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Be sure to check out Robert Reich’s new film, The Work in Progress, which is out now.

My dear Ink community,

It’s time that we get together. It’s book club time again. By now, you’ve heard plenty from me about MAN IN THE MIRROR. Many of you are already deep in the book, sending me the most heart-warming notes.

Now let’s hang out and process it all together.

Here’s what we’re going to do: Three meetings on Zoom over the next six weeks, to discuss the book roughly in thirds. (We will follow the split used in my in-person book club with the McNally Jackson bookstore.)

So save the dates and register now to reserve your spot in the Zoom. Space is limited.

Tuesday, November 10 at 8 p.m. Eastern (be ready to discuss pp. 1-153, chapters 1-19)

Register for Meeting 1

Monday, November 23 at 8 p.m. Eastern (be ready to discuss pp. 154-299, chapters 20-33)

Register for Meeting 2

Tuesday, December 8 at 8 p.m. Eastern (be ready to discuss pp. 300-440, chapters 34-45)

Register for Meeting 3

We will gather together on Zoom. We will be able to see each other’s faces. We will talk about the book, the country, writing, more.

I’m also enclosing some discussion questions below.

Looking very forward to being with you all.

Anand

P.S. If you haven’t yet taken the plunge, you can order the book here:

Get your copy of MAN IN THE MIRROR

It is available wherever books are sold, including: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, Target, Books are Magic, or, for a signed copy, McNally Jackson. It’s available in hardcover, e-book, and audio.

Starter discussion questions

What presumptions did you bring to the subject matter of the book, and how, if at all, has the book challenged some of them?

Who is the character that has most stayed with you, and why?

What do you make of the literary device of seeking to inhabit the consciousness of some of the characters? How does it affect your reading experience? When you end up entering the minds of people you don’t agree with on things, what is that like for you?

The opening chapters introduce you to various players who have various agendas for this story. Why are we spending time with people who are crying to craft narratives?

Which of the worlds depicted in the book do you have some personal experience of? How do those experiences shape your read?

Analyze Johnny’s decision to get off of his antidepressants?

Reflect on the idea of moral complexity, as it appears in this book. Do you find yourself being challenged about the complexity beneath people we judge from afar?

Feel free to begin the discussion here in the comment thread, and we’ll continue live.

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I’m delighted to be able to publish here my essay on the political emotion that unites Americans when so little does. It ran first in The New York Times last month, and now I have permission to share it with you in full. It is my attempt to make sense of the character and mood of the country going to the polls in the coming days. Do share it with your people.

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The System Is Rigged. The Cavalry Is Not Coming. We’re on Our Own.

For a few moments on May 1, 2023, an extraordinary amount of American life was compressed into one New York subway car.

There was Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old Black man, homeless and suffering from mental illness, frightening passengers beneath a city still shaken by Covid. There was Daniel Penny, a white former Marine from Long Island who put him in a chokehold. There were bystanders facing a dilemma that would feel familiar to many Americans: wait for the system to work, take matters into their own hands or withdraw. And hovering in the air of car No. 9774 was America’s deepening crisis of trust — in institutions, in strangers and even in the belief that anyone is coming to help.

When Mr. Neely died in that encounter and Mr. Penny was charged with killing him, an American tragedy was instantaneously reduced to an American Rorschach test: What did you see in Mr. Penny, a hero or a vigilante? Was Mr. Neely a victim or a menace? People retreated to their corners and posted before they knew much. Soon the story, having been picked over, fell out of consciousness.

Three years later, the case is worth revisiting for the mirror it holds up to the nation. A death on the subway that seemed to prove that Americans now inhabit perfectly sealed, irreconcilable moral universes actually revealed one of the last things we have in common — abandonment.

Start in that subway car screeching uptown.

In the flicker of a moment after Mr. Neely boarded the train and began to cry out for food and declare himself ready to go back to jail, even ready to die, and before Mr. Penny came up behind him and dropped him to the ground in a chokehold, a common feeling pervaded the car: No one’s coming. No one’s listening. I’m on my own.

Mr. Neely certainly had reason to feel that way. He had cycled through so many people and institutions that failed him, going back to when he was barely a teenager and his mother had been murdered — her cause of death also, remarkably, compression of the neck.

For a time, he had made a living, and even thrived, as a Michael Jackson impersonator on New York’s streets and below them in the subway system. Then, as mental illness took hold, he struggled and began to unravel, passing over and over through the so-called revolving door of hospitals and shelters and jails that take people in crisis and spit them out until the next time.

Dafna Yoran, the lead prosecutor in the 2024 trial of Mr. Penny, later described Mr. Neely as one of those people city dwellers walk past and typically ignore, but on the day he died, she argued, “Jordan Neely demanded to be seen.”

Mr. Penny claims to have felt his own, rather different version of abandonment. His lawyers argued that he sustained the chokehold for several long minutes, even after the train had arrived at the next station and most passengers had gotten off, because the law was absent.

“The government wasn’t there,” Steven Raiser, one of Mr. Penny’s lawyers, said in the courtroom. “The police were not there when the people on that train needed help. Danny was. And then, when he was the one that needed help, no help arrived. Not for him, and certainly not for Mr. Neely.”

In courtroom testimony, many passengers on that F train confessed their own sense of being left to themselves. In a 911 call played at the trial, a witness identified as Latimer pleaded with the police: “Could y’all get someone over here? Because he’s doing y’all justice.”

These sentiments will be familiar to many Americans. The defining political emotion of the age may be the sense that power, and with it the ability to push back on what bears down on you, is somewhere other than where you are, that you are unheard and unseen, that you are acted on but lack the means to act. Beneath so many disparate political phenomena — the Epstein files, A.I. doom, immigration, prices, housing, weak leadership — is that feeling of being undefended.

Why is a sense of abandonment so potent in America today — and so widespread across the divides of party and tribe and geography?

There is no shortage of culprits, and every political faction has its preferred one. But if you take the Penny-Neely case as a subway-car microcosm of America, it points toward an answer that is less convenient for any of them, because it implicates all of them. For many Americans, public authority has come to feel impossibly erratic.

Such authority is experienced by citizens as a strange mix of overcontrolling and unhelpful, too strong where a lighter hand would do and too weak where more is needed. It is authority that people may experience as draconian even as those who wield it feel hamstrung, an authority that can feel at once oppressive and weak, gargantuan and hollow, omnipresent and absent.

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Take the system of care for homeless people like Mr. Neely. So many Americans walk the streets of their cities and see people in crisis and perceive that the government is AWOL. They may not realize how, in fact, vast the apparatus of care is in a place like New York.

An army of outreach workers toils to build rapport and coax people off the streets. The problem is that their often-remarkable compassion is not matched by that of the shelter system into which they are inviting people. Violence abounds in that system, and the authorities within it often seem more interested in exerting their prerogative to enforce curfews and other rules than the bolder authority of transforming lives, getting people into apartments and ending the phenomenon of homelessness.

In mental health policy, authority can also be haphazard, too much and too little, here today, gone tomorrow. When Mr. Neely died, it was commonplace to hear that he had slipped through the cracks of the system. But this idea was false. Mr. Neely was regularly discussed in a meeting of senior city officials as a member of one of the “Top 50” lists of especially precarious New Yorkers whom city agencies track. The real problem was subtler — and more maddening.

Members of his family wanted him forced into care, but they lacked the power to make that happen, and health care providers often turned him away: Mentally ill homeless people are not the American system’s favorite customers. City outreach workers tried to tend to him, but they lacked any authority to compel him when he simply chose to walk away. And the police, who did have stronger authority, weren’t invested in helping him so much as in preventing lawbreaking.

Underlying these problems was an abiding moral confusion about human self-determination and public power that is haunting many major cities today. When people in Mr. Neely’s kind of psychiatric crisis refuse help, does the state have the right to force them into a hospital and onto drugs in the name of their dignity?

So many in Mr. Neely’s situation are caught between those on the progressive side who overestimate the autonomy of people whose illness may prevent them from knowing they are ill and activists on the right who decry the degradation of public space while resisting the public investment that serious care of the homeless requires.

It is impossible to walk down the streets or take public transportation in any major American city today and not see this confusion spelled out in human pain. And when so much suffering is forced to play out in public, it fosters unease, pity, annoyance and fear in the more privileged — who, in spite of their comparative fortune, can end up feeling abandoned in their own way.

In Mr. Neely’s short and tempestuous life, erratic authority was one of the few constants. The state greatly overpoliced Mr. Neely when he was young and committing crimes no more serious than jumping subway turnstiles and sleeping outside. It arguably held him too loosely after his crimes escalated into violence.

In early 2023, while awaiting trial on Rikers Island for assault charges, he was diverted into one of the new alternative-to-incarceration programs that, in his case, even prosecutors championed. But once he was there, he was free to walk out the door unhindered. Within a few months, he was dead on the subway.

There are many possible responses to the sense of abandonment we feel around us. A hunger for agency — some agency, any agency — may show up in civic engagement, in activism, in mutual aid or in voting for authoritarians who promise order. But it also manifests in the most primordial form of all: taking matters into one’s own hands.

Starting in the first days after Mr. Neely’s death, Mr. Penny’s defenders in court and in public had framed him in those terms — as a hero standing up to entropy. In this narrative, popular on the political right, the left was responsible for this void of public authority by emasculating the police, promoting bail reform, tolerating street camps and minimizing severe mental illness.

Some online rightists were repeating an idea that Mr. Penny was a victim of “anarcho-tyranny”: government cracking down on good, solid, middle-class (white) citizens who step up to reject their city being taken over by hobos, junkies and criminals. “The government,” Mr. Penny’s lawyer Mr. Raiser said, “has the nerve to blame Danny for acting when police were not there.”

Then one day during jury deliberations in the Penny case, news rippled through the courtroom that the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, had been shot and killed in Midtown Manhattan. Soon the murder suspect, Luigi Mangione, would be brought before the law, and some of the same reporters would pivot to covering a new case in the same building. And just as quickly as in the Penny case, Mr. Mangione began to be described by some on the left in the same terms as Mr. Penny was being framed on the right: as someone stepping into the void — in this case, into the byzantine, claim-denying vacuum left by health insurance companies.

The two cases differed greatly, morally and otherwise: an unplanned chokehold that even prosecutors claimed began with good intentions, compared with a premeditated assassination. What was striking was how both stories were processed by many as tales of self-appointed avengers acting in the absence of dependable authority.

Shortly after the Thompson shooting, Mr. Penny was acquitted. And when his critics took to the microphones outside court, a variation on this theme of the void and vigilantism was heard. “Just like everybody else seeks justice on their own, just like everybody else has vigilantes, we need some Black vigilantes,” said Hawk Newsome, a founder of the local group Black Lives Matter of Greater New York.

Mr. Newsome’s idea was not only physical self-defense, though. In a racist country, as he saw it, Black people needed to stop trusting that the system would help them. They needed, he said, to form their own schools, health system, media outlets and more.

Listening to that news conference, I was struck that the supporters of Mr. Penny and of Mr. Neely had disagreed on every substantive aspect of the case — the facts, the role race played, class, mental health, homelessness, policing, crime. But if you pulled back from their arguments so that you heard the deeper stories in their words, there were resonances.

They shared the sense of being undefended, that the cavalry was not coming. They shared the sense that the system was rigged, corrupted, driven by forces and factors that didn’t serve them. They shared the sense that the old ways of achieving the world you want — marching, voting, asking nicely — were dying. They shared the sense of Somebody do something! They shared the sense of pessimism about anyone doing anything, though, and therefore they shared the sense that sometimes the person to do something is you.

How can so many people feel the same basic thing — deserted — and so often end up at the throats of other people who also feel deserted?

Our common abandonment keeps failing to produce a common politics — solidarity across difference — because all too often, as in the Penny and Mangione cases, the way the story is told silos it. Each tribe has its own theory of who’s to blame and its favored expression of self-help. No one wants to associate the forms of D.I.Y. action that they find acceptable with those they reject. This makes it harder to see that taking matters into one’s own hands has become a rare thread of our common life, a final American glue.

When the Rev. Al Sharpton gave Mr. Neely’s eulogy, he tried to make a connection between one man’s act on the subway and the more chronic treatment of Mr. Neely by an entire city and its agencies. “The sad part about it, the sick part about it, is that he’d been choked much of his life.”

The civil rights leader pledged that, just as the choking, as he saw it, had been done not just by a man but by a whole city, so, too, would the pursuit of justice in Mr. Neely’s name require more than winning a case. It called for “a new city.”

That new city hasn’t yet come to pass, though. A country in which we keep failing to hear the rhymes in our different cries of pain, in which our experiences of desertion are turned into competition rather than common cause, is better at producing avengers than answers.

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This essay was drawn from my reporting in my new book, MAN IN THE MIRROR. You can find out more about it and order it here.

Get the book

This essay triggered a large and remarkable set of comments on the Times’ website. See here.

I would love to hear your thoughts as well. How do you relate, or not relate, to this idea of abandonment? Do you think it’s possible to find common cause in our different experiences of the same underlying phenomenon? In what ways are you drawn to, or repelled by, the idea of working outside the system, giving up on the system, taking matters into your own hands? What do you see as roads out of this situation?

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Photo: Marcin Golba/NurPhoto/Getty Images

Today, just a few fragments, in keeping with the fragmented self sending this note. First, some photos. Then, a couple of events where we might meet, including tonight. And, finally, my just-dropped interview with the brilliant Tonya Mosley at Fresh Air.

Some photos from the road (and home):

A few upcoming events in New York, including tonight and tomorrow night:

• BROOKLYN, NY
  When: Wednesday, October 28 at 7 PM Where: Brooklyn Public Library, Central Library, Dweck Center, 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY
  In conversation with Tara Westover
  Tickets / Info

• NEW YORK
  When: Thursday, October 29 at 7 PM Where: McNally Jackson Seaport, 4 Fulton Street, New York, NY 10038
  A city-wide book club, moderated by Anand and Sarah McNally — Part I
  RSVP

• KATONAH, NY
  When: Saturday, November 7 at 10 AM
  Where: Westchester Book Festival at Katonah Village Library, 26 Bedford Rd, Katonah, NY 10536
  In conversation with Priya Parker
  Tickets

And a very special interview I got to do with the NPR show Fresh Air, with the brilliant Tonya Mosley. The episode just dropped, and I wanted you to hear it first.

Here it is, in whatever you preferred format is, or here via the NPR website:

Thank you for being part of this community. You have lifted my spirits during the most grueling days of tour; you have made this book what it is. I’m eager to get back to regular life and writing soon, but, for now, thank you for all of your support.

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Jones’ latest book, BACKSLIDE, is a powerful investigation of how so many in evangelical communities willfully capitulated to Donald Trump — and why.

A few practicalities, while I have you.

If you’re in New York, come to a very special (free!) event I’m doing at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn on Thursday (October 15). This one is especially for all the transit nerds out there. We’ll be talking about public transit as this space in America that ends up absorbing so many of the failures of other institutions and holding people whom no one else will hold. Joining me will be amazing clinicians, city officials, and other experts. Register here.

And a few other upcoming dates to come say hello. I continue to love meeting you all!

Calgary this upcoming weekend. St. Louis on October 20. Brooklyn on October 28. Westchester County, NY, on November 7. Miami on November 21.

And if Wajahat only whet your appetite, at the risk of oversharing, some other fantastic chats I had the privilege of having.

Zeteo

Is This the ‘Defining Political Emotion of Our Time’? A Best-Selling Author Makes the Case

On May 1, 2023, a subway car in New York City suddenly became the center of American political discourse and division when former Marine Daniel Penny killed homeless Michael Jackson impersonator Jordan Neely…

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21 days ago · 127 likes · 15 comments · Mehdi Hasan and Team Zeteo

I’ve spoken to so many of you in recent days, and I was thinking of what I take away from these conversations. It may be this: It seems to me people are ready to turn the page not just on this era, because obviously, but on this culture we’ve been living in.

Donald Trump is not just a president; he’s a culture. He is a reflection, in many ways, of what we had allowed ourselves to become as a country. And what I sense in the air is a desire to turn away from that culture.

What is that culture? It’s hyperreactivity as a way of moving through the world. It’s contempt across whatever chasm of difference, or even crevice of difference. It’s assuming the worst in others. It’s assuming others lack the complexity that only you possess. It’s the flattening and reduction of everyone and everything. It’s refusing to imagine what it might be like to be others.

The other day, in Washington, D.C., one of my parents’ friends quipped to me: I thought you were brave when you wrote a book criticizing billionaires, but now I think you’re really brave because you’re writing the kind of book no one wants.

Thanks, auntie!

But she was right. I knew what she meant. This last decade has been so perpetually stressful, rage inducing, demanding of righteousness, that there is little space for other ways of being in our common life.

One of the bitter ironies of the Trump era is that Trump fosters in his opposition the mimicry of behaviors, habits, and attitudes that make it harder to get past Trump.

I can’t say that I set out to write a book in the opposite spirit; it sort of just emerged from the relationships I built with a range of characters and the substance of what I found. But the auntie was right. In the end, what I made was what no one wants now: full of moral complexity, inviting people into the shoes of people unlike them, asking them to like people they don’t agree with — just like them and ride along with them.

And as I have met so many of you and talked to you and felt the energy in these rooms, I have begun to feel that: maybe, actually, contrary to the auntie, people do want this now. Maybe we are ready to turn the page and peer into our next era.

I don’t yet know what that era looks or feels like; I don’t know what its leadership or slogans will be. But I do know this much: It will be centered on humanizing rather than dehumanizing each other, on curiosity rather than knowing it all in advance, on endeavoring to imagine the lives of others without feeling you’re complicit in them.

It will be an age defined by Team Human, not the dehumanizers or the machines.

I think even the auntie knew it. She was teasing me, but she was there that night. And you have been there night after night as I’ve crossed the country three times already.

And yesterday I learned that, thanks to you, MAN IN THE MIRROR debuted at No. 11 on The New York Times bestseller list.

I wasn’t expecting it. I had done a little self-management meditation in the morning preparing myself. This book isn’t viral-friendly, I told myself. It’s not provocative. It’s an attempt at art, not a fist-shaking manifesto. Let it have a slower life, I told myself.

But then you, and some others perhaps looking for what you’re looking for, lifted it up. You signed up to get it in your hands early. You spread the word. You came to events. You took a chance on a hard story. You pitched it to your beloved book club.

You did this. I mean that quite literally. I couldn’t feel more upheld by this community and in general than I do right now. When I found out, I called my wife, Priya, and even as I gave her news she basked in, she turned the tables on me and gave me some news.

What I take from all of this is that people are ready — you first and foremost among them. Ready for the next incarnation of us.

I tried to write myself out of this era by making this book. And it seems to me that more and more people want to venture together into whatever comes after this.

Let’s walk towards it, fast, steadily, together.

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Today I’m in L.A., where I went on Bill Maher’s show last night. We were supposed to talk about several things, but the conversation about homelessness and mental illness and how we care for those on the edge ended up consuming so much of our time, I think because there is no one who doesn’t see and feel this problem, and wonder.

I wanted to share a few things with you that I hope you’ll find worth your time.

First, and most importantly, there is this video of me humiliating myself when my book character Moses Harper tries to teach me some Michael Jackson moves.

Then there is this conversation from the 92nd Street Y in New York with the brilliant, irrepressible Tina Brown, one of the fiercest minds and sharpest pens we have. I don’t think I’ve ever come alive so much in a public conversation. It’s a special one. And check out Tina’s trenchant Substack here.

Now, if you’re ever wondered more about me, which I cannot remotely understand why anyone would, I nonetheless want to be here for you. So I’m also going to post a profile of me in The New York Times by the very knowing and seeing Ginia Bellafante.

There are many insights and details Ginia weaves together, including exposing how utterly strange I must look while writing:

Giridharadas wrote “Man in the Mirror” in two years, a short span for a book of its length (442 pages) and seriousness. His first draft exceeded 1,000 pages. Priya Parker, his wife of 16 years, a specialist in conflict negotiation and also a writer, said he did it keeping “quote unquote office hours, working nine to five.” He would read his daily output to her while he cooked dinner in their home in Brooklyn. Giridharadas has played the piano since he was a child and thinks about writing in terms of musicality. “He’ll sit at his desk,” Parker said, “and tap the desk to feel the rhythm of the sentence and think, ‘Does this rhythm work?’”

L.A. folks — you asked for a SoCal event, and a reminder that there is one…tonight! Come see me in Summerland at Godmother’s!

Oh, and here’s a Bill Maher clip from last night.

Finally, just a note of thanks. None of this would be possible without the community I have around me. That includes you. Thank you.

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The message came in from out of the blue. A good fraction of the DMs I get feature unsolicited advice about my hair style, or a suggestion to go back to my country (Cleveland). This message stood apart.

It was from a woman who had seen me on “Morning Joe,” talking about a new book called MAN IN THE MIRROR. She had a great interest in that title, which of course comes from a Michael Jackson song. For, as it happens, she co-wrote that very song.

She was going to be in New York this week. I invited her as my guest to my launch at the 92nd Street Y. And then there she was in the crowd, the Siedah Garrett, off to my right; all I could see through the glare from the stage was a shimmering on her head. At one point, I mentioned her presence, as I had done with that of the homeless outreach workers, mental health clubhouse members, and book characters present.

Then there was the book signing, in a small room tucked away. As I was signing, I noticed to my right a dazzling shimmer.

Siedah. It was hard to concentrate on signing books, partly because my children were beside me and seemed to be trying for eye contact with people in the hope that they would be asked to co-sign. Then, as the signing wound down, I got up and met Siedah for the first time. We hugged, and I told her I couldn’t believe this encounter.

I asked her about the backstory of the song, and she told us all about being signed to Quincy Jones as a young lyricist, and Quincy calling her to say Michael Jackson needed one more song for an album he was close to finishing, and Siedah writing what would become MAN IN THE MIRROR, and then singing it for Jackson, who, she said, loved her way of singing it so much that he invited her into the booth to sing it for him, so that he could learn from her.

To understand what happened next, you have to know something about my parents. They love live music like squirrels love trees. They love live music like Republicans love cuts. In whatever city we are in, from my childhood through today, they maintain a kind of auditory Google alert for the sound of live music wafting. If they detect a waft, we must walk towards it. Other families play cards; we chase saxophone.

And so my father, without any shame, asks the Siedah Garrett if she wouldn’t mind — you know — singing. That MAN IN THE MIRROR song. I mean, it is, after all, his son’s book launch, and she did, after all, write the song, and, you know, we’re all here…

And that’s when suddenly it was happening. Siedah, standing a couple of feet from me, began to serenade me and all of us.

I’m gonna make a change, for once in my life.

Have you ever had a moment that you were aware was one of the unforgettable moments of your life even as it was unfolding? Well, this was one of those moments. And I want to share the moment with you:

Perhaps this is the kind of gift you get when you put a work of love out into the world: The world echoes back; and if you’re lucky, the echo will come in the form of a song.

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That minute with Siedah was only the most dramatic, melodious proof of this idea. This week I sent a book into the world and received the most gorgeous waves back.

I have all of you to thank. You in the Ink community were among the very first to hear about this book, take a leap of faith into it, spread the word, and then you began to show up at the events this week. To meet you in person is to have air become flesh. Thank you for all you have done for this work, which my friend Terry Moran last night said it took him time to realize was a love letter as much as a work of reporting.

Below, I’m going to give you a recap of some interviews I’ve been doing in recent days, in case you’re the kind of person who likes to binge. This section is for you, Mama.

Speaking of my mother, I think she would want me to tell you that today is the last day for orders of MAN IN THE MIRROR to count toward the first-week tally and The New York Times bestseller list. To be clear, her son doesn’t care about those things, as he is above such worldly concerns. But his mother would really like it if he brought the family honor by being on that list. So I felt I should pass along my mother’s strong request that, if you think you might want to read MAN IN THE MIRROR, you order it today. And then we can read it all together, book club-style, in the coming days.

Get the book

A final note, before the roundup of links. Books are deceptive. They generally have a single name on the cover. This is a lie. If anything has struck me this past week, it is that it takes so many people to make a work like this possible: This book has received from so many hands the gift of research, editing, designing, marketing, publicizing, and such. It has also had the immense fortune of so many friends and journalists and artists and others devoting their precious time to read it in advance, so that they can assess it and share their impressions with others. My book had so many champions who answered my calls to invite their friends and communities to events; they took trust they had earned with people and spent it on me. Nothing meaningful is possible without others; of a book this may be truest.

So, at week’s end, simply thank you. If today I’m the man in the mirror, what I see looking back at me is a grin wide as the glass.

And now a few links for those who want to go deeper and/or catch up:

• Come find me on book tour. Cities and dates here

• Join our New York City in-person book club over three months with yours truly, organized by McNally Jackson, which is also offering signed copies

• My “Morning Joe” residency, about cities, family, belonging, mental illness and homeless, and a subway car as a metaphor for a nation, featuring special guests Rev. Al Sharpton, former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, and former New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan: Day 1, day 2, day 3.

• A Q-and-A with The Drift, going deep on an obscure literary technique called “free indirect discourse” and how that method is the spiritual center of this book, and why I wanted to probe the “emotional inner life” of our authoritarian age

• A smart-and-great-vibes chat with Preet Bharara, including drilling deep on the idea of dehumanization and humanization

• A thoughtful review in BookPage; one of those reviewers who just gets the project

• A wonderful NPR conversation

• A very New York conversation about the book on WNYC

• ICYMI: The night I spent in Penn Station: a New Yorker excerpt

• ICYMI: Scott Turow’s review in The New York Times

• ICYMI: The first three chapters of the book, for free, in audio form

Today MAN IN THE MIRROR is in the world. I’ve never been prouder of anything I have made, except for tomato jasmine broth.

You’ve heard me talk about this book and kept me company through its making. And now, finally, I get to put it in your hands.

As a special gift to you, I have included the opening three chapters of the audiobook for you to listen to. But if you’ve been waiting for today, too, and are ready to begin:

Get your copy of MAN IN THE MIRROR

It is available wherever books are sold, including: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, Target, Books are Magic, or, for a signed copy, McNally Jackson. It’s available in hardcover, e-book, and audio.

MAN IN THE MIRROR represents my return to the shoe-leather reporting with which I began my career two decades ago in India. It took root in the tragic story of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny and a subway death in New York. And then I followed the story to places I hadn’t expected to go: a Marine Corps base in North Carolina, a community of Michael Jackson impersonators; a Harlem church; a suburb on Long Island; and Penn Station after midnight.

And, indeed, I found in this story so much of our common story today. This is a story of home, belonging, health and illness, security and fear, love, family, democracy. It is an opera about our struggle to live together.

My ambition was to write a book you couldn’t put down — because I know what else is sitting on your nightstand. I wanted to steal your attention away from that phone, with storytelling that felt propulsive. But I also wanted to show you something deeper — about how America works now, about how we might get out of these dark times.

Writing this book required me to change some of the habits that had crept into me in recent years, and that I believe have crept into so many of us: instant reactivity, reflexive dismissal, knowing what we think in advance about whatever comes down the pike. Reporting this book forced me back in the direction of curiosity.

If you have experienced some of this same thing, my hope is that reading the book will help you recover your own curiosity. Stories have the power to make other people more real to us. Democracy means sharing a country with people you didn’t choose; it depends on all of our ability to see each other as people rather than categories.

This community enables my work. Your commitment to independent reporting gives me the freedom to go deep, spend time, and follow a thread wherever it may lead. That is an extraordinary gift to give a writer.

In the months ahead, we’re going to read together and talk about what we find. I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

I couldn’t be more grateful to have you in my corner. Thank you for making this morning the moment I’ve dreamed of.

Anand

P.S. Some more tidbits for you to follow.

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The first three chapters for you to listen to right away

I’m delighted to share chapters 1 through 3 from the audiobook. Take a listen:

The audiobook is now available from Apple, Audible, Libro.fm, Spotify, among others.

Let’s meet…

Tomorrow, Wednesday, September 30, at 6 p.m. Eastern, I will launch the book at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, in conversation with the remarkable Tina Brown. I’d love to see you in the room and meet up afterward during the signing. If you’re elsewhere, you can join us by livestream.

Join us in person or online

I’ll also be coming to see you on book tour starting later this week. More locations and dates coming in the days ahead!

Find a tour stop near you here

Help the book find its readers

Launching a book is a barn raising. So many of you have already ordered, shared a piece, or asked how you can help. Thank you for your kindness, which moves me so.

If you’re wondering what you might do to support the cause:

• Post on social media. Could be a photo, or just a note that you’re excited to read this title, or a video of you reading a passage out loud. Whatever platform you favor. Tag me (@AnandWrites) and use the hashtag #maninthemirrorbook

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• Drop it into your group chat. Give your friends and family something to talk about. Drop either or both of these in your group chats: this New Yorker excerpt and/or this New York Times essay. Bonus points for dropping in a tempestuous parent group or Indian-relatives Whatsapp.

• Review it. On whatever platform you buy on, or on Goodreads.

• Choose it for your book club: The themes of this book are the themes of American life today — and of life in so many places. Bring this work to your book club and I guarantee you lively discussions.

• Lean on your librarian. Librarians want to know what books the community actually wants. Give them a strong rec.

• Gift it. If you have people in your life who enjoy stories, cities, America, immersive experiences, empathy for other people, true crime, or feeling moved, gift them this book. Better gift than wine.

For organizations and hosts: If your company or nonprofit or civic group would be interested in reading the book, Porchlight Books can help with bulk orders. And if you’d like to invite me to speak to your organization, contact Trinity Ray at trinity@goliathjones.com.

Once again, my deepest thanks to you for being with me along this journey. It’s here, and I cannot wait for you to experience what I’ve long dreamed of sharing with you.

Get your copy of MAN IN THE MIRROR

For those of you good enough to scroll all the way down, some items to catch up on:

The first day of my three-day residency on “Morning Joe,” talking about the book.

The New York Times review of MAN IN THE MIRROR:

A New Yorker excerpt:

My New York Times essay on abandonment as a defining political emotion of the age:

The New York Times review of MAN IN THE MIRROR had just dropped. Admit it or not, it is the moment so many writers hanker for. I was flustered, and I began. And I saw the name Scott Turow, and I was floored. And then I began to read his powerful and rigorous engagement with my work.

Now, if you want to avoid the complexity my book encourages us to face, if you want the wartless version, here’s a highlight reel:

“This book — often brilliant, occasionally frustrating — is an extraordinarily wide-ranging investigation of the circumstances underlying a lethal incident that occurred on a northbound F train on May 1, 2023: the death of Jordan Neely, a mentally ill homeless man, after a fellow passenger put him in a chokehold in an apparent attempt to subdue him when he began screaming…The remarkable scope of this book is demonstrated in a series of involving portraits, including of unhoused New Yorkers, whose meager possessions are routinely swept away in police raids but who nevertheless reappear on the Sarsame sidewalks hours later; of touchingly dedicated outreach workers who try to lead the homeless to safety; and of public health figures butting heads over policy…This is an exhaustively reported book by a ferociously talented writer.”

But Turow, to be clear, has some criticisms of the book, namely that I empathize too heavily with Jordan Neely and not enough with Daniel Penny. I have heard it before, except in the form that I empathize too much with Penny and not enough with Neely. That is what happens when, against the grain of this cultural moment, you set out to tell a story in which everyone is humanized. I embrace that this is not for everyone.

I may have succeeded, I may have failed, and Turow is a serious and thoughtful enough writer that his words will have me reflecting on my own. That is what this art is for. I’m so grateful to him for all of it.

I’d love for you to read the review, courtesy of this gift link from me, and then get in the comments and share your own views.

Read the review at NYTimes.com

The review has begun to trigger vigorous debate on social media, among other things about whether empathy is only for some people and is conditional on good behavior. Should we have empathy for everyone? Can you empathize with multiple people in a conflict without siding with one or the other? These are worthy questions to confront.

And so I thought I would give all of you a special gift that we hadn’t planned to release until later. Why not now? I say.

So here, with great trepidation and great excitement, are the first three chapters of MAN IN THE MIRROR in audio form. I’m sharing them because they capture the approach I’m trying to take: empathizing with everyone, because that is the work. It’s my work, but I also believe it’s our work at this juncture of our common life together.

After talking about this book with you for so long, I can’t believe I’m about to hit send on sharing these opening chapters with you.

Thank you for being with me on this journey. If you haven’t yet signed up to have the book at your doorstep on Tuesday, pub day, this is your moment. I want you in the many rich conversations we’ll be having.

Get the book (including in audio)

And tell me what you think. I’m listening.

Leave a comment

You have heard me talk about the story that consumed me for the last three years. Today I woke up painfully early, I think because I knew it was the day I would finally get to share a piece of the book with you.

This has been my little private thing for a long time. Today it becomes shared — ours. There are nerves with that, and much joy.

The New Yorker, a magazine I have revered ever since I could pronounce the word “magazine,” today runs an excerpt from MAN IN THE MIRROR. It is a chronicle of a night I spent in Penn Station in New York, observing kind and savvy outreach workers trying to coax homeless people into shelters.

The essay just posted on their website. I wanted to hop on here and share it with this community, which has made the work I do possible in so many ways, and whose curiosity and civic spirit inspire me daily.

Read the excerpt

And now we get to begin reading together.

On Monday, September 28, at noon ET, my beloved, Priya Parker, will host a community reading party for MAN IN THE MIRROR, right here on Substack Live. Special guests from the book will take turns reading aloud. After so long living with these pages, I’m looking forward to hearing them in other voices, with you there.

Join the community reading

The book comes out this Tuesday, September 29. If you’d like to keep reading with us, you can preorder your copy here, or via any of these retailers: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, Powell’s, Target, or, for a signed copy, McNally Jackson.

And tell me what you think of the excerpt:

Leave a comment

In our household, the beautiful chaos continues. Priya is somewhere between Florida and California. Last night I abandoned my kids to mow down some sushi on their own because I had to speak to a university class taught by my first mentor in journalism, Jill Abramson. Today, another frantic day of podcasts and signing several hundred books, many of them bound for you all. When I apologized to my kids for how scattered I’ve been, my son said, “It’s OK, it’s for a good cause.” I love them.

Today I wanted to share a special Q&A I did with the good people at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan — home to the historic room where I’ll be launching MAN IN THE MIRROR into the world next Wednesday.

The book I’ve written was first a conversation the internet showed itself incapable of having. Now, as I launch the book in that storied room, and then in rooms across the length and breadth of this country, I want us to have the conversations the internet couldn’t. Conversations that feel like the opposite of the clickbait all around us. Conversations that are human in the age of AI. Conversations that are life-giving, about how can build the kinds of communities where we all feel like we belong.

I’m so eager to meet so many of you along the way. Join us at the 92nd Street Y if you’re in or around New York, or sign up to join us virtually from anywhere else:

Join me in New York

And I’m very possibly coming to your city. Come meet me along the book tour trail:

Tour dates

If you haven’t yet, consider ordering the book, so we can all read it together:

Get the book

And now on to my conversation with Daniel Poppick.

Anand Giridharadas Holds Up the Mirror

Reposted from the original here.

The tragic story of Jordan Neely’s death on the subway and Daniel Penny’s subsequent trial for manslaughter and negligent homicide — and Penny’s ultimate acquittal — divided New York City, and much of the country. In your book, you make the case that the polarized reaction elides a deeper moral complexity. What have we been missing?

Part of why I am excited to be launching this book in that historic room at 92NY is that this was a conversation that the internet couldn’t have. The case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny was on the simplest level the case of a tragic and fatal encounter on an uptown F train. But as every New Yorker who reads this will know, every subway car fits more than people — it contains clashing histories and social forces. There was a lot of institutional failure in the life of Jordan Neely, a former Michael Jackson impersonator who was homeless and mentally ill; there has also been an implicit permission of violence in the air since the beginning of the Trump era. Once the internet got hold of the story of this encounter, it was reduced to clickbait, hot takes, and a kind of American Rorschach test that quickly became almost tribal.

I wrote a book in a very different spirit. In Man in the Mirror, I am trying to understand what actually happened, and I am trying to imagine a city and a country and a world in which Daniel Penny felt neither the need nor the right to take someone’s life. It is a story, more than anything else I’ve ever written about in my life, of deep moral complexity; of genuinely difficult dilemmas about how to care for the most precarious and vulnerable people in our society, and how to make people feel safe in public space without deploying police as a tool for everything. I wanted to launch this book in that historic room at 92NY because it is place that is famous for having hard conversations that couldn’t happen elsewhere. My hope is that we’re going to be able to gather on September 30th and have a conversation that is the opposite of clickbait.

What is it about 92NY and its audience that you think makes this conversation possible here?

Over the years I’ve heard from people who are older than me that 92NY is like an intellectual grocery store. It isn’t a place you visit twice a year when something piques your interest — it’s a place you visit twice a week because you want to refresh and restock your ideas about the world. There’s an infinite library of content on the internet, but 92NY has this community that keeps wanting to leave the house to go sit with other people to take in ideas. That is a profoundly civic faith that is sadly rare. I do think it has a good chance of coming back, but the burden is not just on the creators — it is on the audience to stay engaged. I think the audience at 92NY understands that.

You are known as a journalist, but Man in the Mirror is written in a more narrative style than your last few books — it is almost novelistic, reaching into the literary lineage of books like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which had its public debut on our stage. Why was it important for you to tell this story in this way?

I have always wanted to write this kind of book. In my previous books, I was trying to articulate an idea. My book Winners Take All from 2018 is very much in that spirit — it is not meant to be a beautiful work of art, it’s trying to articulate an idea and deliver it to a reader. With this book, I wanted to make something that was a piece of art that also happened to be non-fiction. There is a branch of journalism in this tradition: books like Capote’s In Cold Blood, Adrian LeBlanc’s Random Family, and George Packer’s The Unwinding. It is very hard to write a book with an imaginative quality that is also documented and true.

It seems to me that there is a crisis of both trust and attention in our culture. At its best, narrative non-fiction attempts to solve the problem of trust through journalistic rigor, and it addresses the problem of attention through a commitment to engaging storytelling. I wanted to write a riveting story in which I could show my receipts to prove its truth.

Winners Take All was an investigation into how the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” preserved and deepened a status quo of inequality. In a sense, Man in the Mirror could be read as a companion to that book, the other side of the same coin. What is the relationship between the inequality that you wrote about in 2018 and Neely’s story?

Great question. The Neely and Penny case reveals, in my view, the defining political emotion of our age: the feeling of abandonment. At a time when the richest and most powerful people in the world are building bunkers, buying private islands, and seeking immortality while telling the rest of us that AI is going to kill humanity, most of us have been left to fend for ourselves. In the subway car in which Jordan Neely was killed, there was one emotion that virtually all the passengers had in common: the feeling that no one was coming to save them. I would argue that this emotion was not just present in that one subway car. I think it’s everywhere in our culture. Man in the Mirror is a kind of follow-up story to what I was writing about in Winners Take All— a story about what happens when people are left to fend for themselves.

It’s been more than three years since Neely’s death and nearly two years since Penny’s trial. Have these events changed life in New York City?

It became very clear to me while reporting this book that people who are chronically homeless and mentally ill, of which there are many in America’s cities right now, are falling into a chasm. It is a chasm between a view of the world held by some progressives that overestimates the capacity for this population’s autonomy and a right-wing view of the world that doesn’t want to spend a dime on a system of care for people who need help, that wants people like this to be swept away. The tragedy of Neely’s death on the subway held up a mirror to our society, but so far it has not resulted in reforms.

At your event at 92NY, you’ll be talking to Tina Brown. Why was it important for you to have this conversation with her in particular?

Tina is one of the greatest editors around, and she’s someone who deeply understands many of the issues at the heart of this book. She understands New York deeply, she understands the crisis of mental health in our society, and she understands the problem of media sensationalism in how we process a story like the one I’m trying to tell. She has a combination of journalistic rigor and an understanding of the attention economy which is rare, and it’s something I aspire to.

What do you hope the audience takes away with them after this event?

You mentioned Truman Capote’s book debuting on that stage — I find that daunting, but I am moved to be part of that tradition, along with all the other 92NY conversations that I’ve seen, heard, and read about. My first hope is that this is going to be an electric night in New York. We’re going to sit together and ask a big question: how do we live together? How do we all find a shared sense of belonging? There is so much loneliness, isolation, and estrangement across this city. I think it’s time for New Yorkers to grapple with this story’s many realities and meanings and take it forward for themselves so that we can make the city better. I deeply believe that this kind of conversation actually can help build a new city. I couldn’t be more honored to be starting it on that stage.

Anand Giridharadas launches Man in the Mirror with Tina Brown on Wed, Sep 30.

It was a video seen around the world. But what did it really show? In this, the second episode of my new YouTube investigative series, a companion piece to MAN IN THE MIRROR the book, Emma Goldberg of The New York Times and I break down the clip so many briefly saw and made their minds up about. What might a closer look show?

Thanks for watching, and, as always, let me know what you think:

Leave a comment

Catch up on the first episode here:

We talked about the case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, the political emotion that unites Americans across divides today, whether spreading the sense of being needed and having others can be part of the public health response to mental illness, and what happens when we fail to see each other as human beings. It’s a rich conversation and a kind I love, in which two people seek and find what their work and experiences offer them in common.

Watch above and share your thoughts.

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For those who track that kind of thing (Hi, Mama!), MAN IN THE MIRROR comes out in exactly one week.

Order the book

Just as quickly as the article dropped, I watched people began to process it on social media. And I was startled by what should no longer surprise me: So many seem to be losing the ability to process information through any other filter besides “Do I agree with this?” If yes, post the essay with fire emojis. If no, eviscerate it. There are no other options for so many people today.

I say this as though it’s only happened to other people. But in recent years, I felt it happening to me, too. You probably felt it also. There is so much to be righteous about these days that the faculty we’re quickest to go to is judging. Do I deem this new information to be right or wrong?

But there are so many more interesting questions with which to face the world. What does this new information tell me that I didn’t know? How have I lived some variant of what I’m reading, in my own way? What must it have been like to be that person? These are not the questions people have on social media. These are the kinds of questions you have when you’re a reader.

As I’ve shared before, I wrote MAN IN THE MIRROR partly because I wanted, thanks to a friend’s intervention, to jolt myself out of the certitude I felt closing in. I wanted to feel curious again.

And now that I am a day and a week away from sharing the book with you, I want to say that my highest hope for this book is that it might help you in some of the same ways. If you feel that judging reflex swallowing your mind, if you feel that instinct to either agree or disagree and not take things in, if the certitude virus has come for you, too, I want to invite you to join me on this journey.

Let’s read this book together over the next few months. My promise to you, since I know what’s in it better than almost anyone, is that it will help you reclaim that part of your mind that was able to switch into other people’s ways of looking, to feel what it is like to be someone else, to hold in one’s mind a thought one doesn’t agree with but just hold it there for a moment, because citizenship demands this faculty of all of us.

So today, a last call from me to preorder MAN IN THE MIRROR, so that you will be among the very first to get it.

Preorder MAN IN THE MIRROR

I say last call because today is the deadline for letting us know you’re in this reading circle from the start — and getting to be part of a special event with me this Wednesday, September 23, at 8 p.m. ET.

That’s when my friend Sam Dolnick, who made said intervention and assigned me the idea for this book, will join me for an intimate conversation about our friendship, the origins of this book, and more. This will be open to anyone who preorders by today and submits their proof right here.

Join Wednesday's special event

Oh, and when you do, this crew who is here with me from the beginning will also get a behind-the-scenes archive just for you:

— Photos, videos, notes, and scraps from three years of reporting — some revealing, some strange, some funny, most never intended for publication.

— The music of the book: a playlist drawn from the people, places, moods, and worlds I entered while reporting it. Music became such a major character in this story that it felt wrong not to give you the soundtrack.

— And, after an unreasonable amount of lawyerly negotiation, a deleted scene I still love but couldn’t keep in the finished book. They won’t appear anywhere else.

I woke up this morning almost vibrating with energy to begin sharing this work with the world. I’m so honored to have you with me.

Get behind-the-scenes content

Thank you for being the community you are.

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When so much in the world seems to undermine our sense of common humanity, a book can reconnect you to your own humanity and others’.

I wrote MAN IN THE MIRROR hoping you might find yourself in other people’s struggles to belong, to love, to matter, to find home, to make the world better. If you are like others who have already read it, I think you’ll finish it feeling less alone, more alive, and more human. And more hopeful about what brings us closer together.

I feel proud of what I’ve made. Now I need readers to pick up where this writer has left off. I’d love you to be among the first.

If you’ve been meaning to order it, please make today the day. It would make a big difference and be a light at tunnel’s end.

Preorder MAN IN THE MIRROR

Have you already ordered, or just did? Drop a comment telling me you have, so I can thank you and so you can find others to read along with. I’m so grateful to you.

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Because of copyright law, I had to excise the reading of the article, but I’m happy to share the little conversation we had afterward.

It’s about how to listen for the rhymes beneath so many of our different experiences.

As I say in the video, this is what my new book, MAN IN THE MIRROR, is really about: this shared sense of abandonment we all feel, told through the story of an incident that reveals the country itself — and I think will show you to yourself.

It’s scary trying to put work like this into the world, but having this community makes it less so. If you are able and haven’t yet, it would mean the world to me if you pre-ordered MAN IN THE MIRROR today. You are the vanguard whose choices now will determine how many other readers get to see the book in the media and in stores.

Thank you for always having my back.

Read MAN IN THE MIRROR

Today I want to pivot from sharing my thoughts on the question of abandonment as our shared experience of modern America — to hearing all of your thoughts.

How do you experience this sense of abandonment? What do you think are the remedies? Do you struggle to find common cause with others who may also feel deserted, but for different reasons? What might make those rhymes easier to hear?

Leave a comment

And a personal request. What has occasioned this conversation is the three years I’ve spent working on my new book, MAN IN THE MIRROR. I am beyond eager to share it with you. This work changed me and grew me in so many ways, and I hope reading it might do something similar for you. When we go deeply into the stories of other people’s humanity, we come away seeing everything a little differently.

If this conversation we’ve been having has meant something to you, I’d love for you to read the book. And if you know you want to, I’d be grateful if you ordered your copy now. Preorders make a real difference in helping a book find its way to more readers — and, most of all, it would mean a lot to know that many of you will be reading it in tandem when it comes out.

You can order a copy here. And eternally: thank you for reading, for thinking with me, and for being part of this community.

Read MAN IN THE MIRROR