodes at Oxford has always been associated with elite status — traditionally for “athletes, scholars and gentlemen.”
By then, the Rhodes was co-educational. And Sviridov was a scholar. But an athlete?
For more than twenty years, Lev has been a regular in fast-pitch softball games in Central Park. “I thought that if I could just get in the room for an interview, I’d be fine,” he said, which happened. Lev Sviridov was finding his way.
He spent four years at Oxford, earning a DPhil in inorganic chemistry. To supplement his scholarship, he worked as an assistant at the London office of the law firm Skadden Arps, where the managing partner, the legendary Joe Flom, had also attended City College.
Returning to New York, Lev was working in a CCNY lab when he caught the eye of Dr. Judith Friedlander, a senior administrator at Hunter, and the college’s president, Jennifer Raab. They told him that the director of the Macaulay program at Hunter was departing, and Sviridov’s appearances at several City University public events had led them to offer him the job.
That was 2014.
I asked him when he had started truly feeling as if he was an American. He replied: In 2004, when he received his citizenship — twelve years after his arrival.
“And your mother?” In 2022, he said, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, and she finally accepted that she could never return to Moscow.
************************
Macaulay Honors College was founded in 2001 and was named after William E. Macaulay, a CCNY graduate who was chairman of the First Reserve Corporation, a major private equity fund. In 2006, he donated $30 million to City University to endow scholarships and other student funding for the Honors College program and to finance the purchase of a building at 35 West 67th Street to be the hub for the Macaulay programs at eight colleges in the CUNY system. Hunter’s program is the largest. Macaulay died in 2019.
Lev’s role at Macaulay, aside from leadership, is, in a word, “mentoring.” The accepted students, he says tactfully, tend to arrive as “diamonds in the rough,” with accomplishments and a readiness to take on the next phase of their lives.
They are given a senior counselor with the expectation that this person will be advising them for the full four years. One of these counselors, Charlotte Glasser, described her efforts as providing “social capital” — the capacity to accommodate the social, economic, and cultural challenges they will face as they evolve from adolescence.
Glasser said: “Most of these kids come from large bustling public schools. Many balance additional jobs, research labs, and volunteering as they earn straight A’s, communicating by subway long hours every day … They navigate the additional challenges of a public university, while at the same time, exploring the many opportunities in New York … that will fine tune their academic trajectories and career goals.”
I have no idea whether any of the high schoolers I interviewed will be accepted, but they all had a quality once described to me as SWAN — smart, works hard, ambitious, nice. At the end of every interview, I extended a fist bump and a comment about how impressed I was.
Lev Sviridov’s background qualifies him to closely identify with the students and gain their trust when disputes arise — as they did in the spring of 2024 over the Israel-Hamas war. Were there tensions? Yes. Did they create conflicts like those that cost the presidents of so many universities their jobs? No.
Sviridov has a belief in the students who make it to Macaulay Honors College — and based on his own experience, a belief in himself. That is how he is so able to get things done.
*******************
Gina Raimondo, the subject of the first installment of this series, and Lev Sviridov were both Rhodes Scholars. Established in 1902 by the will of the British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes and located at Oxford University, the program has always been identified with privilege and controversial exclusiveness. But that has changed over the years. Raimondo and Sviridov both were high achievers from modest backgrounds.
I heard Chelsea Clinton characterize the modern Rhodes well when she told her father, Bill (himself a recipient), that she would not apply for one. Were she chosen, she said, it would be for what she already was, the daughter of a president and an outstanding student at Stanford. The fellowships should go not for what the applicants already are, but to support them to become what they could be.
She paid her own way at Oxford.
Jeff Bezos’s announcement on Elon Musk’s X that henceforth the Washington Post’s editorials and its opinions section will be devoted exclusively to issues of personal liberties and free markets means that the enterprise will reflect only his personal values and vision – or else. David Shipley, the opinions editor, resigned.
Bezos wrote:
I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning: I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job. I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity. I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction. I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void. Jeff.
The Post’s situation has been a matter of mostly fretful attention since the rumors and then the revelation that it was losing money, the upheavals around Will Lewis’s hiring as publisher and especially since Bezos killed the presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris and the now departing Shipley’s refusal to run an Ann Telnaes’s editorial cartoon mocking Bezos’s obsequious pivot to the Trump era.
What now?
The endorsement flap cost the Post 250,000 subscribers. Whatever else this announcement about the opinions section will do, it will not solve the financial issues – and will almost certainly make them worse.
So take the business crisis off the table. Bezos paid $250 million for the Post and whatever he has invested since is a pittance of what he can afford.
Jeff, reap the losses you incur, and you can do whatever you want with the Washington Post.
This bottom line is ignominious. However, it is the result of what Jeff Bezos’s ownership now demands.
Ronald Reagan’s victory in the 1980 presidential election was a landslide. He won forty-four states to Jimmy Carter’s six. The Republicans flipped twelve Senate seats, gaining a majority for the first time since 1955, and added thirty-four seats in the House, although the Democrats still held a majority.
Because of the scale of his win and his avowedly conservative commitment to overhaul government spending and social policies, the “Reagan Revolution” became the term to describe what would be happening in his administration — the reversal, finally, of the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
What actually happened in the early months of that year was recounted in William Greider’s Atlantic Monthly article, “The Education of David Stockman” in which the thirty-four-year-old director of the Office of Management and Budget portrayed to Greider (then an assistant managing editor of the Washington Post), the process by which the revolution confronted the reality of politics.
The article was a sensation. After it ran, Stockman ruefully acknowledged that President Reagan had taken him to the “woodshed” but did not fire him for sharing the truth. Reagan’s lofty commitment to cutting the size of government never happened; instead, military spending was increased and the national debt soared into the multiple trillions. It was only when Paul Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve imposed high interest rates to drive the country into recession that inflation dropped to acceptable levels.
(An aside: The assassination attempt against Reagan on March 30, 1981, which left him badly wounded — combined with his quip to a despairing Nancy, “Honey, I forgot to duck” — provided a positive personal aura that largely endured for his two terms.)
As the scale and style of Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s intentions have unfolded in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency — taking on the Constitution and the federal workforce with a vengeance — I wondered what Stockman now thought of those objectives. I subscribed to David Stockman’s Contra Corner (a pricey $365 annual subscription) and found that the one-time boy wonder is now fierce in his judgments, data driven, and scary in his predictions, wherever you are on the political spectrum.
Here is an excerpt from February 10:
“There has a been decent outpouring of good stuff…bulls eye hits like the Donald’s ixnay on paper straws, the penny, the global climate hoax, DEI idiocy, green energy boondoggles…the rat hole of waste at USAID. Beyond that, turning the enormously gifted and committed Elon Musk loose on the Deep State bureaucracy is in itself a remarkable stroke for sanity…
“Unfortunately, we’re getting a lot of foul balls in the form of random attacks on the US trade accounts, the US labor force and America’s already wobbly fiscal foundations. And that’s to say nothing of utter stink bombs like annexing Greenland and Canada, standing up a Sovereign Wealth Fund, retaking the Panama Canal and occupying and rebuilding a Palestinian-free Gaza Strip….
“Most of this list…is going to lead to big time trouble that is almost impossible for fully imagine. Particularly the Donald’s unhinged wars on imports and immigrants could actually turn an already weak, debt-entombed national economy into a veritable basket case.”
Take that, dear subscriber.
So, the Reagan Revolution’s objectives have become the mayhem of Trump and Musk. This is the French Revolution of 1789 becoming the Committee of Public Safety, renamed for our time as the Department of Government Efficiency. You may remember that Robespierre and his cohort were eventually executed.
The fate of Trump and Musk and the United States is at stake. And speaking of stakes, whose heads will eventually roll as the consequences of what they are doing are fully realized?
*************************
One of the most brutal (cruel will also work) of the Trump-Musk actions is the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development. USAID was established by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to direct and fund foreign assistance programs in a variety of areas, including health, education, governance, economic development, environmental protection, and disaster relief. In the 2023 fiscal year, USAID’s “total obligations” were $43.4 billion.
The agency’s name was immediately removed from its headquarters, letter by letter, and nearly all of the more than ten thousand employees defenestrated. Our friends with sons and daughters who have made notable careers in places like the Departent of Justice and USAID see their lives in shambles.
The most vituperative public response to what was happening with USAID came from Andrew Natsios, who was USAID administrator in the George W. Bush years and who describes himself as, avowedly, a Republican conservative. On the PBS News Hour he said: “It’s not a takeover. It’s a destruction of the agency.” He added that people at USAID and the agency’s grant recipients are “appalled.” And then he went on CBS’s 60 Minutes and said it again and more.
Natsios said that each administration would move USAID policies from “left” to “right” as standard practice. But the pivots in American social and political policies in every respect have become more pronounced in recent years, undermining effective change.
Trump-Musk is another scale altogether.
A Financial Times poll last week found that almost “60 percent of [American] respondents agreed that funds set aside for humanitarian causes were ‘wasted on corruption or administration fees.’ Only 12 percent disagreed with that proposition.”
Whatever problems foreign assistance has had — and there are doubtless experts from all perspectives on these — the undisputed fact is that since the 1960s, virtually every meaningful measure of global livelihood has improved. World Bank and United Nations numbers report that global poverty has decreased by more than a billion people over that span.
The rhetoric around crises is so overused that it has largely lost its meaning. But the summary abolition of USAID’s programs is a crisis and cruel.
The Reagan Revolution happened forty-five years ago. In Reagan’s era, the main menace was communism. Then after 9/11 it became terrorism. In the 2024 election cycle, “woke” posed the perceived threat to the American way of life.
If you or anyone you know is around in 2070, ask them what the Trump-Musk period accomplished.
*************************************
As this Substack enters its fourth year, it becomes Peter Osnos PublicAffairs Press, adapting for the digital age the name Morris B. Schnapper called his independent Washington D.C., enterprise from the 1930s to the 1980s and featuring the eagle he affixed to communications.
In the coming months, this series will feature people of notable accomplishment. The focus is on how they manage to get hard things done, rather than just what those were.
My objective is to decipher the qualities of personality and character that overcome obstacles of logistics, competing interests and constituencies, media criticism and funding to reach their goals.
These successes do not generally come with fame and fortune. In fact, they are especially impressive because the rewards are not as tangible as celebrity or money.
One quality I have identified is “oblivious confidence,” an inherent sense that achievement is possible — and that arrogance and bullying are not the same traits as self-confidence, in fact quite the opposite. I have a list of people I’d like to write about who have agreed to let me do so. They are all busy, so it takes time to connect.
Gina Raimondo, whom I interviewed on her last day as secretary of commerce in the Biden administration, is the first in this series.
*********************
Gina Raimondo has a resume that qualifies her as one of the elites that in our era are considered out of touch with the needs of real people. Harvard BA. Yale JD. Rhodes scholarship. Governor of Rhode Island. Secretary of commerce.
But Raimondo’s story shows the fallacy of assumptions. She comes from a working-class, Roman Catholic, Italian-American family in Rhode Island, and her accrued status was unquestionably earned through determination, smarts, and an inherent belief in herself.
There is also this physical reality. In a crowded room of big shots and large egos, Raimondo would not stand out. She is reported to be five-foot-two. At fifty-three she has a style that is energized and youthful. Her manner of presentation — by her own account — is not bombastic. So the impact of what she says comes from its contents and not her swagger.
After her education and years in venture capital, Raimondo ran for and was elected to the position of Rhode Island general treasurer, where she confronted the state’s badly performing public employee pension system — and which meant trimming benefits to recipients until the reorganized investment policies showed a sustainable return. To be an elected Democrat taking on state and local employees guaranteed pushback, and there was.
Once the inevitable controversy and lawsuits were dealt with, Rhode Island’s Retirement Security Act was enacted with bipartisan support and went into effect in June 2015, after she had been elected governor in a three-way race, with 41 percent of the vote.
I first encountered Raimondo in 2018 on Stephen Dubner’s “Freakonomics Radio” program in an interview called “How to Be a Modern Democrat — and Win.” I arranged to visit her in Providence to pitch an idea for a book about the role of a governor as CEO of a state. She was too busy to write it — and the book idea of comparing management of a state and a business is still out there.
Raimondo’s name came up during the 2020 Biden campaign for one administration job or another, which turned out to be secretary of commerce, the position she held for the full four-year term. Here is a succinct summary of her work, which appeared in an Associated Press profile:
“She has been integral to efforts to reshape the U.S. economy. She managed infrastructure money to eventually connect everyone to the internet, approved the funding of new factories and research sites for advanced computer chips and set up the government’s ground rules for developing artificial intelligence.”
And in an age when the potential for criticism is charged by polarized politics and free-for-all social media, nearly as I can attest, Raimondo emerged with a reputation for effectiveness — and personally unscathed.
************************
Asking someone to explain themselves can be an invitation to earnestness. And I heard expressions of “faith,” “self-discipline,” the ability to “focus, obsessively” on the task at hand. But how, I wanted to know, did she handle the frustrations of political obstacles when policies she supported were being stalled or even dismantled?
That’s when I got a sense of her feisty determination. “When I hear people say, ‘You know I agree with you,’ but I need to ….”
“What kind of coward are you?” is Raimondo’s standard riposte.
Because Raimondo’s commitment has always been focused on the issue at hand and not her personal glory, she was able to maintain composure with opponents who would have been glad to make her angry. Whatever bureaucratic cut and thrust there doubtless has been, the Department of Commerce has been the source of none of the leaks that in Washington are the preferred means of revenge or retaliation (or at least none that my assiduous search online could find).
Another characteristic that Raimondo cited is personal organization. This approach was most notably framed in a now-famous 2014 commencement speech at the University of Texas by Admiral William McRaven that became known by its title and later a major bestselling book called Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…and Maybe the World.
McRaven’s exhortation was that the way you start your day — by making your bed rather than leaving it in disarray — is a metaphor for fulfilling a broader plan.
When I asked Raimondo if she was familiar with McRaven’s concept, I didn’t have to explain.
“One hundred percent,” she replied.
I recently read that Raimondo, who married Andrew Moffit in 2001 and has two children, intended to stay in Washington until June, when her son will finish high school. To my question about parenting as a leadership tool, she deflected. Raimondo does not promote her family as a political asset.
Combining public visibility with personal privacy is another aspect of being effective in Raimondo’s case. She has certainly gotten her share of recognition as a powerful woman — in the Time Magazine 100, for instance. But I’m guessing that except in Rhode Island and Democratic Party circles she is not famous.
I can’t say I know Gina Raimondo beyond our encounters in Providence or by phone — but from a distance and after making my rounds of reporting, she certainly has been getting it done.
