My first boss in journalism was Pete Hamill. He was the first person I ever knew who had a library in his bathroom. He also had a dog named Chekov and an old manual typewriter in an upstairs office at his Brooklyn home. Sometimes I would sit in the next room, organizing his old newspaper columns into files while he typed on deadline. He said that he always kept the rhythm of Gene Krupa’s “Lyonnaise Potatoes and Some Porkchops” in his head. But to me, it sounded like the machine guns of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. When he was done, you’d hear paper getting ripped off the roller and his voice calling out, “Hey, come in here and stop me from making a fool of myself.” And if you were lucky enough to get called in, you’d see music in plain black type with holes punched out of the o’s.

I was also working in the early 1980s when the transition was made from typewriters to computer keyboards and newsrooms began sounding, in Tom Wolfe’s description, like tiles being moved around in a massive mahjong tournament. Typesetting became faster and more efficient. The Wite-Out business was surely never the same. But did it make anyone’s writing better? I don’t know.

Now a new writing revolution is upon us. Or maybe the battle is already over. High school teachers and college professors report they rarely see student essays untouched by some form of artificial intelligence. AI-cheating has become so prevalent that Princeton dropped its honor code. Reading and writing scores have been deteriorating at accelerating rates, while data centers suck energy from our grids and tax breaks from our political system. Even some of the major tech companies say they’re overwhelmed by AI slop. It’s hard not to be overwhelmed by a sense of learned helplessness that comes from letting machines do your thinking for you.

At least some people are starting to think constructively about alternatives. Several colleges are bringing back the Blue Book Exam, forcing students to take timed tests in the classrooms with pen and paper to eliminate digital malfeasance. Sales for the booklets are up 80 percent since 2023.

Like most people, my memories of taking these exams are not fond ones. My handwriting is what some self-appointed experts have called “ugh, really not good” and the process of inscribing is laborious. But over the years, I’ve come to realize that labor has often been a salvation. I have often written 400 pages on a computer, and then discovered the real work only begins when I print them out and go over them with a pen in hand. I find myself scribbling new sentences in the margins, then character insights on the back of the print-out, and finally whole chapters on blank paper because holding an actual writing implement has forced me to dig in deeper. Eventually, I turned to writing entire drafts in longhand.

But most people don’t write for a living, and don’t have time to bother with handwriting anyway. In fact, there’s a sound argument to be made that most people barely have to write anything by hand anymore, including their own signature, and never really learned penmanship in school, so how the hell would you expect us to suddenly turn into a nation of earnest scribes with feathered quills in our inkwells?

So let me meet you halfway. Bring back the typewriter.

Don’t try to tell me that your kids don’t know how to type anymore. Anyone who can send an email or a write a dumb-ass social media message knows how to put fingers to keys. Some of the young’uns may even appreciate the steampunk technology of a well-oiled Underwood or a Royal. You say you can’t strike the keys hard enough to print a letter? Fine, use an electric model. Can’t deal with typewriter ribbons and rollers? Okay, before the internet there were word processors that plugged straight into printers.

But don’t give me any crap about “just block the internet.” Because you and I know the little buggers – and the old ones – will always find a way around that.

The other day, a friend of mine told me about an interesting meeting he had with a wealthy tech firm. Its leaders said that every week they saw slick AI-enhanced “pitch decks” from young people seeking funding, productions of such ambition and opulence to make Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey look like a high school student’s film. Naturally, the tech guys said, they became so inured that they asked the presenters to turn off the computers and just talk about their projects in real time. Nine out of ten couldn’t do it.

It’s hard not to picture a future that looks a lot like the end of the Pixar film Wall-E, with bloated, flaccid humans barely able to launch their atrophied bodies out of their reclining chairs or avert their eyes from their personalized screens.

Maybe we’re already there, and it’s too late for some of us to turn back. Or maybe some of us can still make the older machines work for us. Wake up and smell the ink! Free your mind from Open AI and all the other digital tyrants. Dust off the old technology. If you can’t handle a pen, raw dog it with a keyboard that clatters. Fight the future! Bring the noise! Think for yourself. And for God’s sake, don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Viva Smith-Corona!

Nine months ago, Zohran Mamdani got himself elected mayor of New York City. That’s enough time to conceive and give birth to a kid. And it’s enough time to ask how he’s doing so far.

When Mamdani was voted in, the Republican establishment and many of the city’s business leaders became hysterical with visions of the Apocalypse. From reading the New York Post, you would have thought the entire North American continent was about tilt south from all the bags of money tumbling down toward Florida and Texas. A mass business exodus was predicted. Kathryn Wilde, the longtime head of the pro-business Partnership for New York, was reportedly forced out for being insufficiently aggressive toward the young socialist mayor. City tax revenues would bottom out, because top earners would flee the brutal new burdens they were going to be yoked with.

But nothing like that has happened. Yet. American Express is still building a $6 billion headquarters project in Lower Manhattan for 21,000 employees. Anthropic is doubling its local workforce and leasing a 16 story building for them. JP Morgan has neglected to empty its new $4 billion headquarters in midtown. And after a long delay, Mamdani appointed a registered adult as head for the city’s Economic Development Corporation – Anthony Shorris, a veteran of city government since 1979, well-respected in the business community, and someone I know a little personally.

The crime wave predicted by the doomsayers has also stubbornly refused to materialize. The overall crime rate has dropped 5.8 percent for the six months of this year, reaching historic lows. Murders – which the police can’t really prevent ahead of time – are down 24.7 percent. Robberies are also down by 11.9 percent, burglaries dropped by 15.8 percent, and auto theft declined nearly 12 percent. Mamdani can’t claim credit for all that. It’s largely the hard work of people in the communities and the NYPD, which the mayor-to-be characterized as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety” just a few years ago.

On the other hand, the mayor hasn’t screwed that up either by handing criminals a get-out-jail-free card, as predicted. He’s kept on Jessica Tisch as his police commissioner, helping to stabilize a department whose leadership had gone rogue during the Eric Adams years – with the commissioner’s twin brother accused of openly shaking down club owners for bribes and the chief of department demanding anal sex from subordinates.

My personal theory is that keeping Tisch on has had the added effect of somewhat restraining the Trump Administration’s impulses to unleash ICE agents on city residents (though there have been raids and plainly illegal detentions). I believe that Trump, who was at best a third-tier developer in the city, is still cowed by the status of the Tisch family in the real estate world.

It’s also possible that the president, as longtime starfucker, is impressed by a young mayor who got the biggest voter turnout since the Lindsay era and became a worldwide name overnight – while avoiding a head-on confrontation with Trump himself.

A lot of this is luck. No one could have predicted that New York Knicks would win their first championship in 53 goddamn years soon after Mamdani took office. But good luck is the residue of design, and the mayor did not miss his moment. He announced a victory parade as soon as OG Anunoby grabbed the final rebound and gave a rousing speech at City Hall, which had the delightful effect of aggravating the team’s much-unloved owner James Dolan.

But there have been false starts and errors, forced and unforced. Mamdani’s campaign promise to provide free childcare for all is going to cost $5 billion more than he originally estimated, according to the Center for New York City Affairs. His pledge to make city buses free has also gone unfulfilled, largely because he never had the power to fulfill it – the MTA is not a city agency. But in the meantime, a growing number of passengers – perhaps encouraged by the mayor’s position – have stopped paying for their rides. A more practical plan to open a handful of city-owned grocery stores is doing better, despite some opposition from local business operators. But the first of the stores won’t open until late next year in the Bronx.

So okay – Rome wasn’t refinanced and rebuilt in a day! And as Mamdani quoted his vanquished rival’s father in his victory speech: you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. But some of the recent prose has been not just questionable, but fugazi.

It’s fair to say the mayor had a mandate to make this a more affordable city for the working poor. He said he was going to raise $500 million with a “pied-a-terre tax” on the “richest of the rich,” who owned luxury second homes in the city that mostly sat empty. He made an eye-catching video outside the building where hedge fund owner Ken Griffin has a $238 million apartment.

When Griffin complained bitterly about being singled out, it was hard to be sympathetic. Fat cats are rarely shy about using their wealth to gain political advantage and evade regulation; payback was long overdue.

It was a surprise, then, when 17,000 New Yorkers, who are not the richest of the rich, and who in fact primarily live in the city, got stiffly-worded letters warning they could be subject to the same tax. Some people I know (ahem) received notices assessing their property as much as 50 percent higher than its true value and threatening an eye-watering surcharge, unless the owners could prove within four weeks they merited an exemption. At the same time, the city included those homes when it published a list of 900,000 properties which might be targets.

The backlash was immediate. To its credit, the administration quickly extended its deadline and was just as quick to accept some proof of exemptions. But it was a sloppy and unnecessary mistake, which cost the mayor a measure of good will in some quarters.

But the other issue with Mamdani is not a bug, but very much a feature.

On July 22, Mamdani released a two-minute video, with dramatic music, saying he had just learned he lacked the legal authority to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal, but was now calling on the federal government of the United States to execute the warrant on behalf of the International Criminal Court.

The mayor’s clip got 91 million views on X, and 108 million on Instagram. I agree that Netanyahu is a war criminal who belongs in the Hague, but I thought the mayor’s video was disappointing, performative bullshit. With your indulgence, I’d like to pick my way across the minefield here.

Let’s first give the mayor his due. His roots are in the Pro-Palestinian movement and his opposition to Israel was a central part of his campaign. Those issues are an important part of what attracted young voters to him, while the rest of the Democratic Party has become a toxic brand nationally. Of course, Mamdani has every right to speak his mind about the 73,000 Palestinians killed in the Gaza war, as many as 21,000 of them children. Those numbers are shock to the human conscience and a permanent stain on Israel’s history.

But long before he made his theatrical video, the mayor knew he had no standing to make an arrest. In fact, he knew he lacked authority when he told the Times a few days before that his team was still looking at ways to execute the warrant. And the idea that this very clever young man believed he could convince Donald Trump to arrest the Israeli prime minister was a little hard to take seriously.

“Well, fine,” you might say. The mayor was signaling to loyal supporters that his priorities remain unchanged. And so what if it was a performance? Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s greatest mayor, was about as performative as you can get, with his chest-thumping anti-Hitler speeches and reading funnies to the kids on the radio during a newspaper delivery driver strike. Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani weren’t exactly shrinking violets either.

But here’s the thing: when the ADL and others jumped all over Mamdani before he even got to City Hall, accusing him of being a closet antisemite fomenting Jew-hatred, I said, “give the guy a chance.” I’d still like to believe the mayor’s heart is in the right place, but I’m giving him a little side-eye these days.

As Michael Powell pointed out several months back in The Atlantic, Mamdani has shown a willingness to moderate many of his other positions. But not on Israel. In fact, he’s spent a great deal of time and political capital on the issue that is obviously far beyond his purview as the mayor of New York. He called the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee “monsters” and successfully backed a slate of anti-Zionist candidates in congressional races, including Darializa Avila Chevalier, who, like other progressives, has rejected Israel’s existence as a state and who attended an anti-Israeli rally on October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas killed 1200 Jews.

Now, let’s just be clear: opposing Israel and its policies doesn’t make you an antisemite. A Washington Post poll from last year showed that 61 percent of American Jews believe Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza and nearly 40 percent believe its actions were genocidal. But as the mayor certainly knows, a lot of people at both ends of the political spectrum do not make the distinction between Israel and “the Jews.” Netanyahu encourages that merging, but so does the person who wrote the “fuck off murduring Jewish cunts” graffiti that I saw recently.

I recognize Mamdani faces a kind of balancing act. On the one hand, he is the leader of an insurgent political movement that wants to see Israel cut off from U.S. military funding and punished not only for Gaza, but for tolerating violent land grabs by anti-Palestinian settlers in the West Bank. On the other hand, he is mayor of a city with more than a million Jews, and hate crimes against Jews in NYC have ticked up 8.5 percent so far this year – which isn’t a lot, but isn’t nothing either. I’m not saying those crimes happened because the mayor called AIPAC “monsters” or endorsed anti-Zionists candidates. But it does make you listen to his fiery anti-Israeli comments in a different context, especially when he strongly opposes Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Look, I’m still rooting for the guy. I don’t think he’s personally antisemitic. He does reach out to community leaders and does have Jews in prominent positions in his administration. He’s also the most charismatic Democratic politician to come along since Barack Obama – though, to be honest, that’s like being the most reasonable patient in the Bellevue psych ward.

I give him mixed grade so far. Mixed is pretty good in a city with as many competing and conflicting groups as New York. Walk down Coney Island Avenue on any given day and you’ll pass shops owned by at least a dozen people who would’ve been killing each other in their home territories. The likes of Rudy Giuliani, Ed Koch, and Eric Adams couldn’t quite wreck that balance. Here’s hoping that Zohran Mamdani doesn’t blow it either.

Near the end of his life, George Orwell wrote, “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” That is one reason to stop looking at reflecting pools. But I was thinking about Orwell’s quote in the lead-up to the new movie version of The Odyssey, because every era gets the Odyssey it deserves.

Like the stories of Jesus and Moses, the tale of Odysseus never really goes away. There is something both eternal and adaptable about it. Any sentient human being who’s lived long enough feels they’ve been past whirlpools and through the legs of the Cyclops, when not being waylaid by lotus-eaters and almost turned into a pig.

When Alexander Pope translated Homer’s poem in 1726, he turned it into an Enlightenment tale of manners (buzz kill!). James Joyce took the bones of the thing and melted them into the surreal consciousness streams of Ulysses. Robert Fitzgerald and Richmond Lattimore brought a battle-weary Odysseus home a couple of decades after World War II. Robert Fagles added Technicolor splashes in 1996. And Emily Wilson, while casting feminist aspersions on her predecessors, gave us a very 21^st century – and commercially successful – translation in 2017.

So why shouldn’t Christopher Nolan do a movie version? The previous film adaptations haven’t set the world on its ear. There was a shlocky Kirk Douglas flick in 1955, a 1968 European TV miniseries that few saw, and a 1997 American TV version with Armand Assante and The Return in 2024 with Ralph Fiennes as a sinewy, bedraggled Odysseus taking on Penelope’s suitors. Spongebob Square Pants and the Coen brothers also borrowed from Homer. So why not Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway?

I haven’t always been a fan of Nolan’s films. I first liked the tricky labyrinth of Memento, but ultimately found it empty. The Dark Knight movies left me cold. I couldn’t make head or tail out of Interstellar and Inception. Dunkirk and Oppenheimer were finally about something, but not definitive.

The time is right for a new Odyssey. A lot of us feel like we’ve been through the fall of Troy over the past few years. Foundational values have crumbled. Our ship has gotten lost and the crew members are at each other’s throats. The one thing that many on the right and many on the left might agree is that we need to get back to Ithaca. We need to go home and find a place where we can at least exist in peace – even if some of us don’t want to co-exist with anyone who is different from us.

Nolan’s film acknowledges that yearning. A number of the characters in the film give voice to the idea that our world is badly broken. Zeus’s Law has been shattered by man’s war, honor has been betrayed, nature itself has turned against us. But Nolan’s world is not Homer’s world. It can’t be. The ancient Greeks’ view of life makes no sense to a mass modern audience. The presence of the gods in our daily lives, shaping our fates and judging our adherence to xenia – the ancient code of hospitality - would be box office poison.

Instead, Nolan and his collaborators have given us an odyssey that’s heading somewhere else. As others have noted, Matt Damon plays Odysseus as a kind of hard-working, conscience-stricken Everyman, not the man “of twists and turns” per the Fagles translation. I wondered if the script reflects the influence of Damon, a very intelligent man who has made good intelligent movies, in an era where intelligence is treated with increasing hostility. Damon’s Odysseus is a war general suffering from post-traumatic stress and torturing himself over not just the deaths of his comrades, but over atrocities he took part in during the sacking of Troy.

It’s a powerful notion, likely derived from books like Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and The Trials of Homecoming by Dr. Jonathan Shay. Shay, a psychiatrist who has treated many Vietnam war veterans, wrote eloquently and compassionately about the crippling effects “moral injury,” the distress experienced by soldiers who have been forced to violate their personal ethical codes. Those feelings of guilt, shame, and betrayal are familiar to any modern person who isn’t a sociopath. But they would not be recognizable to Homer or his listeners in the ancient world.

But so what? Pope’s Odysseus wasn’t exactly Homer’s and neither is Emily Wilson’s. The new movie gives us a “relatable” Odysseus and a visual rendering of his narrative that’s nearly the equivalent of Homer’s words. We get eye-popping versions of the Cyclops, Circe turning soldiers into pigs, golden-limbed Charlize Theron as Kalyso, and the Trojan Horse stuck in sand like the Statue of Liberty at the end of Planet of the Apes. As a cinematic updating of a story from antiquity, Nolan’s film is hard to beat. The controversy over the “woke” casting of the Black actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and the transgender actor Elliot Page as the Greek soldier Sinon are no big deal; both of them are fine and not in the film that much.

But the movie’s version of Odysseus runs straight into a thematic incoherence at the end. Our hero is supposedly so tortured by memories of the Trojan that he spends seven years getting addicted to memory-erasing lotus leaves on an island with Kalypso (yeah, right, that’s why you’d delay rushing back to pissed-off Anne Hathaway). But then he comes back to Ithaca and unleashes an unholy slaughter of Penelope’s suitors that’s presented as cathartic and restorative.

The filmmakers know there’s a contradiction here. After telling us to be horrified by the fate of one young Trojan woman in a flashback, they avoid talking about what famously happened to the slave girls Odysseus found sleeping with the suitors. In Homer’s version, Odysseus tells his son Telemachus to take them outside and hang them. Here is how Emily Wilson translates it: “their heads all in a row, / were strung up with the noose around their necks / to make their death an agony. They gasped, / feet twitching for a while, but not for long.”

You can understand why that scene might not appeal to audiences who enjoy Love Island. But then instead of returning to the throne and setting his house in order, Nolan’s Odysseus departs from Homer’s text with his queen and sails off for “the west,” a communion with the dead, while their son Telemachus is left to clean up his parents’ mess and somehow reunite a kingdom in shambles.

So we never really get back to Ithaca and the restored world. Instead, a wounded (dying?) Odysseus tells Penelope that their story will be sung “Because songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write.”

I guess Nolan is referring to the collapse of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Dark Age when writing disappeared for hundreds of years, anticipating we’re headed toward that kind of dimness in our era. I hope he’s not right. But sometimes I fear he is.

But maybe the best thing about Nolan’s Odyssey is that it’s sending people back to the original. Emily Wilson’s translation hit number 3 on the Amazon bestseller list after the film’s release and earlier versions are sailing briskly as well.

So when I walked out of the theater, I didn’t think about whether Odysseus was dying or even how well the movie is doing at the box office. I remembered the beggar who used to sit outside my local supermarket like one of Homer’s sages, calling out to passing children, “don’t forget to read a book.”

Many years ago, I saw something that I still can’t explain.

I was in Atlantic City, writing about the boxing promoter Don King, when I found myself in the new Taj Mahal Casino, surrounded by cheering gamblers. I turned to see what the fuss was about and there was Donald Trump, the casino’s owner, parading around his new mistress Marla Maples. It didn’t bother me that Trump was still married – that was Ivana Trump’s problem. What I couldn’t understand was why these customers, already been flushing away money at the one-armed bandits and craps tables, were waving dollars and clapping their hands for the guy who was fleecing them.

As everybody knows, Trump bankrupted his three casinos. Obviously, his business acumen has improved since then. As a second-term president, he’s brought in more than two billion dollars for his family businesses. Especially in the cryptocurrency racket, which his administration has effectively deregulated (It’s good to be the King). His personal memecoin $TRUMP brought in $636 million for the president, while close to a million of its investors lost a total of $3.81 billion.

Meanwhile, inflation has increased at the fastest rate in three years. So why is anyone still cheering?

More important, how is this America First?

The populist theme of the Trump Administration has always been putting the American Worker and the American Family first. But who was putting Italy First? France First? Latvia First? Yes, I know there are people on both sides of political aisle who now say it was Israel First for too long, but that relationship appears to be fracturing - a lot more needs to be said about it somewhere else. The point is, every mainstream politician always says it’s about America first.

But the Trump doctrine says that Trump always eats first, then his family, and then the oligarchs who support him – who were not always Americans first. I’m thinking of South African-born Elon Musk, who got federal regulators off his back, expanded his already-lucrative Space X contracts, and saw his stock prices skyrocket while getting to shape government to his advantage through DOGE. I’m thinking of German-born Peter Thiel, who has raked in billion dollar federal contracts for his companies Palantir and Anduril, and then showed his appreciation by decamping to Argentina. I’m thinking of the Saudis getting the U.S. fighter jets they’ve always wanted while doing deals with Jared Kushner. And the Kazakhs getting billions off a tungsten deal that also happens to benefit a company partly owned by Trump’s sons Donald Jr. and Eric.

Not that it’s all foreign-born beneficiaries. The Ellison family has done wonderfully well since the President put his thumb on the scale to help facilitate the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery deal – at the cost of journalistic independence and honesty. Technology companies like Sam Altman’s Open AI have also reaped the rewards for bending the knee. And let’s not forget Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, BlackRock, or any of the other corporate sucklings who’ve been getting fat the last few years.

Let’s not kid ourselves. The American people weren’t always served first under Democratic administrations. NAFTA happened under Bill Clinton, leaving the American worker well and truly screwed. Tons of people from the Obama and Biden administrations stuck their hands into the cash till as soon as they could.

What’s new is that the Thiels, Musks, Bezoses, and Zuckerbergs openly see themselves as having nothing in common with the Great Unwashed Masses – very much including the American public. They are a separate class, private citizens with no real allegiance to any nation. In fact, they believe they are more powerful than any nation. Musk, for example, has tried to forcefully interject himself into German electoral politics and stoke violent ethnic divisions in the UK. And it’s the interests of these overlords that Trump serves – Oligarchs First - after he gets his three scoops of ice cream for himself.

I remember that when Marla Maples walked by me that night at the Taj Mahal, through the wreathes of cigarette smoke from people gambling away their kids’ college tuitions, she smiled and said, “expect the unexpected.” On this, she was incorrect. Everyone should have known all along: the house always wins and everyone else is a sucker.

Golf is the President’s game. He owns courses all over the world, and seems happiest lording it over his cronies and CEOs on the green. Tennis is the sport of the suburbs and the country club crowd. But basketball, as the writer Pete Axthelm put it, is the city game. Every neighborhood, no matter how run-down, has a rusty hoop and a patch of asphalt. You don’t even need a net. If you can heave a ball through the ring even just once, you can delude yourself into thinking you could be LeBron James or Steph Curry.

It’s easy to lose forget that when an endorsement can net a billion dollars and the courtside seats at Madison Square Garden look like the modern aristocracy and cost as much as tuition at Harvard. But the New York Knicks just reminded us it doesn’t have to be that way. I was on the subway right after the team’s miracle comeback in Game 4 of the NBA Finals, and I saw people high-fiving and shaking hands across class lines, race lines, and gender lines in a way that that I haven’t witnessed since 9/11.

“It was like a happy blackout,” my friend Denis Hamill said.

Now they’ve done something I’d given up hope of seeing: they’ve brought back the NBA championship to the city after 53 years. And they’ve done it by representing the best of us. Every sports team has a character. The 1927 Yankees had Murderer’s Row, including the Olympians Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. The Dallas Cowboys of the 1970s had a brutal, Tom Landry efficiency. The Showtime Lakers, led by Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, had speed, flash, and dominance.

But the current Knicks line-up has a kind of flawed humanity that reflects the city that surrounds Madison Square Garden.

The superstar Jalen Brunson had nights during the NBA Finals when it seemed he could barely throw the ball in the ocean, but came back like the city in the fiscal crisis when it mattered. Karl Anthony Towns began the season as a stultifying clog on the offense, like he was going to be a selfish finance bro hogging the ball and stopping the momentum. Instead he turned into a sharp-eyed playmaker, spotting open men across courts as crowded as subway platforms. OG Anunoby, the injury-prone Londoner, rallied from a hamstring pull and gave us the best New York sports moment since Willis Reed limped from the tunnels in 1970. Raw-nerved Jose “Grand Theft” Alvarado, a child of NYCHA housing and the only native New Yorker in the pack, picked his spots and somehow got in Wemby’s face despite being a foot and a half shorter than the French Goliath. And Josh Hart was Josh Hart. Brilliant and bold sometimes, and utterly confounding at others.

They were us. Or at least we could see ourselves in these men who struggled against the odds and the shit-talking, and somehow became so much more than they were supposed to be. A lot’s been said about how this team made up for all the decades of Knick disappointment, ranging through the Trent Tucker years to the Patrick Ewing era, as well as the times of Carmelo Anthony, Linsanity, and Amar’e Stoudmire.

But when you see the joy that’s exploded around the city – in some cases with awful consequences – you know this was about more than basketball. People have been yearning for something that redeems this bastard us-against-them time. Our leaders have been pushing us to give up hope, to submit, to give our money and souls over to the crypto-market, the predictive market, the cold, harsh reality that the underdogs can never win.

Not this time, baby.

We needed this one and our guys gave it to us.

Note: This was the first Substack I published three years ago. I think it still applies now. Let’s Go Knicks!

In May 1970, when I was ten years old, New York City was in trouble and my family was falling apart. There were piles of garbage on the street, bills on the doorstep, and a lot of yelling in and out of the house. And I was the cause of some of that yelling, because even for a ten-year-old I was doing a lot of screwing up. I stunk at sports, school, friendship, household responsibility, and basic hand-eye coordination. But that was all right. Because in my mind, I was Willis Reed.

Willis Reed had little natural grace as an athlete. He wasn’t a Goliath like Wilt Chamberlain or silk-on-wood like his teammate Walt “Clyde” Frazier . He was bulky and sweaty. He was famously less than 6’10 as the Garden’s programs claimed and he worked hard for every basket he made. He muscled bigger men for rebounds, boxed out in the paint, threw screens, and passed when he didn’t have the shot. And most of all, he played through the hurt.

A lot is being made of the two minutes when he lumbered onto the Garden floor for Game 7 of the Knicks-Lakers series fifty-three years ago. If you weren’t alive and aware, it may be a little tough to understand the idea of New Yorkers being the underdogs. But this was before Superstar salaries and the formation of the Courtside Aristocracy. This was the time of grimy Fun City, of the tidal wave of urban despair and drug abuse and rampant street crime, of the sense that the rest of the country loathed us. They looked down on us for being so many and so different from one another. And yes, until the Jets’ improbable Super Bowl victory a year and a half before, and the Mets’ World Series triumph in the fall, most of our sports teams had been godawful for the decade that had just ended.

But Willis was our guy. Or at least he was my guy. It barely registered that he was a tall Black man who grew up in the segregated south, on a farm in Bernice, Louisiana, and I was an uncoordinated Jewish kid from the Upper East Side. He had grit and he had courage, and I knew I was going to need some of that to get by.

I managed to be in front of a rare television with a cable hook-up on the night of Game 7. Two games prior in the series, Reed had torn a thigh muscle playing against Chamberlain, Jerry West, and the other Laker superstars. Somehow, in his absence, the Knicks had pieced together a win in Game 5 with shorter players like Dave Stallworth, Dave DeBusschere and even Bill Bradley plaguing Wilt like the Seven Dwarves risking foul trouble. But in Game 6, reality hit and the Lakers won by 22 points.

To a child, it felt crushing, devastating, like the aftermath of a disaster. Our hero had fallen and we would never rise again. There was a question of whether Reed would even suit up for Game 7. And when he did walk out onto the court with a heavy bandage on his leg and 200 cc’s of cortisone in his system, he was grimacing in obvious pain as he moved.

But then the game started, Clyde tossed to Reed at the foul line, the Captain jumped maybe two inches off the floor, the ball went through the hoop and ripped the cords. Then the roof came off Madison Square Garden. A few seconds later, Reed hobbled down the floor again, got the ball about seventeen feet to the right of the hoop, jumped about an inch, and, improbably, the shot went in again and all at once, anything seemed possible.

That was a very long time ago. The Knicks are a very different team in a very different city. We live in an era when gritting your teeth and playing through the hurt is not something we honor often. Some of us still do it, but we don’t honor it much - on the right or the left. To be honest, I haven’t always done it so well myself. But when it came time to name our second child, my wife turned to me at the hospital and said “I know you really want to name him Willis,” which sent me sprinting down the hall to try to catch the registration nurse before the elevator doors closed.

I didn’t quite make it and neither have the Knicks for several generations (Note from 6/7/26: until now!). But the Captain’s number is still in the rafters and on our better nights I’d like to believe his brawny obstinance is still in the air we breathe.

Here’s a thing I’ve noticed about Cancel Culture: Some of the very people who excoriate you for mentioning Woody Allen was never convicted, or thinking that Chinatown is still a great movie, despite Roman Polanski being the director, will jump up and start dancing joyfully when they hear a Michael Jackson song.

I thought of them when I went to a Brooklyn theater the other day to see the biopic Michael. The audience, which was largely Black, loved it. People around me sang along with Jackson’s undeniably propulsive songs and gasped at the greedy cruelties of Michael’s father Joseph (played by Colman Domingo).

I was…more ambivalent.

The film, directed by Antoine Fuqua, who also directed Training Day back in 2001, moves along briskly. The young actors who play Michael at various ages are pretty good at approximately his speaking voice and dance moves. You get a general sense of the hero’s evolution from child star to adult artist, with a nod toward his eccentric love of animals and his ferocious ambition. Hearing those songs again reminded me that whatever else he was, Jackson was a great singer and pop craftsman.

But the movie is a mendacious work of propaganda, and the filmmakers know it. Michael Jackson slept with little boys. He admitted it. The controversy is that the star denied he was sexually interfering with these children; he was just being like Jesus in caring for the young. But at least six of these boys – now adults - say otherwise. Jackson was acquitted of criminal charges in some of these cases and reached settlements in others. However, two of the accusers, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, spoke graphically of Jackson sexually molesting them, when they were seven and ten respectively, in the 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland.

I found those interviews to be gruesome and persuasive. But if you live in America, you can’t hear those stories anymore. Because the Jackson family estate has effectively blocked the film from being streamed in the U.S. and Canada via a legal settlement with HBO.

I want to be clear: I still think a lot of Michael Jackson’s music is terrific. And I’ve always felt strongly that it’s necessary to separate the value of an artist’s public work from the way they conduct themselves in private life. Many writers and musicians I admire were louses and monsters. But Michael insists that we swallow it all with a credulous smile. It pretends it’s giving us the artist and the man, while trying to divert our attention away from the monster in plain sight.

Jackson himself occasionally alluded to a hidden nature when he was alive. He co-wrote and recorded a song called “Keep It in the Closet” for his Dangerous album. And remember the Thriller video? Jackson tells a girl that he’s courting, “I’m not like other guys” before transforming terrifyingly into a werewolf. Tellingly, Fuqua omits that moment in a key scene when he recreates the video in his film. More important, he omits any mention of Jackson’s pursuit of boys as young as Robson and Safechuck. Instead, his interest in children is explained away as innocent compensation for his own miserable childhood and pure-hearted empathy.

If you’ve got a strong stomach, try watching the real Jackson yawn and smirk his way through an interrogation with help from his lawyer: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueCrimeDiscussion/comments/1b44d4q/michael_jacksons_extraordinary_1996_interrogation/

The real Michael Jackson story is stranger, more complicated, infinitely sadder than anything that could wind up in a blockbuster studio film. It’s about an abused child star who becomes a distorted adult, surgically altering his face, lightening his skin, and hiding his sexual proclivities. Meanwhile, his record-breaking success snowballs and allows him to act with near-total impunity. But then, he literally self-destructs before our eyes, his face disintegrating grotesquely, along with his reputation, before drugs take over and kill him at the age of fifty, leaving the lawyers and accountants to forage for dollars among the wreckage.

It’s a weird and uniquely American story. Only some unholy combination of David Lynch and Spike Lee could get anywhere close to the racial/sexual/celebrity confusion of such a life. Maybe it would be better as an epic novel written by James Baldwin and Don Delillo, with the help of a talented, nonbinary fantasy writer. It’s almost too much to take in: Jackson’s obsession with creating a Peter Pan landscape in Neverland, where he took little boys into his room alone and locked the door while a giraffe, a llama, and a chimpanzee roamed free outside.

But never mind all that. Michael is a major studio movie that’s intended for the widest audience possible. In its opening weekend, the film grossed $219 million.

But are the people always right?

Well, the people allowed Donald Trump to become a two-term president. And there’s a lot in the Venn diagram between Trump and Michael Jackson. They knew each other well. Jackson performed at Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, lived at Trump Tower for a while, and stayed Mar-a-Lago where he spent time with Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie, to whom he was briefly married (the more you look at this story, the weirder it gets). Trump described Jackson as “a really good friend of mine…a really good person.”

I think there’s a reason Michael is the biggest movie of the year so far. I’m not suggesting Trump had any role in the production. It’s more about the cultural atmosphere of our moment. The administration has moved aggressively into the business of controlling the media, especially in the Paramount/Warner deal. Naturally, filmmakers are asking what kind of movies will get greenlit now. Michael is a dispiriting answer. It’s a film for our time because it’s a pack of hypocritical, bald-faced lies that channels Trump every time Joseph Jackson declares, “in this life, you’re either a winner or a loser.” It’s also a movie that avoids talking about a star’s sex abuse allegations, while much of the country is still obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein. And it’s a movie that is succeeding in a marketplace where the truth-tellers are being shut down.

In other words, it’s just about perfect for now.

Last week, I wrote about my OG friend God Shammgod and how he raised his late wife’s autistic son as his own and guided him toward an independent life. https://peterblauner.substack.com/p/my-friend-god

Now I’d like to tell you about a friend Shammgod introduced me to, another OG who did something just as extraordinary. But this one may be hard for some readers to wrap their heads around.

Hakiem Yahmadi grew up near Shammgod in Harlem. Like Shammgod, he’s an imposing OG. But unlike Shammgod, he managed to stay out of legal trouble most of his life. He’s better known as a youth basketball coach and a community activist who specializes in defusing violent conflicts. Your son’s bestie got killed and now he wants to settle the score with a gun? Hakiem is the man you want to call. He can talk sense to a charging buffalo. Your kid went ahead with the beef, got shot in the back, and now he can’t walk? Hakiem will try to hook him up with a wheelchair.

A lot of cops and prosecutors express cynicism bordering on contempt about “violence interrupters” doing this kind of work. But Hakiem is one of those rare well-respected men with credibility both sides of the street.

“I love that guy,” one high-ranking NYPD official told me a few years ago.

But that honor and respect came at a terrible cost.

On the night of September 10, 2001, Hakiem’s 30-year-old son Lamont, aka LA, was shot twice in the back of the head outside the Mott Haven Houses in the Bronx. Shammgod happened to be at a housing project nearby and was one of the first people on the scene to identify the victim. “He was a decent kid,” says Shammgod, who’d known Lamont since infancy. A lot of witnesses were on the street that night, but no one wanted to talk.

The next morning, Hakiem was due to go to the morgue at Jacobi Hospital in the Bronx to identify his son. But first he went for solace to his safe haven, the barbershop on 118^th and Lenox Avenue where he got his head shaved twice a week and talked to the guys who cut hiar about the things men talk about. Just a little bit after 8:46 a.m., he looked up and saw the report on the news about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center’s North Tower.

“I said, ‘let me get to the morgue before it gets too crazy,’” he recalls.

By the time he got to his car, the second plane had hit the South Tower and it was obvious no one was going to paying a lot of attention to a single murder in the Bronx. When Hakiem arrived at the morgue, workers were rushing to get to the scene downtown. One took the time to show Hakiem a photo to identify his son. There was a patch over Lamont’s eye. The tech explained that it was because of the way the bullet had exited from the back of the young man’s head.

Hakiem had a lot of sleepless nights after that. But sometimes what goes comes around in a good way. One of Hakiem’s basketball buddies offered him a furtive tip few years later, saying his nephew might know something about the killing. Hakiem pried the information out of the kid. He learned that his son had been killed by a Blood-affiliated thug I’ll call DM. The motive was jealousy. Hakiem’s son had gotten romantically involved with a female schoolteacher, while her gangster boyfriend DM was away at prison. Soon after his release, DM convinced the woman to lure Hakiem’s son to a rendezvous outside the projects, where DM ambushed him.

Instead of taking matters into his own hands, Hakiem did the responsible civic thing and passed the tip on to police at the 40^th Precinct in the Bronx. But the road to get justice was twisting and torturous. The primary detective on the case was dealing with a huge caseload and losing a lung after working “on the Pile” at the World Trade Center site. Then DM went on the lam and took the schoolteacher with him. He beat her up while they were staying in Maryland. She managed to get away. But then he found her in Florida and beat her up again, which led to a domestic violence arrest. A jailhouse informant then offered to give DM up for murdering Hakiem’s son, but disappeared after he was released. Another witness declined to testify against DM because he was threatened.

Someone close to Hakiem suggested they just skip the legal niceties and just kill everyone in DM’s family as vengeance.

Hakiem said no. “I was about fifty by then,” he recalls. “I said, I want to see my grandkids grow.”

Eventually, the case went to trial and DM was sentenced to fifteen years, partly thanks to the information that Hakiem helped to uncover. But that’s not the most remarkable part of this story.

After a lot of pain and deep consideration – and a decision to quit his job as a night manager at D’Agostino’s to become an anti-violence activist - Hakiem decided to go upstate to visit his son’s killer.

To forgive him.

“He told me, ‘Listen, I want to go and see this guy,” his friend Shammgod recalls. “I said, ‘You what?’ He said, “Yes, I want to go up.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, “Man, I got to ask this guy why did he kill my son?’ I took my hands off of it and gave him my blessing. I didn’t go with him up to the prison. Shit, they would have probably locked me up because I probably would’ve fucked him up.”

But Hakiem was determined. “I had to let it go,” he says. “If I keep it harbored inside, all it was doing was hurt me. So I had to let it go, man.”

It wasn’t easy to understand, or easy to set up. Hakiem was dealing with his own overwhelming grief - he still regularly goes to his son’s graveside, right by a basketball court in New Jersey. Then there was the grief and anger of other family members. Lamont left a young son behind when he was killed, and Hakiem wanted to protect the child from the kinds of endless cycles of revenge and retaliation that took Lamont’s life.

The flipside was that DM was not very eager to meet either. He’d been having nightmares. He was afraid that Hakiem would punch him in the mouth if they got together in person. But intermediaries argued that a meeting was the least he owed his victim’s father. So eight years after Lamont’s murder, Hakiem walked into a conference room in the Greenhaven Correctional Facility and looked his son’s murderer in the eye.

“We hugged, we embraced, we talked,” Hakiem recalls. “I apologized...”

“Wait a second.” At this point in the story, I had to put my hand up. “You apologized?”

“Yes,” Hakiem nods. “I said because as an OG, when you got nothing for you guys coming up behind us, we fail you. As a father, in some situations, we fail our young men and our daughters when we break up and we go somewhere, we move on. We leave our kids to the streets. And then the streets raise them.”

But this was no Hallmark movie with a comforting message about redemption. Hakiem recalls, “[DM] said, ‘Listen, man, it ain’t the first time I ever killed anybody. But this one just hit me a little bit different...’”

Nevertheless, when DM was released seven years later, Hakiem offered to try and help him get a job. Other members of the family were less forgiving; they circulated DM’s photo so they could track him down on the street. There was a confrontation at a corner dice game. Another time, a gun jammed when DM was about to get shot. And in one of life’s crueler ironies, Lamont’s son grew up to be a gangbanger and ended up taking a bullet to the back of his head, as his father did. Unlike his father, he survived. But he lost an eye.

Sometimes, I must admit, I struggle with all this. My life has been a lot easier than Hakiem’s but I can’t get there from here. I’m just not very good at forgiveness. It’s a character flaw. My grandmother was married to a Buchenwald survivor and, after he died, to an Auschwitz survivor. “Forgive and forget” does not co-exist easily with “Never Again.” I have shit lists that are longer than War and Peace. But I also know that if we’re going to survive the terrible, hate-filled time we’re living through now, we’re going to eventually need to show each other a little grace. Or at least cut a few bastards a break.

So when I had lunch with Hakiem at Junior’s a few weeks ago, I asked him to tell me one more time how he managed his burden.

He told me that after his son died, he went into counseling with a group of people who’d lost children of their own to violence. But the space was small and the group was limited.

“I realized one of us needed to get out so that somebody else could get in,” Hakiem said, as we looked at our menus. “And it might as well be me.”

When the waiter came to take our order, I said, “I’ll have whatever this guy’s having.”

If you’re like me, you’re probably getting a little fed-up with some of the recent stories about the crisis in masculinity (except for the one posted by my wife here: https://pegtyre.substack.com/p/alex-pretti-and-another-kind-of-masculinity). You’d think the only role models are either celebrities, shmucks, or both.

But I want to tell you about a friend of mine, who is not a celebrity or a shmuck but what in Yiddish is known as a mensch: a person who has acted with integrity and decency. And he’s done it far from the spotlight.

God Shammgod has been my buddy for more than 40 years. You may know his name because his son – also God Shammgod – was an NYC playground basketball legend, a star point guard at Providence College in the 90s and then an assistant coach in the NBA – first with the Dallas Mavericks, now with the Orlando Magic. If you’ve seen players do that flashy cross-dribble called the Shamm, he’s the inventor. And he’s gotten even more press lately because he just published a lively autobiography called The Word of God

I got to know Shammgod the father back in the early 80s when I was a young writer trying to make a name for myself. I asked a cop in the NYPD Gang Intelligence Unit what was the roughest crew in the city. He said, “the Five Percenters.” My dim understanding was that this was an off-shoot of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, which went further in believing that 85 percent of the human race is mentally benighted, ten percent are parasites, and five percent are “gods” meant to dominate (if that sounds extreme to you, read the Bible and the Koran more closely).

Anyway, I figured these guys must be bad ass, which would make me bad ass for finding them and writing about them. Somehow I got wind of the fact that they were having a big rally in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, and I showed up thinking I was all that just for being there. And yes, I discovered that some Five Percenters are thugs, just as some Jews are thugs and some Christians are thugs. But most of the people I met that night were - I was chagrined to discover - the salt of the earth.

I’m talking about taxpayers, sidewalk-sweepers, responsible parents, civil servants, and pillars of the community. People you would love to have as your neighbors. Which was crushing for me, at the time, because I was hoping to write a hyper-violent, modern-day Gangs of New York.

Instead, I met guys like Shammgod, an extremely-imposing native of Harlem with a very deep voice and a gentle manner that you do not want to disturb without good reason.

He wasn’t always like that. Here’s how his son describes him in his book: “Like a lot of the OGs of his era, coming up in the 1960s and ’70s, he was an activist, an intellectual, a street philosopher, a fighter, a boxing trainer, a Muslim, and one hell of a disciplinarian. If you’re familiar with the Black Panthers, then you got a taste of what my father and my friends were all about. To them, Black Power was not some catchphrase on a T-shirt. It wasn’t no fashion statement. It was what they were living every single day, for real.”

He was no goddamn choir boy, as Shammgod will tell you himself. One night in the 70s, he used a new guy with his otherwise-experienced robbery crew at a Times Square hotel job, a closet door didn’t get locked properly, and someone got out to call the police before the getaway was made. Shammgod got collared for a second time in his criminal career. He did a five year bid upstate, leaving the three kids he had at that point to deal with the streets of New York in the 70s and chaos in their mother’s home. According to Shamm the son’s book, the wounds from that separation took a while to heal.

After his release, Shammgod the father very nearly blew his shot at redemption by skipping meetings with his parole officer. But a couple people in the system saw some potential in him and cut him a break. He eventually pulled himself together and landed a tech job at Verizon, where he spent 27 years working hard and paying his taxes, while devoting much of his spare time helping his community as a social worker. So the next time somebody tells they don’t believe in second chances, bear that in mind.

My favorite story from that period is about how Shamm once got into a conflict with five hulking boys at a group home for troubled youth where he was helping out. Shamm very calmly told the boys they might beat the crap out of him on that particular night, but he had seven children of his own, four of them sons, and “at least one of them goes to school with you all.” So whatever beef they were starting right then would get settled painfully for each of them in the long run. The boys decided to back down and do what Shammgod told them.

Anyway, Shamm’s got a lot of stories like that, but I want to tell you the one that truly makes his life exceptional.

A few months after 9/11, Shamm met a phone company supervisor named Diane Beatty at a Verizon conference. Though he was single at the time, deeply experienced in relationships and not necessarily looking for another one, something about her kindness and sincerity clicked with him. But she quickly let him know it was a package deal, and one that many men would not accept: She had a solidly-built, fourteen-year-old autistic son named Ahaziah.

“She didn’t want to be in a relationship with someone who was just in it for her,” Shammgod says. “She needed someone who was interested in her kid.

So the first time, Shammgod dropped Diane off at her home, he asked her to send the kid outside to talk to him.

“Diane said, ‘he’s getting older. He needs a man talking to him about man things. Not a woman.’ So I just called him over and said, ‘My name is Shammgod. You want to hang out sometime?’ He said, ‘yeah.’ And I said, gimme a hug and have a nice day. And that was it.”

From then on, they were together as a family. “I told him what I needed him to do. At first, Diane didn’t like it. Because mothers protect their children. She made sure he got his dinner at 5:30 every night. But when I came in the picture, I changed all that. I said, ‘let’s give him a window and let him pick the time inside it. And then if he doesn’t choose, he gets a bowl of cereal and that’s it.’ Same with a haircut. If he wants it, he asks for it. And that’s how he learned to be independent and speak for himself.”

They were together four and a half years. As in any family, there were times of ebb and flow; plans to get married were on and off the table. Diane’s mother, in particular, was a vocal skeptic. But Shammgod really wanted the chance to raise another child, having missed some of his own kids’ formative years. He not only became Diane’s life partner, he made raising Ahaziah his primary goal, riding herd on the counselors at the kid’s special school and coming up with his own game plans as a social worker.

In the summer of 2007, Diane came home from work and told Shammgod she’d read a newspaper article about ovarian cancer. “She told she had three out of the four symptoms,” he recalls. It turned out she had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The hard conversations about life after life began with Shamm. “I said, ‘I said, listen, I don’t care about no money. You just make sure I get this kid.’” They got married on August 31, 2007. Less than three months later, Diane was gone, five days after her 49^th birthday.

Shammgod was good to his word. He raised Ahaziah as a single dad for the next six years. And when he got together with another strong capable woman named Earthly Paradise, Ahaziah, who by then was 22, was a nonnegotiable part of the deal.

That was fifteen years ago. Nowadays, Ahaziah is 37 and lives independently about 20 minutes away from Shamm and his wife in New Jersey. He has his own apartment and works as a contract packer and cleaner. It’s not the glamour profession, but AI isn’t going to take away his job. He talks to Shamm and Earthly every day

Earthly Paradise, Ahaziah, and Shammgod

Maybe that doesn’t impress you. Maybe you’re more interested in what Joe Rogan or Elon Musk or LeBron James have accomplished. Or maybe you think the whole idea of the patriarchy is terrible and traditional masculine identity is toxic.

But we’re living in a dark time and the only thing that gives me hope is our ability as individuals to change and do better. This guy put a life of crime behind him, became a solid citizen, tried to help his community, and raised an autistic boy who wasn’t biologically his son to be a man standing on his own two feet. And if that doesn’t make him an OG and a mensch in your book, then we are in different libraries.

Coming soon: The story of Shammgod’s friend Hakeim Yamadi and an act of forgiveness that will blow your mind.

A few months ago, I wrote about how many men have stopped reading fiction. But then I realized that I rarely recommend contemporary novels. There are several reasons.

A) I’m an asshole. John Updike said he liked to keep younger writers down and discouraged to cut down on competition. Who am I argue with a literary giant?

B) I read a lot of nonfiction for research and I’m still trying to catch up on a lot of the classics.

C) I have a lot of friends who are wonderful writers and don’t want to slight any of them by recommending one book over the others.

So I picked up THE SLIP, a first novel by Lucas Schaefer, with some wariness. A review from the New York Times caught my eye because it said the plot involved boxing and it’s been a while since a book like that got much attention. But then I saw other notices describing it as a story of “identity” and “gender fluidity,” and the grumpy old man in my head muttered, “oh, here we go again.”

There’s nothing wrong with the themes of identity and gender fluidity. Shakespeare and the Greeks got a lot of mileage of them. And, God knows, we can always use a lot more writers who aren’t just straight white men. But I’ve come to associate that kind of description with a political agenda that I might agree with personally but distrust in storytelling. I don’t mind a novel getting provocative and jumping into the moral muck. I just don’t need a fucking fiction writer who can’t balance their own checkbook telling me what to think. Just tell me a story that makes me think.

It turns out the author of THE SLIP feels similarly. “This isn’t a story about every white kid from Newton, or every Haitian immigrant to Texas,” Lucas Schaefer said in an interview. “It’s the story of these two, very particular people. That was important for me to remember when writing about these larger themes, especially race. No character is a spokesperson for their entire demographic; they’re spokespeople only for themselves.”

Rumble, young man, rumble.

THE SLIP is tense, often hilarious and satisfyingly unpredictable. Like a lot of good “literary” novels, it has the premise of a crime story. A sixteen-year-old kid named Nathaniel Rothstein disappears while staying with his uncle and training at a boxing gym in Austin, Texas. From that hub, we radiate out to the spokes of a wide cast of characters that includes an absurdly braggadocious Haitian immigrant, a staggeringly under-confident female cop, a bigoted geriatric psychiatrist, a facilitator of border crossings in clown make-up, and, yes, a budding teenaged androgyne. All are observed and inhabited with unsparing detail and generous understanding. The pace is, for the most part, brisk and the digressions are worth the road stops – though, at one point, I thought Schaefer might be apologizing for writing something that was extremely funny but potentially offensive to progressively-minded readers.

Lucas Schaefer knows a lot about boxing, cross-dressing, immigration, and police malfeasance. His story reminded me at times of Hemingway and Pete Dexter’s wonderful boxing-related novel BROTHERLY LOVE; at other times, SOME LIKE IT HOT and THE CRYING GAME were playing on the drive-in screen in the background. In fact, there is a long middle section when I thought THE SLIP was going to turn into a more familiar kind of novel about young gay men coming of age in Texas, but then Schaefer turned back to painting on a broader social canvas.

This is a debut novel and like all novels, great and small, there are things that are wrong with it. Not every plotline works well and not every character is fully realized. Schaefer makes a big risky swerve to slip reader expectations and I’m still trying to decide if it worked. But he put a lot of work into this book, and a lot of heart as well. Schaefer has spoken of working for more than a decade on the novel, while supporting himself as a tutor in Texas. When he finally could tell someone that he’d fulfilled his dream and sold a book to Simon & Schuster, his student client was more interested in preparing for a test coming up. All I can say is: I feel ya, brother. Anyway, the result is a gripping page-turner with real laughs and some piercing insights. So read it. If you like that kind of thing.

I also want to recommend THE DIRECTOR by Daniel Kehlmann. I have read that his previous novel, MEASURING THE WORLD, was one of the biggest successes in postwar German literature. If that doesn’t make you suspicious, I don’t know what will. But THE DIRECTOR is a terrific novel: swift, suspenseful, amusing, and deeply chilling. It tells a lightly-fictionalized version of the story of G.W. Pabst; that’s the auteur who helped discover Greta Garbo, made the great silent film PANDORA’S BOX with Louise Brooks, failed in Hollywood, and then returned to Germany, where he made films for Josef Goebells. Kehlmann has a reputation as literary heavyweight, but his narrative moves like a bullet train. His writing is lucid and pungent, but also richly suggestive. I was particularly impressed by his adaptation of film editing techniques to prose, as he slips seamlessly from past to present and character-to-character without ever losing the reader (with the able assistance of his translator Ross Benjamin). The portrait of moral capitulation and complicity with authoritarianism could not be more relevant to our time – though Lindsay Graham might be puzzled by Pabst’s qualms about collaborating.

Anyway, Daniel Kehlmann lives in Berlin and New York. I’m told that, in addition to being dazzlingly talented, he seems like a nice guy. So I salute him and, as a writer and a New Yorker, I say in all sincerity: screw you, buddy.

I’m baack. Didja miss me? Of course, you didn’t! I’ve been in your face every day for the last twelve months. I haven’t been this happy since the Black Plague, the world wars, and that day Mr. Belvedere sat on his own balls (look it up, kids).

Anyway, It’s time to decide who’s been naughty and nice, so we can reward the naughty. As for the nice? Prepare comfortable cushion to sit on because you’re about to get a pitchfork you know where.

So let’s goooo…

A.I. I’m tempted to say my work is done here. All of humankind’s worst ideas aggregated, mashed together, and presented back to the suckers to rush their own obsolescence? Why didn’t I think of that? Oh yeah, I did! And then Big Tech marketed it and put it into systems you don’t even know you’re working with. And now you’re all paying for the data centers to support it (see that darn Peg Tyre’s Substack, https://substack.com/home/post/p-180270483).

But forget all that and sign up for ChatGPT and all the others! So listen to me! Leave your wife! Pledge your love! Fire your workforce! Let me drive your taxi! What could go wrong?

TUCKER CARLSON. Elon Musk annoyed me because he was starting to get a little too big for his britches, so I gave him a trillion dollar bonus for work well done and a urinary tract infection from doing too much ketamine. And then this kid ups his game. Naturally, I’ve had my eye on him for a long time. I especially enjoyed his patty-cake interview with my buddy Putin and his happy-time grocery story visit in Russia right before Vlad had that pain-in-my-neck Alexei Navalny murdered in prison.

But TC’s 2025 interview with Jew-hating incel Nick Fuente? Chef’s kiss, son. Let that boy sing his song! And I especially like that you did it at a time when so many of your Fellow Travelers are pretending that fighting antisemitism is the reason they want to shut down free speech at the universities and on the streets. Tell it like it isn’t, son. I know you’ve had it in for the Jews since that Jon Stewart told you needed to go to journalism school on CNN. So who’s laughing now, huh?

A Whitman’s Sampler consolation prize box of poison chocolates for Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation who defied his staff to defend you as a friend of the cause. Right on, my brothers.

LARRY AND DAVID ELLISON. How much is enough? It’s never enough! All right, I helped you get the Paramount deal done. but who’s still hungry to control the media? CBS and one legacy studio weren’t enough for me either. I was thinking early on that I would try to help you get CNN and tell those carping schoolmarms to put a sock in it. But taking over Warners and Tik Tok? Wrecking old media and new media at the same? Supporting your minions as they censor 60 Minutes to keep them from airing a piece about the prison where deportees are being sent in El Salvador? Making people root for Netflex? And then whining and asking my little chubby prince, my right hand on earth, DJT, to personally get “involved” and put his thumb on the scale for you? All I can say is: Daddy like!

THE (FORMER) KENNEDY CENTER HONOREES. Especially Sylvester Stallone and Kiss. I freaking love Kiss. Bat Lizard is my boy. I have all their solo albums that they put out the same day in the middle of an oil crisis. And I love all of Sly’s flicks; Rhinestone and Rambo are so much better than Citizen Kane and The Godfather. But how did Gloria Gaynor get in there? “I Will Survive” has inspired millions of heartbroken people. I hate that!

THE DEADEND DEMOCRATIC PARTY ESTABLISHMENT. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I call that a blueprint for joy. Or the Andrew Cuomo campaign. I’d like to take all the credit, but really this has been a group effort, years in the making, to turn almost all of America against your brand. Bon voyage, suckers.

ALL THE WEASELS WHO BENT THE KNEE. Columbia University. Paul, Weiss. ABC. And everyone else who carried on about their precious integrity for years and then crumbled like stale Ritz crackers as soon as the Trump administration blew on you. And you know what was really great? Instead of banding together to resist, you made protecting your own little precious pile of money the priority, and then meekly handed over what was left of your dignity in a mini-Dixie Cup. Congratulations! You did the impossible. You made Harvard look good. The alma mater of the Unabomber, the Salem Witch Trial judges, the architects of the Vietnam War and Facebook, and – uh-huh – yours truly. Continuing education is a beautiful thing.

And finally, I’ve been trying to decide all who is my absolute favorite in the current White House. Hegseth is doing fine in my eyes, but I often smile when I think about Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. He used to be a protégé of George Soros, and profited from Britain‘s pound sterling crisis. Now he’s the smiling butler for crypto and every crazy tariff threat Trump wakes up with in the middle of the night. Then there’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, but he’s always been an idiot and a dick, refusing to pay salaries that were owed to families of Cantor Fitzgerald employees who killed on 9/11. And let’s not forget snarling Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, the worst enemy of man’s best friend.

And I have a special place in heart for Kash Patel, the FBI director, who always looks like he’s been startled by an intruder while sitting on the toilet. Exactly what you want in a law enforcement official!

As for RFK Jr.? Way to go, kid. It’s a big legacy to disgrace but you’re on your way here. But the one who really came into his own this year was Stephen Miller. I used to think he was just my old buddy Roy Cohn without the charm. But then I heard about him holding regular meetings demanding higher and higher numbers of deportations, guilty or innocent, pretty much guaranteeing you would rip families apart and violate the rights of actual citizens, and I thought, “attaboy.” And listening to him spew lies and venomous threats against fellow citizens at the Charlie Kirk memorial made me feel like I was back in the good old days listening to Goebbels at the Nuremberg Rallies.

But then I heard him talk about the stain of immigrants lasting for generations, even after the children become citizens, and I remembered his mother’s side of the family emigrated from Belarus in the early 1900s, and I thought, “laying it on a little thick, aren’t we? You little shit. That’s too much hypocrisy, even for me.”

So I’m giving the Booby Prize to J.D. Vance.

For now.

And for those who missed it last year, here’s my playlist:

@Brian Hamill

On this day in 1980, Lennon was assassinated on the Upper West Side. This is a piece I published a while back for an anthology about Beatles’ songs called IN THEIR LIVES: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs, edited by Andrew Blauner. I don’t claim to be a great writer, so I beg my readers’ indulgence as I repost this. I know Lennon’s reputation has diminished in some quarters over time. But I think we could use a little more of his irreverent wit and occasionally oppositional spirit these days.

I‘ve lived in New York City my entire life, but on the night John Lennon was murdered I was in a grubby little post-industrial ash-heap of a Connecticut town, a newly-minted adult working for a newspaper and trying to earn the right to call myself a writer. Early in the evening, I’d gone to watch a movie called “Resurrection” in an empty theater, so I could write a review probably no one would read about a film that almost no one would see. Then, feeling homesick, I went to the library and looked for copies of the Times and the Post. Why the place was open that late in a small town, I don’t know. A few minutes after I got there, a homeless guy in a baseball cap with wings on the sides started screaming and banging on the glass doors. I went over to see what was wrong and for no discernible reason he punched me in the nose.

I walked back to my rental apartment with a Budweiser in a bag and dried blood on my chin, and turned on “Monday Night Football,” trying to figure out if this was what grown-up life was about. The Patriots and the Dolphins were about to go into overtime. Then Howard Cosell came on and said Lennon had just been shot twice in the back outside the Dakota apartment building on the Upper West Side, and was dead at Roosevelt Hospital.

Which didn’t make any sense either.

Well, what could you do with that? A beloved musician shot dead in front of his home. Assassinated in the city that helped to make his name, on the Ed Sullivan show and later at Shea Stadium. My hometown, which he’d adopted as his own. In the country he’d given solace to when a beloved president was assassinated seventeen years before. Killed in a notoriously violent city by a visitor from beautiful Hawaii. An absurd end for one of the greatest of all absurdists.

John Lennon made at least half a career out of assaulting notions of common sense and propriety. He told the Queen to rattle her jewelry before he shredded his throat howling “Twist and Shout” at a famous performance. He stuck a Coke bottle up his nose in “A Hard Day’s Night.” When asked at a press conference “how did you find America?” he replied, “turn left at Greenland.” At the height of his pop idol fame, he published two books, In His Own Right and A Spaniard in the Works, which had sentences like “I was bored on the 9th of Octover 1940 when, I believe, the Nasties were still booming us led by Madolf Heatlump (who only had one).” As a child not quite mastering the guitar, I took heart from his delight at mangling the language and hatched the notion of maybe someday trying to play with words of my own.

From that first Sullivan appearance, Lennon was my guy in the Beatles. Standing apart from the others, legs bowed, eyes squinting, not taking the business of screaming teen idolatry too seriously as he chopped away with casual determination at his guitar, as if it hadn’t been all that hard to come up with “She Loves You” and “Help.” He wasn’t an obvious people-pleaser like Paul, making lover boy eyes at the camera and shaking his mop for the girls. And he wasn’t a studious grind like George, hunched over his Gretsch, making sure to get his Carl Perkins licks just right, before scurrying over to huddle next to Paul at the vocal mike. And he wasn’t Ringo, bashing away in the back seat, the ultimate good sport, making sure everyone was having fun and keeping time.

John was more his own man. It wasn’t exactly that he was aloof or didn’t care. His raspy imperfect voice raged with commitment. But everything about his stance said that he wasn’t going to change or adapt for your standards. You had to figure him out, or stay away. You don’t get me was the implied taunt, before he actually sang the words. And so “And Your Bird Can Sing” always seemed, to me, the most John Lennon of John Lennon songs.

For some reason, the track was left off the original American release of Revolver, so like a lot of other kids, I discovered it as the theme song for the awful Beatles Saturday morning cartoon that briefly ran on ABC-TV in the mid-60s. The show was a crass exercise executed in bad faith with cheap animation, dumb jokes, and excruciating plots about cannibals and karate masters and the like. But even the sight of the cartoon’s stiff-limbed, lazy-lidded figures flailing away unconvincingly at their instruments could not diminish the disciplined raucousness, the off-handed invention, the joyous abandon in the original recording.

It’s not a love song, like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or “If I Fell.” Or a bordering-on-hate song, like “You Can’t Do That” or “Run for Your Life.” It’s not a rafter-raiser like “Hey Jude” or a maybe-disguised drug song like “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” It’s something both more abstract and binding, like an oath to a cause that can’t quite be defined.

So what the hell is it about anyway?

The lyrics start off like a cynical accusation: someone has irked John by claiming to have everything they want. But they won’t get him—even though they’ve seen Seven Wonders and their bird is green. They won’t see him or hear him either. Wha? There’s also the threat of the “bird” getting broken at some point, and God knows what that portends.

But this isn’t an ad hominem attack like Bob Dylan’s “Positively Fourth Street” (with its Hall of Fame putdown where Dylan says I wish you could stand in my shoes, so you’d know what a drag it is to see you.) Lennon doesn’t sound smug or condescending the way Dylan can sometimes. A tentative note of compassion sneaks across the bridge with its sympathetic minor chords and the guitars deconstructing the main riff underneath the vocal. When the target’s prized possessions become a burden, Lennon says he’ll be around. So is that an offer of friendship? Or a status check? When you’re on the way down, I’ll still be here. And then there’s a hopeful reference to being awoken. But is that a spiritual awakening or a chemical one? Before you can be sure, the break is over, and John has redrawn the battle lines, throwing a final challenge. His target may have heard every sound there is, but hasn’t heard him.

And what about that music? The band comes crashing in on the first note, firing on all cylinders. If a jet taking off had a tune, it might sound like this. Pounding engines, massive propulsion, a billowing aural fireball pushing off and then the machine improbably soaring. Ringo holds the pattern steady with his snare and high-hat while John churns up clouds of distortion with his rhythm guitar. Two lead guitars put wings on a melody that might have been a little twee and precious if it wasn’t played with such proto-psychedelic aggression. And somewhere amid the beautiful noise, the pilot’s voice cuts in, defiant and all-too-human. It took me years to notice that an intricate bass part ties it all together, somehow weaving around the melody while holding down the bottom. Then the song ends on rumbling notes of irresolution that suggest the journey isn’t quite over.

It’s all done in two minutes, but it feels like you’ve been around the world. No wonder McCartney made sure to follow it on the original Revolver album with one of his best songs, “For No One.” This was a time when the Beatles could still play with the force and cohesion of a seasoned live band, but were just beginning to unlock the potential of the modern recording studio as an instrument in the mix.

A few days before, they’d used tape effects and Leslie speakers to assemble a revolutionary brain-melting collage around John’s composition “Tomorrow Never Knows.” “Bird” doesn’t go quite that far. The great musicologist and songwriter Marshall Crenshaw, who once played John in a stage production of Beatlemania, identifies it as one of Lennon’s “last conventional songs,” before he went off on the wild blue yonder streak that included “Strawberry Fields Forever,” “Being For The Benefit of Mr. Kite,” “I Am The Walrus,” and “Revolution #9.” In its structure and feeling, “Bird” anticipates those later experiments while still rocking as hard as “”Dizzy Miss Lizzie” or “I’m Down.”

Strangely, though, John himself was less impressed. At various times, he described the song as “another horror” and “another of my throwaways.” And when you hear the band’s first attempt to record the track, on April 20, 1966, you can hear what he means. He can barely keep from cracking up in the vocal booth with Paul. It’s hard to tell if something just happened in the studio or if he’s just stoned and overtaken by the nonsense in his own words. One rumor had it that the song was a rejoinder to Frank Sinatra, who’d put down the Beatles and reputedly liked to ask his friends “How’s your bird?” (probably referring to male equipment). But a cursory listen to this early version hints that the real source inspiration was probably the Byrds. George’s twelve-string guitar part sounds like a blatant imitation of Roger McGuinn’s trademark Rickenbacker twang, and, when they aren’t giggling, John and Paul are striving for a harmony blend reminiscent of McGuinn and Gene Clark.

When I heard this version for the first time on the Beatles 2 Anthology, released in 1995, I was a little embarrassed and mystified about why I loved the song so much. The lyrics were close to doggerel, the playing managed to be both desultory and over-busy, the vocals were too strenuous on Paul’s part and lackluster on John’s. The whole thing was a drag. Perhaps Lennon was right. Not only was the song crap, but maybe the Beatles were just a group imitating other groups. Whatever fondness I had for the record was just nostalgia for childhood that didn’t hold up in the harsh light of adulthood.

But then I listened again to the final version they recorded just six days later in the same studio, the bird had somehow taken flight. It was hard to hear where the metamorphosis had come in. The words were virtually the same, the melody was unchanged, and the arrangement was similar. But the song had become a forceful sui generis creation, with all traces of the original influences completely molted away. This could only have been the Beatles, with John Lennon at the forefront, in the full spring bloom of their careers, out of the Cavern and well on the way to Strawberry Fields

So what happened? How did the thing transform in so short a time?

Obviously the band knew the song better, having run through it exhaustively a few days before, but the performance is completely fresh and committed, as if they’re discovering the tune for the first time. Maybe that exuberance is ginned up by studio tricks, hence John’s later suspicion of the track. Having helped to fashion the brilliant soundscape of “Tomorrow Never Knows” less than a week before, perhaps the producer George Martin and the engineer Geoff Emerick felt emboldened to find new ways to fill out the aural canvas for a more “normal” pop song with guitars played through revolving Leslie speakers and a slightly drier than usual drum sound. So it could be that part of the track’s success is not just as a song written by a composer or two, but as a record.

But what truly makes “Bird” a great quintessential John Lennon song is Paul McCartney. Like a lot of prematurely cynical people, I used to take Sir Paul for granted. Yes, he was a great singer and a great tunesmith, but he was a teacher’s pet, a shameless panderer, the self-conscious “cute” one, someone not to be trusted. In the film, “Let It Be,” the other members of the group become visibly annoyed and increasingly disaffected by his relentless pushiness and organization, his determination to sit down and get things done on his terms. No wonder they broke up right after this. He’s like Dad trying to get a bunch of surly children in the car, so they can all get where they need to be, while John just wants to hang out with Yoko.

But once you have children of your own, you start to become more attuned to his point of view. Or at least that’s how it was for me after my two sons were born. I learned that you have to become more like Paul so your kids can be free to act more like John. They get to be free, intuitive, and rebellious while you stand by waiting patiently. They amaze you, they come up with wonderful ideas that you could have never thought of, and sometimes they go off in the wrong direction and waste a lot of time. And then you have to shake the keys and lay down the law, telling everyone to get in the goddamn car already or there won’t be any party.

Yes, I’m going to say it: Famous as McCartney is, the man is still underrated. Okay, the world knows he wrote and sang “Yesterday,” “Penny Lane,” “I’ve Just Seen A Face,” and all the others. And anyone with half an ear can tell that his bass playing is the supple spine of most Beatles’ records. But listen even more closely and you realize that he’s the indispensable element in the songs he didn’t write or sing lead on as well. That’s his kamikaze guitar tearing into George’s “Taxman” and John’s “Good Morning, Good Morning,” his flute-like Mellotron that leads into “Strawberry Fields,” and his tape loops and wayward piano contributing to the chaotic wonder of “Tomorrow Never Knows.” In his book, “Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles,” Geoff Emerick describes Paul staying in the studio long after the others left, perfecting his bass parts and adding the subtle simonizing touches on other instruments that allow those songs to sound as good now as they did when they were recorded more than half a century ago.

McCartney himself says the song was eighty percent John, twenty percent Paul. But that’s some twenty percent. The foundation is still John’s on the final version, but it’s Paul joining George on the harmony guitar intro, giving a necessary touch of raw urgency to the part that Harrison had just played prettily the week before (and saving the riff from sounding like something the Electric Light Orchestra would play on one of their 70s hits). He trims his vocal part, giving John enough room to state his case while chiming in strategically for just a few words at the end of each verse for the crucial amount of sweetening. And then he lays down that monster bass line, which Marshall Crenshaw compares to the crucial element in a Bach invention, the unnoticed piece that locks everything into place.

It’s still John’s song, but it wouldn’t be worth a second listen without what Paul brought to the mix. Or at the very least it wouldn’t still sound as rudely alive after a half-century without him. Sadly, though, John seemed to rarely return the favor, especially in the later section of the Beatles’ career. Maybe it was drugs or personal estrangement, but John retreated from the collaboration, preferring to declare Yoko his true artistic partner as well as his wife. An understandable choice in some ways, though I can’t really remember the last time I put on “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking For Her Hand in the Snow)” or “Sisters O Sisters.”

In fact, the older you get and the more you learn about John Lennon, the harder it is not to have complicated feelings about the man. He sang “love is the answer,” but never told his eldest son he loved him. He was, on occasion, abusive toward women. More often, he was ungracious and ungrateful toward his peers and collaborators, discouraging to other musicians, and hurling brutal insults toward McCartney in interviews and songs after the band dissolved.

But that’s how it is when the child listening to records alone in his room becomes the man playing the same songs in the car for his kids. You realize that your heroes are not just human, but deeply flawed in ways you might find hard to forgive even in a friend. The songs that once defined you, that once meant everything to you, change—whether you want them to or not. You realize love is definitely not all you need, that the narrator of “No Reply” needs a restraining order, and that—as Elvis Costello pointed out—a millionaire has a lot of gall to urge his listeners to imagine no possessions. After a while, you put certain records out on the street and forget the times they got you through. They can’t be the same songs because you’re not the same.

But then there are other songs that grow old with you, they reinvent themselves, they evolve and show you sides that even their composers couldn’t have imagined, or maybe you just adapt them to the circumstances of your life. And so when I hear “And Your Bird Can Sing” now, I don’t hear John Lennon being purposefully obscure and inscrutable anymore. I hear a guy singing to himself, trying to work out his own contradictions. What do you do when your prized possessions weigh you down? How can you feel so alone with friends around you? How can you be well-known and still be unseen? How can you exist in a world that demands compromise and still be your own man (or your own woman)? When he sings “You can’t hear me,” it doesn’t sound like a taunt anymore. There’s an undertone of sorrow, maybe even desperation. No wonder the guitars repeat the first few notes of the main riff three times at the end, like a detective knocking on a door. And then it opens, the other instruments drop off, revealing Paul thrumming away softly at his bass after hours, as if mulling a question that can never be answered.

I had the day off from work after Lennon was murdered. My nose had stopped swelling by then and I had access to an Oldsmobile Cordoba. But I didn’t drive down and join the crowds that stood out on West 72nd Street under his apartment’s window, singing his songs and keeping his widow up. In fact, it was many years before I laid eyes on the Strawberry Fields memorial in Central Park. I never saw the need to visit or to take my kids. Because for me, John Lennon lives on somewhere else. He talked a good game about coming together and power to the people, but the real spirit of the man exists in a more private place. And I go there whenever I hear this glorious ode to being misunderstood.

This essay first appeared in IN THEIR LIVES: Great Writers on Great Beatles Songs, edited by Andrew Blauner, with a note from Paul McCartney

Everybody loves Thanksgiving. But sometimes…I don’t know.

Don’t get me wrong. I love getting the family together. And I’m good with turkey, yams, gratitude, and football.

But the problem for me starts with the Puritans. Now I understand that some scholars believe they had a legitimately beef against the Church of England for being intolerantly. But the more you learn about these people, the more you feel that once they set sail for the New World, the rest of Europe must have breathed a collective sigh and said, “fare thee well! And don’t let the skreen doore hit thee in the backseyed.”

The problems continue to the present day, I believe, with the godawful buckled hats and bonnets that help make this the least erotically-charged of all holidays. Yes, I know the buckled hats were never really a main fashion statement, but really?

Anyway, what bugs me about Thanksgiving is the way Squanto was treated.

“Who?” you ask.

Well, let us cast our minds back to fourth grade history pageants and lessons lightly skipped over. Thanksgiving professes to celebrate the period of fellowship between the pilgrims and Native Americans. Squanto, if he is remembered at all, is discussed as the liaison between the early Mayflowers fathers and the local indigenous leaders known as sachems. He is credited with helping the pilgrims obtain food in the new land and with helping to facilitate the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621.

The real story is considerably darker, more complicated, and, in its way, more relevant to today.

The real Squanto was born Tisquantum, around 1585, give or take ten years, in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. He was a member of the Patuxet tribe of the Wampanoag. His early experiences with white people were not all that positive. He was kidnapped by English slaver named Thomas Hunt in 1614, who took him to Spain and sold him in Malaga. The story is that he was rescued by a bunch of Franciscan friars, who wanted to educate him and save his heathen soul. They were at least partly successful because Tisquantum managed to learn English and on his deathbed years later clung to the hope he would be admitted to the Englishman’s heaven.

In the short term, he managed to use his wiles and language skills to get from Spain to England and then back across the Atlantic to his home village in 1619. There, he found was the last of his kind. Everyone else in the Patuxet had been killed in an epidemic that was either smallpox or some kind of bacterial infection brought over by the Europeans.

Either way, you can understand why a guy like this would have murder in his heart the next time he laid eyes on a white man.

Instead, when William Bradford and the rest of the Mayflower crew arrived at Cape Cod Bay in 1620, “Squanto” (as the pilgrims nicknamed him) became their interpreter and negotiator with the other local tribes. He taught them how to hunt deer, plant corn and squash, and broker peace with the sachem, who basically functioned as the regional bosses. Then he died from “Indian fever” while guiding the newcomers on a trading expedition around the shoals of Cape Cod.

American History studies have not been particularly generous with Squanto. There is only one Disney movie about him from 31 years ago and it was a commercial failure. Scholars have not done much to see things from his point of view. The 19^th century ones often portrayed him as a childlike savage, which he clearly wasn’t. But later writers haven’t given him that much attention and his contemporaries sometimes offered a decidedly jaundiced view. Even his so-called friends and allies accused him of being a double-dealer, cutting side deals to enrich himself, while threatening to unleash plagues on his enemies - like the one that wiped out his tribesmen.

“Squanto sought his owne ends, and plaid his owne game,” wrote William Bradford, who became the governor of Plymouth County.

To which modern readers might say, “So what? Welcome to America.”

Obviously, there’s a lot more to the story – I’m no professional historian. But sometimes I wonder if we might be more honest about the meaning of the holiday. Gratitude is great. But considering everything that happened to Squanto, couldn’t this be annual “Forgiveness Day” or “Not Holding A Grudge Day”? Or even taking into account that the man obviously wasn’t a plaster saint, “National Pragmatism Day.” It’s a little difficult to hear these scholars knock him for being transactional, given the world we live now.

Which brings us back to Thanksgiving. In a recent post highlighted for me by my much-smarter wife (to whom I am always thankful), Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote: “Gratitude, real thankfulness, is a mental return to the moment of need—a physical, spiritual or emotional need…. Gratitude requires returning to that moment of need even after the need has been met.” Maybe that’s why we don’t talk about people like Tisquantum. Because it’s uncomfortable to remember our national moment of need. But screw it. Pour one out for Squanto. The guy hooked the early Americans up when they needed it. Maybe he wasn’t exactly cheated by the pilgrims, but the dude deserves a place at the table.

We have a motto in my family that would look good on a coat of arms: “Don’t you think that’s a bit of an overreaction?”

I thought of it the other day when I saw the reaction, in some quarters, to Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York City mayoral campaign. Social media and the mainstream press throbbed with dire warnings for the city’s Jewish community, with some outright calling the new mayor a jihadi terrorist as well as a communist. In slightly calmer tones, the Anti Defamation League said it was hiring someone to monitor how the new administration responds antisemitic incidents, because – supposedly - we’ve never had a leader like this before and Jews no longer feel safe.

Look, antisemitism is on the rise and it’s always despicable. And it needs to be called out when leaders indulge in it. But it’s interesting that the ADL has not called for a monitor of the Republican Party, even as boils of Jew Hate are erupting all over the GOP. White Nationalist and accomplished antisemite Nick Fuentes was given a friendly platform by Tucker Carlson, who shares many of his anti-Israeli views. In the furor that followed, the head of the Heritage Foundation – which put together the blueprint for the Project 2025 – angrily defended Carlson while trying to distance himself from Fuentes (who has been a guest at Trump’s White House). And this was just two weeks after Vice President Vance defended a group of Young Republicans who joked about loving Hitler, not trusting Jews and sending people to the gas chambers in an online forum.

I’m generally wary of the “safe space” business, whether it’s practiced in politics, academia, or culture in general. It’s one thing when there are legitimate examples of racial threats and violence that need to be policed. But the Trump administration has used the fig leaf excuses of “fighting antisemitism” and “Jews not feeling safe” to punish their perceived enemies and silence opposition voices on college campuses.

I don’t love everything Mamdani says about Israel as a Jewish state. But I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when he says he wants to be the mayor of the five boroughs, not East Jerusalem. And let us note that Mamdani has said that he wants to keep on Jessica Tisch, the first Jewish woman to serve as an NYPD commissioner, who also happens to be from one of the city’s wealthiest families. That is a very odd thing for a committed antisemite and communist to propose.

So do we really believe that a fiercely ambitious 34-year-old, with a potentially bright political future, is going to allow Jews to be targeted in the first major assignment of his career? Maybe he is a fanatic with a hidden agenda to drive out New York City’s Hebrews. But if he spends all his time and political capital trying to impose the BDS agenda on the city’s pension funds, rather than making New York more affordable, he’s going to wind up with a lousy resume and as much time on his hands as a certain former politician I often see pedaling slowly on a stationary bike at my local Y.

I don’t know what Mamdani is going to do as mayor. I heard some things I liked in his victory speech and some things I didn’t like. Declaring he would never say Andrew Cuomo’s name again and then quoting his father without attribution about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose was both a low blow and an effective coup de grace. He’s an authentically charismatic young pol and pretty fast on his feet – both extremely rare in the Democratic Party - and he received more votes than any mayor since John V. Lindsay. For that alone, he deserves a fair shot.

This town has survived FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD, AIDS, crack, repeated crime tsunamis, race riots, Hurricane Sandy, 9/11, and Covid. And that’s just the last fifty years. I think we can survive another mayor with his head up his fundament, if that’s what Zohran Mamdani turns out to be.

“You’re entitled.”

I was really hoping she would leave it alone.

This was eight o’clock in the morning, less than ten hours since Zohran Mamdami had been declared the winner of the 2025 New York City mayoral campaign. I was walking my dog in a Brooklyn park when I stumbled into an argument between a man about my age and a much younger woman walking her hounds on the stone paths around the fields.

“You’re entitled,” she repeated.

“How do you know what I am?” the man asked.

“Look at you,” she said.

I did not want to hear this. I was in a fairly good mood. I did not vote for Mamdani myself, because I vote in upstate elections where congressional seats are up for grabs. And though I am ambivalent about many of Mamdani’s policies and his refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, I was impressed by the discipline of his campaign and greatly encouraged by the fact that two million New Yorkers came out to vote in this election.

I’ve heard for too many people proudly identify as nonvoters and claim there is “no difference” between the political parties. Whatever it is that establishment Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are doing, it ain’t working. Andrew Cuomo ran a campaign that tried to highlight his experience, but just reminded people of why they can’t stand him.

Mamdani’s victory speech was fiery and, at times, intemperate but it was good to hear a young charismatic leader speak up for hard-working underdogs of our city and defiantly tell Donald Trump “turn up the volume” to be ready for a fight.

But now I was walking into another kind of fight. Who knows what started it? The older guy was wearing earphones and a knit cap. The young woman was with a couple of friends and walking a couple of yappy little dogs. Maybe he stepped on her dogs. Maybe she was blocking the path where he was doing his speedwalking routine. Whatever. It’s the city. A lot of people. Stuff happens. She was well-dressed and sounded well-educated. But then she called him a dumb-ass. And a motherfucker. Which, honestly, comes with the territory if you live in Brooklyn.

Then she came back to her earlier theme. “You are entitled,” she yelled. “You’re immature. You’re an asshole. You’re so fucking privileged.”

You could feel something else was coming, like a blister about to pop. Especially because she was clapping on each syllable. I do not know why young people do this. It reminds me of cheerleaders trying to rally their team. Perhaps it’s just a way of communicating emphatic emotion. Or maybe it’s referencing something in popular culture that I’m not aware of. But one thing I’m sure about: it’s not meant to invite a civil, respectful exchange of ideas.

“What are you talking about?” the man asked.

At this point, I believe I need to mention that the man was white. The young woman was Asian. I did not want to notice this difference, for the same reason that I wanted to embrace the fact that Mamdani said he wants to represent all New Yorkers as mayor, and not just the progressive, multi-ethnic coalition he pulled together to defeat Cuomo. And I certainly did not want to believe that the young woman was feeling inspired to use certain epithets because of the election results.

But now she was pointing her finger and the dogs were looking up, like even they knew which script she was following.

“You’re a fucking old white man,” she said. “Look at you. You’re disgusting.”

I generally mind my own business because it’s a big town and there’s a lot of different kinds of people here. But I told her that we don’t need that kind of language around here. Then I walked away because I didn’t want to get into an argument that – if she stayed on brand – she was going to film on her cellphone and post online.

Maybe it was just a thing that happened, with no other lasting significance. Maybe the guy was being a dick. Maybe she was just having a lousy morning, because she lost her job. What I do know is that thinking you can judge someone and stick in them in an ethnically-defined compartment because of what they look like is the essence of Trumpism. And I hoped it was the thing Mamdani had triumphed over becoming the first Muslim mayor of our first city and the best of a new generation. And what I’m absolutely sure of is that he will not be able to govern very effectively if his supporters resort to dismissing a large part of the population as “white men,” “Jews,” or “old.” Or if his detractors and critics succeed in weaponizing such knee-jerk bigotry against him.

The young woman yelled something behind me as I walked away. But I was done paying her any mind because I had to go run after my dog, who at least knows when to cut the crap and move on.

1.

When I was very young, my grandmother Sarah was married to a concentration camp survivor named Simon. He was completely bald and his eyes were set deep in his head, as if he’d seen things in life that caused them to permanently recede. I rather liked him, but always thought he seemed a little sad. Later, I found out he had a wife and daughter who died in the camps.

We used to play the game where a child places his hands on a grown-up’s palms and tries to draw them away before getting slapped. If there’s a miss, the child gets a turn on top. But the thing was, Simon never really slapped me. He just put his big gentle hands on my wrists when he caught me. As a result, it wasn’t a very exciting game. But I’ll say this about Simon: he gave me a good sense of when things are about to turn.

And right now, it feels like things are about to turn in a very bad way.

2.

I think about Simon a lot these days. I’m researching a novel that takes place during the Holocaust, and I keep reading things that remind me of the present moment. The collapse of an aging, enfeebled former president in Germany. The rise of an authoritarian leader in his place. The demonization of a group blamed for “poisoning” the blood of a nation.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve asked myself what I would do if I was in Simon’s shoes before the war. Would I speak out or try to escape? Or would I keep my mouth shut and hope it was only people from other groups who got hurt?

I think about this all the time. And I’m always a little surprised when I run into people who don’t.

3.

Charlie Kirk got killed the other day on a Utah college campus while wearing a t-shirt that said FREEDOM on the front.

Before his assassination, I never gave Kirk much thought. He was not an elected official or even a government appointee. He just seemed like another far-right provocateur who’d gained a big following by currying favor with Donald Trump and speaking about disadvantaged groups with deliberate cruelty. But I respected his willingness to debate the issues and his honesty in saying in saying he thought a few violent deaths were “worth it” to have widespread gun rights. I happen to disagree with him on that point. I think most deaths from gunfire are not “worth” the cost. That includes Charlie Kirk’s death. But I appreciate that he didn’t offer any phony “thoughts and prayers” or fake empathy to victims.

Now a young man is gone, leaving behind a wife and two children. I believe violence to shut down an opponent and achieve a political end is always wrong. And that is all I have to say about Charlie Kirk as a person, rather than an idea now being used as a weapon in the public arena.

4.

Donald Trump and his accomplices are engaged in an effort to remake the character and culture of the United States - and much of the rest of the world. Top aides like John Kelly, his former chief of staff, and Mark Miley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say he meets the definition of fascist. They would know.

Up to this point in his Second Administration, Trump has been enjoying a string of successes, abetted by Congress, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. And yes, most important, the American electorate. Beyond reversing the policies of the Biden Administration in economics, healthcare, and foreign aid, he has coerced major law firms, Ivy League colleges, and top media outlets into “bending the knee.”

Those institutions have largely submitted – especially those who could most easily afford to stand up to him. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has responded weakly and ineffectively.

Now, in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, the Trump Administration is proposing a quantum leap toward punishing the opposition. The president has vowed vengeance against those he calls radical left-wing lunatics.

In an appearance guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast from the White House, Vice President JD Vance got more specific. He did not propose going after right-wing groups advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government – like the January 6^th rioters. Instead, he focused his fury on liberals and talked about going after nonprofit nongovernmental agencies that he seemed to blame for Kirk’s death, without offering any evidence of a true conspiracy.

Vance made it clear he was not just attacking Antifa anarchists, but established organizations like the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. He claimed that Soros and the Ford Foundation sponsor The Nation magazine, which has published negative articles about Kirk since his death. The problem with this claim is that the last time Ford gave The Nation money was in 2019 for an internship. And Open Society has not contributed at all.

Fellow Republicans have gone even further. Knowing it would be difficult to rewrite the First Amendment to their specifications – Trump himself would be in a lot of trouble for the things he’s said – they are proposing a fear campaign to threaten and silence the opposition. They are asking people to report fellow citizens in their workplaces and schools who speak negatively about Charlie Kirk, so those colleagues and schoolmates can be punished, fired, and expelled.

To call this McCarthyism does not go nearly far enough. This is deeply and disturbingly antithetical to the American project and the principles of democracy. Donald Trump, of course, couldn’t care less. He’s always seemed befuddled by the idea that other people have rights and exist for any reason except to serve him. But JD Vance does know better. In 2016, he wrote this to a friend: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler.”

Compare that tone to what he said the other day on the Kirk podcast. He proclaimed there could be no unity with those who celebrated Kirk’s killing. But as you’ll see in this clip, he actually went further, saying: "There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics," Vance said. "There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder. There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend.”

https://www.foxnews.com/video/6379525461112

You may not like the things that Vance listed here. But they are free speech. And let’s recall that Donald Trump joked about Nancy Pelosi’s husband getting attacked with a hammer and used the occasion of John McCain’s funeral to reiterate that he “wasn’t a fan.” This was after he disparaged McCain as not “a war hero,” because he got “caught” by the North Vietnamese, tortured, and held captive for five and a half years, refusing an early release when his fellow Americans were still being held.

5.

I’m under no illusion that more than a handful of people care what I think. I’m also not young and not currently working anywhere. Which means that in a small way I am still free to speak my mind. At least for now. So speaking only for myself this is what I have to say: You’re right, JD Vance. We can’t have unity. Not on your terms. Because you’re inciting hatred. Because you serve a man you called a potential Hitler. Because this country gave you everything as a democracy and now you want to betray your fellow citizens by helping to turn it into an autocracy. We can’t have real unity when you want to crush and silence those who disagree with you.

That’s not the country I signed on for, and I doubt it’s the one you signed on for either – whether you’re left-wing or right-wing.

I usually like to end with a joke, but I can’t think of one here. The hand is turning over. We have to find a way to pull back before it’s too late.

Note: In the days after I posted this, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show off the air “indefinitely” for allegedly offensive remarks about Kirk’s assassination. I’ve watched the video. The comment had nothing to do with Kirk himself. It was a jab at MAGA adherents. The factual basis of the barb might have been questionable because it had to do with the shooter’s political affiliations. But on the other hand, much is not yet known about the shooter. Right-wingers defended the decision by arguing a private corporation is not a government agency and therefore has no First Amendment obligations. But the decision to get rid of Kimmel was made very soon after Donald Trump threatened to “go after” ABC to one of its news correspondents and his FCC chairman Brendan Carr threatened to sanction the network because of Kimmel.

But in some cases, it’s true. At least in art. Or maybe you can just say that some years are better than others. The year 1939 produced the following novels: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, The Day of the Locust by Nathaniel West, Ask The Dust by John Fante, Good Morning Midnight by Jean Rhys, Pale Horse, Pale Rider by Katherine Anne Porter, Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, and the criminally underrated Christ in Concrete by Pietro di Donato. Native Son by Richard Wright came out the very next year. By contrast, when you look at any given year in the late 1960s, there are decidedly fewer “great novels” that everyone remembers, while the rock and roll of those years is still with us.

It's interesting to consider why these things come in rushes. In 1959, jazz had a bumper crop year with Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, Giant Steps by John Coltrane, Time Out by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, The Shape of Jazz To Come by Ornette Coleman, and Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus. But 1968? Not so much.

Maybe it’s that certain art forms possess the right language to speak to a time of change, but then the alignment shifts and a new vocabulary is required.

In any event, we’re looking at the year 1975 in film. I’m going to argue that there’s never been a better twelve-month period for movies – even though there were no films by Scorsese, Coppola, or Bunuel that year.

I want to share my enthusiasm – though I’m open to hearing counterarguments and willing to grant that some of these films may not have dated entirely well. Others are widely acknowledged as landmarks. I was fifteen when they came out and spending my hard-earned shekels as a Good Humor man to buy cheap tickets. But almost every weekend at the movies felt like a mind-blowing adventure. I’d like to share that experience if I can, and maybe offer some suggestions if you’re looking for something to watch. You could do worse than be stuck in this year for a while.

DOG DAY AFTERNOON. For my money, the best Sidney Lumet movie and the best New York City movie ever made. Rambunctious, intense, funny, and weirdly soulful. How the hell did Al Pacino go from playing supremely-controlled Michael Corleone to wild-and-wooly Sonny Wortzik, who tries to rob the First Brooklyn Savings Bank to pay for his lover’s sex-change operation? John Cazale, playing his rifle-toting accomplice Sal, was never better, and that’s really saying something since Cazale had just played Fredo in the Godfathers. Watch for the peak moment when he announces the country he most wants to visit is Wyoming.

One thing I love about these films is that none of the protagonists have qualities that would be recognized as “likeable” or “relatable” by a digital algorithm. We care about these people because we recognize them as wounded human animals trying to survive in desperate circumstances.

DERSU UZALA. I’m mentioning this one high up, because not that many people have seen it, or even heard of it. But it’s one of Akira Kurosawa’s best movies. It’s also his only non-Japanese language production. The story comes from the true-life tale of how a nomadic hunter in the remote Far East befriends and guides a Russian expeditionary crew through an epic, death-defying journey in the early 20^th century. It won the Academy Award for best foreign film the next year, and it’s well worth your time to seek it out.

NASHVILLE. Yeah, it’s been fifty years since Robert Altman unfurled this sprawling and acerbic canvas of Americana. In the opening montage, country star Haven Hamilton (played by former Laugh-In stalwart Henry Gibson) sings a defensively patriotic anthem that goes “We must doing something right to last 200 years.” It would sound exactly like a parody of the similarly-defensive MAGA anthem “God Bless The U.S.A.” (“where at least I know I’m free!”), except Nashville was made decades before. At times, the film verges on caricature when it goes after country musicians and their fans. At other, Altman’s satire seems too gentle, considering where we’ve ended up. Hal Philip Walker, the fake presidential candidate who weaves through the assorted narratives, wouldn’t stand a snowflake’s chance of getting any attention in the world of Trump and social media. But Lily Tomlin and Shelly Duvall are great, and so is Gwen Welles as the wannabe starlet who gets duped into stripping for a bunch for loutish business assholes. Keith Carradine is perfect as the guitar-strumming Lothario who women in the 1970s kept falling for (inexplicably!). But the real find is Ronnee Blakley, who acts and sings her ass off as a deranged Loretta Lynn-type superstar who gets caught up in the tragic awfulness of American politics.

SHAMPOO. The epitome of a certain period in Hollywood filmmaking when Warren Beatty could basically get away with anything. Screenplay by Robert Towne, coming off Chinatown, directed by Hal Ashby. It was conceived of as a 1970s version of a 17^th century Restoration comedy about promiscuous libertine who bedhops with other men’s wives. The update makes Beatty a heterosexual hairdresser in Beverly Hills, and it’s all open field running for him. Julie Christie, Goldie Hawn, Lee Grant, and young Carrie Fisher fall prey to his charms and what he can do for their hair. But the film is infused with a kind of cynical political consciousness that gives it more of a sting and an undertone of sadness than a typical sex comedy.

SMILE. Somewhere between Nashville and Shampoo lies this little gem, frequently overlooked in period surveys. The subject is the Young American Miss Beauty Pageant in Santa Rosa. And like Nashville and Shampoo, there are moments – in retrospect - when the tone seems a little too Hollywood-condescending. One of the girls in the talent competition demonstrates how to pack a suitcase (the director Michael Ritchie saw this in real life, but still…) But it’s also funny as hell and features Bruce Dern in a rare comic turn as one of the pageant judges. And any movie cast that has choreographer Michael Kidd and Barbara Feldon - aka Agent 99 from Get Smart – is ahead on my ballot.

THE STORY OF ADELE H. A different kind of women’s story, adapted by Francois Truffaut from the diaries of Victor Hugo’s daughter. Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t fallen in love with? This movie’s for you. It tells the story of a magnificent obsession as Adele pursues the object of her affection – another Lothario, this one a British soldier – over the edge and down into the abyss of madness. Isabel Adjani, then 20, goes “full retard” in her performance and holds nothing back. It’s hard to believe there was a time when even casual American moviegoers would know who Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut were, but we were better off for it.

ONE FLEW THE CUCKOO’S NEST. Like Pacino and DeNiro, Jack Nicholson went on an incredible acting tear for the first half of the 70s: EASY RIDER, FIVE EASY PIECES, KING OF MARVIN GARDENS, THE LAST DETAIL, CHINATOWN and this. He plays the rebel to end all rebels, trying to overthrow the tyranny of Nurse Ratched at the mental institution where he’s an inmate. Like some of the other films mentioned here, time has revealed some serious flaws. Especially in the way women are treated – Randle McMurphy has been locked up for statutory rape of a fifteen-year-old, who he believed was eighteen. And the whole 60-ish idea that crazy people are the free and sane ones has dated badly. But it’s still a very entertaining flick and you can see why it won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. Yeah, this came out the same year. The Black Knight who keeps wanting to fight after all his limbs are hacked off. Brave Sir Robin runs away. That rabbit is dynamite!

PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK. A half-century later and we still don’t know where those girls went. An early Peter Weir film that I haven’t seen since it opened, but the gauzy memory of it still haunts me.

LOVE AND DEATH. Woody Allen doesn’t get a lot of love these days. And let’s face it: the more you know, the harder he is to love. But I remember this as one of his funnier films and definitely one of the last he made before he started taking himself very seriously as auteur. It’s basically a series of riffs on 19^th century Russian literature, many of them truly inspired. Sonja marries a herring merchant who is more interested in herring than his wife – even though the wife is played by Diane Keaton. A countess tells Allen’s character he’s the greatest lover she’s ever had, and he humbly parries, “I practice a lot when I’m alone.” And best of all, the Red Army gets “a hygiene play,” warning them of the dangers of dallying with professional women. “Comrade, you have a social disease!”

BARRY LYNDON. I found this a little glacial in the wake of earlier, more obviously-revolutionary Kubrick films like Dr. STRANGELOVE, 2001, and A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. But you know what? Glaciers seem pretty cool nowadays. And while the ice has been shrinking, this film’s reputation has been growing. I’m not the world’s biggest Ryan O’Neal fan, but he’s perfectly fine here as the faithless rogue protagonist from Thackeray’s 1844 novel. Some 70s movies that used to seem gritty and real appear forced and mannered now. Whereas Kubrick’s film, which is largely about manners, seems more painterly, complex, and thoughtful.

THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING. Based on another 19^th century narrative, an 1888 novella by Rudyard Kipling. Starring Sean Connery and Michael Caine, directed by John Huston. When it came out, I thought it was a little square, compared to hipper films pitched to the youth market. Now the classic design looks pretty damn durable. The basic story is simple: A pair of British Army officers-turned-grifters find themselves adrift near the Khyber Pass, and decide to scam the natives by passing themselves off as potentates and even deities. The plan does not go well. The film not only stands up as one of Huston’s best, but the theme of Western exploiters also getting their comeuppance in the mountain region has dated better than, say, the politics of Cuckoo’s Nest.

JAWS. Really the beginning of the end for maverick moviemaking, because it was the blockbuster that began the blockbuster era. But unlike many of the popular studio films that followed, it’s a smart and brutally effective thrill machine. And still has traces of the quirkier, more character-driven films like Steven Spielberg’s own SUGARLAND EXPRESS. Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw are all very good. Shaw should have been a happy man that year. A film was adapted from a play he wrote, THE MAN IN THE GLASS BOOTH, inspired by the Adolf Eichmann case. But being a drinker and a hot head, he demanded his name be left out of the credits because he felt the producers were not honoring his intentions. When he saw the film and realized it came out pretty well, he tried to get his name put back on. But it was too late. And then the shark got him.

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. If this is your kind of thing, then this is really your kind of thing. And even if it isn’t, it’s hard to resist the singing, dancing Midnight Show silliness of the enterprise. And who doesn’t like a little Meatloaf once in a while?

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES. A three and a half hour slice of an ordinary woman’s life. Sight and Sound named it as the greatest film of all time. I must admit that I don’t really get it. But maybe, someday, I will.

THE PASSENGER. Another Jack Nicholson film, but it could not be more different from Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s quiet, hypnotic and mysterious. The story of a burnt-out journalist in Chad who assumes a dead man’s identity to escape the cul de sac of his life and then realizes he’s wound up impersonating an arms dealer with connections to a deadly civil war. It’s not a conventional suspense movie at all; it couldn’t be since it was made by Michelangelo Antonioni, the master of slow takes and modern alienation. Guy Ritchie fans will not be enthralled. But it’s far tighter and more accessible than earlier Antonioni films, and if you’re willing to give yourself over to a strange drive through the desert, you will be mesmerized. With Maria Schneider.

GREY GARDENS. A smart reader alerted me that I omitted this terrific and eerie documentary by the Maysles brothers about the two misfit cousins of Jacqueline Onassis, living in ruined splendor on Long Island.

NIGHT MOVES. A moody little noir with Gene Hackman in his glory years, as a football star turned PI.

HESTER STREET. In its restrained way, as groundbreaking as any of the other movies mentioned here. Not only because it was directed by a woman – Joan Micklin Silver – but because it’s an unusual depiction of the early 20^th century immigrant experience and marriage, through the eyes of a neglected wife (played by Carol Kane). Photographed in beautiful black-and-white.

Honorable mentions: The original version of THE STEPFORD WIVES, FRENCH CONNECTION II, HEARTS OF THE WEST, THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR, LET’S DO IT AGAIN, THE WRONG MOVE, RANCHO DELUXE, 92 IN THE SHADE, and A BOY AND HIS DOG.

A film called MIRROR by Andrei Tarkovsky was also released that year. But I haven’t seen that one myself. Yet.

Quite a few years ago, I did a book signing event with several other novelists at a mall in suburban Pennsylvania. Actually, it was in a hallway at a mall. Few readers came to our table. Then a young man with a shaved head and an Anthrax t-shirt glanced at our dustcovers as he passed by and announced, “If one of these books has the word ‘fuck,’ ‘shit’ or ‘Satan’ in it, I’m buyin’ it!”

“That’s nothing,” I told him. “I have all three words on every other page.”

Which was pretty much true of my writing in those days. Unfortunately, the mass market paperback edition of my book cost $4.99 and the young man, who told me he was called “Stony,” only had four dollars. So I spotted him the difference and hoped he’d remember me for future books.

I never heard from Stony again, but I think about him often. Especially these days, when there’s a lot of talk about the disappearing male consumer of fiction.

Since the start of this year, the New York Times has run several pieces on the topic, provoking a deluge of letters and comments. The Atlantic, Vox and Literary Hub have also weighed in. When I read at libraries or appear at bookstores, a good ninety percent of the audience is usually female. And the men who are present are often older and flagrantly falling asleep. When I speak to friends who teach creative writing, they tell me they rarely have a straight man in their classes, and not that many gay men either.

A counterargument says the issue is overblown, and the frequently-cited 80-20 female-to-male reader split is poorly sourced. But in the words of the esteemed author Lenny Dykstra, I call bullshit. Look around any subway car or airport lounge, and tell me it’s a golden age for men reading novels.

It was not always this way. The fiction bestseller lists used to be bursting with testosterone. You had your John Updikes and your Philip Roths at the high literary end, and your slightly-less exalted Leon Urises, Mario Puzos and Herman Wouks somewhere below them in critical regard but above them in sales, and then your Mickey Spillanes and your Harold Robbins.

These days, it’s a lot of Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. Maas. Good for them – and good for their readers. Making a living as a novelist is harder than ever – it was never easy – and everyone I know in a book club cherishes having a novel as a pretext to get together with friends.

But as a grumpy old guy who writes novels, I have a personal interest in figuring out what’s happened to male readers. But there’s also a broader social question about their scarcity.

Let’s tick off the obvious reasons and get to the less obvious ones.

1. People, in general, don’t read that much these days. Or they don’t read the way they used to. Yes, they look at short pieces on the web and social media posts. But, duh, attention spans are dwindling. It takes a lot less effort to get into a TikTok video or an Instagram post than a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. True, some version of this has been going on since the invention of the printing press. But the technological and digital target advances of the last couple of decades have eroded our ability to absorb longform narratives at an alarming rate of acceleration .

And let’s face it, a lot of guys would rather get the immediate dopamine rush from playing Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption 2 than the delayed gratification of slowly turning pages. “At least I get to win sometimes when I’m playing videogames,” a dude who works at CVS told me not long ago.

2. The way literature is taught in schools mostly sucks and turns off male readers. This is part of a general long-term trend in education with boys feeling alienated in the classroom and falling behind girls in academic achievement. You can read all about it in an important nonfiction book called The Trouble With Boys by Peg Tyre (and let me assure you that I have absolutely no ulterior motive for trying to get you spend your hard-earned cash to enrich the author’s lay-about husband). Annnyway…

Most boys come out of school thinking reading is a drag and novels have nothing to say to them. Or nothing they can use in their lives. Instead, the dreary apparatus of critical interpretation is imposed on what could have been engaging stories and kills whatever interest a boy raised on videogames might have had in All Quiet on the Western Front or To Kill A Mockingbird. Which leads to --

3. Men no longer see the point of novels. There is a saying, “Girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.” People used to read novels for two big reasons: escapism and information. But the novel itself moved away from the information business in the decades after World War II. If you look at reviews of novels by Dickens, Balzac, Steinbeck, and Dos Passos, you’ll see critics praise them for conveying a sense of life. If you read Anna Karenina, you’ll not only learn a lot about marriage in 19^th century Russia, you’ll learn a lot about crop rotation while getting a total banger of a story.

Serious post-war fiction often turned inward or drifted toward metafiction, while the escapist market turned more dominant on the bestseller lists. Men get their information – and misinformation – elsewhere nowadays. And it’s not that people don’t write good realistic novels with a lot of information anymore – Jennifer Haigh’s industrial-strength Heat and Light is one of the best contemporary novels I’ve read in the last 20 years – but it’s hard to imagine such a book getting much traction in the current attention-deficit economy.

Men like getting information from other men. They don’t believe they get that out of novels anymore. Novels feel like work you don’t get paid for. And no one wants to work without getting paid.

4. The Oprahization of Fiction. I want to be careful about this one, because I think Oprah Winfrey has been a big net plus for the modern fiction market. A lot of the books she’s recommended are really good ones – including Anna Karenina, East of Eden, and yes, The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (thanks a lot for blowing it, Big Mouth, when you said all those nasty things about her other picks). But for reasons that aren’t really Winfrey’s fault, her book club has led some readers to focus mainly on narratives about characters “who are just like me.” In other words, you’ll read a novel like Where The Crawdads Sing or She’s Come Undone because you directly identify with the suffering of the female protagonist. That’s great. Most of us are driven to read by a sense of recognition. The problem is that a wall goes up and many people won’t try to scale it. “Talk to my wife, she reads novels with her book club,” a lot of guys say when I meet them at social events. “I watch sports.”

5. There’s not enough naked people in serious storytelling anymore. A young man of my acquaintance (okay, actually, my older son) recently said, “When you watch The Sopranos, you’ll have a lot of really thoughtful, well-written scenes and then you’ll go to the Bada Bing.” When I started to debate that, he pointed out, “Dad, all the 70s movies you recommend have naked women in them” (in my defense, I’ll say he still hasn’t watched all the neo-realist Italian and French movies from the 40s that I’ve recommended). Along the same lines, Playboy used to publish stories by the likes of Doris Lessing, Annie Proulx, and Jorge Luis Borges on either side of its centerfolds.

Of course, that era is long-gone. And I’m actually not sure if it’s true that there’s not enough sex and nudity in modern fiction. But what I do think is true is that novels for a certain kind of male reader used to hold the promise of the forbidden. Novelists said things in their stories that couldn’t – or wouldn’t – be said in polite society, and could feel like a subversive activity. Personally, I’m never any good unless I’m saying something that I’m not supposed to say in a novel. Now that sense of transgressiveness has migrated to podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience, the vast far reaches of the internet, and, I’m sorry to say, Donald Trump’s White House.

Meanwhile, fiction and, more specifically novels, have become the province of book groups and certain shrinking corners of academia. Those circles are largely female and largely well-behaved. There’s nothing wrong with being female and well-behaved. In fact, I’ll gladly admit to being one of those men who thinks women are generally smarter, less boorish and more perceptive than men. But if you’re sitting around with your friends and having a warm empathetic conversation about the latest Barbara Kingsolver or Ann Patchett, it’s not quite the same thing as reading Portnoy’s Complaint or page 27 of The Godfather in 1969.

That’s not to say that reading is just about greasy adolescent kicks. A little more than generation ago, Tim O’Brien wrote the following in his great book of short stories, The Things They Carried:“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

Anyone with a modicum of life experience can tell that’s an authentic voice speaking to the reader. But few men turn to novels looking for the kind of honesty now.

And that’s a shame, I think. Because we’re living in a fog of lies at the moment, some generated by political propagandists and corporate mouthpieces, and some created by AI creeping inexorably into our lives.

Earlier I reeled off a list of novels published in 1939, when the world was on the verge of a war that still defines us in many ways. I think we’re on the edge again right now. Guys could use some good human stories to get through all the bullshit.

And just in case, you think you get everything you need from YouTube or some streaming show, let me leave you with a quote from the Russian novelist Vasily Grossman. Grossman, who was one of the first eyewitnesses to write about the Holocaust as a war correspondent, said the following in his epic novel Stalingrad:

“When people read obscure novels, when they listen to over-complex music or look at a frighteningly unintelligible painting, they feel anxious and unhappy. The thoughts and feelings of the novel’s characters, the sounds of the symphony, the colours of the painting—everything seems peculiar and difficult, as if from some other world. Almost ashamed of being natural and straightforward, people read, look and listen without joy, without any real emotion. Contrived art is a barrier placed between man and the world—impenetrable and oppressive, like a cast-iron grille. But there are also books that make a reader exclaim joyfully, “Yes, that’s just what I feel. I’ve gone through that too and that’s what I thought myself.” Art of this kind does not separate people from the world. Art like this connects people to life, to other people and to the world as a whole. It does not scrutinize life through strangely tinted spectacles. As they read this kind of book, people feel that they are being infused with life, that the vastness and complexity of human existence is entering into their blood, into the way they think and breathe.”

I’d like to believe Stony, the kid I gave that dollar to, kept on reading novels like this.

But he probably didn’t.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of working with Mariska Hargitay when she took on her first directing assignment for the TV show Law & Order: SVU. Midway through the shoot, she got sick as a dog and when I came to the set early the next morning in Central Park, I wondered how we’d move on without the star and the director. At a few minutes before 7 a.m., I saw her come strutting down the Fifth Avenue with a smile as wide as a city bus, wearing a knit hat with ears like a Viking helmet and shouting, “Come on, you freaks! You can’t keep me down! I’m a warrior!”

Most people think of Mariska as warm, empathetic Detective Olivia Benson, the scourge of rapists and champion of sex abuse victims. There’s truth behind that image. But I know her as a work colleague. And before I start saying a bunch of nicey-nice, kissy-face things, let me start throwing in some criticism for the sake of balance. Here goes: I once overheard her sounding a little over-the-top talking about wine.

And…that’s pretty much it.

Otherwise, honesty forces me to admit it that she is one of the most hard-working, well-meaning people I’ve ever encountered on a job. Even when things are going to hell, she treats everyone from her A-list co-stars to autograph-seekers on the street with consideration and respect. I’ve seen strangers walk up to her and start crying because she gave them courage to start talking about being sex assault victims. I’ve also seen cops and victim advocates tell her that they chose their careers because of Olivia Benson. And I bet no one came up to Charles Laughton and said, “Hey, I became a hunchback and started ringing a bell because you were so good as Quasimodo!”

She comes to play every fucking day, even after 26 years or whatever the crazy number is, and is always willing to push on to the next take if she thinks she can make a scene better.

That combination of guts and grace is on prominent display in the first documentary she’s directed, My Mom Jayne, which begins streaming on HBO June 27. The title subject is Jayne Mansfield, the once-famous actress and pin-up girl, whose image has long been synonymous with a certain kind of Hollywood decadence. In fact, it’s her picture on the cover of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Some of her fame comes from sexpot roles in films like The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? But the rest comes from the circumstances of her death in a horrific car accident in 1967 when she was 34.

Three of her children were in the backseat and survived. One of them was Mariska. She was three years old and has no memory of the crash. And few actual memories of her mother. But now she’s made a movie that looks at the wreckage without flinching.

It's a hard story to tell. Mansfield was ruthlessly exploited for her buxom figure and high, breathy voice, but, as her daughter makes clear in the documentary, she was often a willing accomplice in that exploitation. The voice was a put-on and so was the dumb blond image. In one of the most striking pieces of archival footage, an utterly sincere Groucho Marx turns to Mansfield and starts talking about what an intelligent and “sentimental” young woman she is behind her persona.

Mariska, of course, has staked out the opposite territory in her own career, playing a strong kick-ass character since 1999 – landing her big role when she was just a year older than her mother when she died. At the beginning of the documentary, Hargitay talks about her discomfort with the way Mansfield presented herself as a sex symbol.

So much of My Mom Jayne is a perilous journey toward daughter-mother acceptance with some serious jolts and pitstops along the way. Her siblings are along for the ride, though they’ve obviously been down some rough roads themselves. In a wrenching interview, her older brother Zoltan reveals that he remembers his mother’s last moments and that an innocent question that he asked after the accident saved Mariska from being abandoned at the scene with a head injury.

But Mariska is too smart and crafty an entertainer to make anything like a grim reality-show gorefest. With her co-producer Trish Adlesic, she’s assembled enough contemporary interviews and archival montages to give a vivid sense of the show biz world in which her mother became a starlet. In fact, the movie begins with dulcet tones of Merv Griffin interviewing the family. A Jack Parr interview that appears later should leave a deserved stain on his reputation. Occasionally, I found myself wondering what David Lynch would make of this material, particularly when we glimpse the tawdry Southern nightclubs where Mansfield finished her career or see earlier footage of an unleashed ocelot trailing after Jayne and the kids in the wacky Pink Palace where they lived on Sunset Boulevard.

There’s also a major plot twist when Mariska discovers that Mickey Hargitay, the former Mr. Universe she adored as her father, is not biologically related to her. And the scene in which Mariska reveals how she discovered the truth makes me wonder why she didn’t yell at the SVU writers, “Don’t you freaks understand how strange and painful real life can be?”

But the overall feeling I got when the movie ended was that Mariska had given dignity to a life where dignity was often conspicuously withheld – especially after her mother died. It’s not just a classy thing to have done, it’s a good story. In fact, the whole documentary is really good, even if you’ve never watched SVU.

Just don’t tell the director that I said so.

Even if you had dance moves like Henry Kissinger, Sly Stone’s music could get you grooving. And even if you had moods like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Brian Wilson’s music could get you humming.

It’s both poetic and strange that Wilson and Stone died a day apart, both at the age of 82. But then, they were both poetic and strange in similar ways.

Both wrote complicated songs that sounded deceptively simple and happy. Both started off with family in their bands – Brian with his brothers Carl and Dennis and his cousin Mike Love, Sly (born Sylvester Stewart) with his brother Freddie and his sister Rose – but wound up alienated and isolated. Both were great vocalists who let others sing some of their best songs. And both were hit machines who helped define the sound of American pop music in the 1960s – the Beach Boys in the first half of the decade, Sly and the Family Stone in the second half.

Both tapped into a particular kind of American joy in their music and ran as far as they could with the freedom of their era. Songs like “I Get Around,” “Dance to the Music,” “California Girls,” and “Stand!” exploded the boundaries of doo-wop, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and gospel, and put an infectious sense of possibility into the air everyone breathed. You could have women and men and Blacks and whites in the same band. You could sing about solitude or racism. You could have a hit record with a theremin and fourteen key changes or six different time signatures. You could even have a white drummer in a funk band.

They did songs about dancing and sunshine and love. But I think what makes their music resonant and durable is that they both could see the darkness as well. Even in their happiest songs, there are minor chords that allow for the other possibility – that life is not always joyful, that loneliness and sorrow are real, and that music is sometimes the only solace. It’s there in Sly’s empathetic “Everybody Is A Star,” “the edgier “Someone’s Watching You,” and even in the melancholy undertone of “Hot Fun in the Summertime” (which I take to be his homage to the Beach Boys).

And you can’t get away from it in Brian’s music, especially once you get to the Pet Sounds era, when even the delirious carousel of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” admits, “You know it seems the more we talk about it, it only makes it worse to live without it.”

Of course, in both cases, the darkness eventually took over completely. Both guys had about four or five years of astonishing productivity, churning hit after inventive hit under tremendous pressure. And then both retreated into the studio, shedding band members and withdrawing from public view, with drugs and mental illness starting to eclipse the ability to make good music.

By the early 1970s, both were still throwing off sparks of their old brilliance. Sly’s album There’s A Riot Goin’ On has the great paranoid anthems “Running Away” and “Family Affair,” and Brian’s wrenching “Til I Die” on Surf’s Up is one of his greatest songs. But at other times, you felt like their talent was dissolving like a bouillon cube in roiling water. By the middle of the decade both were largely marginalized and silent.

After that, Sly promised to make a comeback, but never really did. He’d start to play keyboards with a band on stage, then excuse himself to go pee and never come back. I highly recommend the documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), which my buddy Shelby Stone (no relation to Sly) helped to produce, as an explication of what happened.

Brian toured extensively with younger musicians, once he broke free of his crackpot Svengali therapist, and revived the infamously aborted “Smile” project. But he was no shape to break much new ground. I remember sitting directly behind Lou Reed at a Radio City show and seeing that old grump jump up and stalk out as soon as “Good Vibrations” started.

I always take heart from stories about artists who seem to have lost their way midcareer and then find it again at twilight. John Huston made some of his best movies toward the end of his life, Philip Roth (whatever else you can say about him) had a great third act, and my favorite Bob Dylan album is “Love and Theft,” which is a helluva long way from “Highway 61.’ But that didn’t happen for Brian Wilson or Sly Stone. The hard truth is that the mountains they climbed were mostly behind them by the time they were thirty, and there were a lot of valleys after that.

“Dying young is hard to take, selling out is harder,” Sly sang in “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)”. He didn’t do either of those things, but the alternative wasn’t much better for him or for Brian. But why begrudge them their achievements? They gave us more than enough. They played and sang their asses off, and four or five years is a very long time in rock and roll. At the end of the day, if you can cut a record in 1964 or 1968 that still has something to say to people now, then you belong in a Hall of Fame.

What I really mourn is the dimming of the uniquely American vision both musicians had. A foreclosing of possibilities. It’s not that people don’t make good music now. It’s that they’re making it in a country that’s more defined by the doors that it’s shutting than the ones that could be opened.