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:

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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:

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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.

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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?

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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

The short version: The New York Times is running a guest essay today by yours truly, based on my new book, MAN IN THE MIRROR. It’s about how a tragic subway killing that divided America actually revealed what we have in common.

Read it at NYTimes via gift link

Now, for those of you who like a little context stirred into your coffee, here’s a splash.

The first time I had the feeling, I was 17. I was a high school kid who had somehow talked himself into an internship at The Times. My boss, an editor in the Washington bureau named Jill Abramson, told me to report and write something. I suggested that might not be a good idea, because…17. But she insisted, and I did. And I remember sitting on my parents’ bed the night the piece was closing, and the copy desk calling me with edits, and the piece closing. And the feeling — that came the next morning when I went outside to bring in the blue bag. It was a magic trick to me, the only one I ever wanted to learn. I wrote it on my laptop, they called me with some repairs, and then it was in the blue bag in my front yard.

Some years later, I was lucky enough to embark on an 11-year stint writing for The Times. I learned everything about journalism there. It’s Parris Island for people whose idea of a pull-up is pulling up to a reluctant source’s house to see if they will talk.

And now I write something for The Times a few times a year at most. But the feeling, I will tell you, doesn’t go away. The magic trick.

So when I have a new book to share with the world, it’s a special honor to get to bring it to a broad audience of Times readers with an essay like today’s. And the 17-year-old boy buried in me is very thrilled to see it.

I talk a lot on here about the power of independent media — like this thing right here. But I have to tell you, it is a powerful and special experience to be edited the way a piece like today’s essay was. The legendary Vanessa Mobley is my editor. She used to be a book editor, now works at The Times. She is as fastidious and obsessive as I am, and doesn’t mind going three, five, eight rounds with me, back and forth, back and forth, until we cook it just right. Then several other editors weigh in, make tweaks, adjustments, suggestions, additions. Everyone in the Track Changes, a kind of ballet.

As much as I enjoy going it alone in a newsletter, I have to admit that this kind of process makes for powerful, lasting work. Or so I hope. (The same goes for books, by the way, and my wonderful team at Knopf.)

That’s it, that’s the context. I would love you to read this story, share it with people you know. In fact, if you’re able, send it to five people today. It would help a lot.

Read it at NYTimes via gift link

And if you haven’t yet, I will say unabashedly: I want you as one of the early readers of MAN IN THE MIRROR. I want you to get in on the ground floor of this work and of all the conversations we will have about it.

Order MAN IN THE MIRROR

And a short preview of the essay here:

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.

Read it at NYTimes via gift link

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I’ve shared a bit about this before, but in this conversation with my friend Monica, a lot more came out of me. I think a lot of people will relate to what has happened to all of our brains living in this era in which moral clarity and ferocity feel important, but are also bad for our thinking spirits.

Watch the full conversation here, along with my brilliant wife, Priya Parker, author of the new book THE ART OF FIGHTING:

Preorder MAN IN THE MIRROR here so that you’re part of our conversations about it when it comes out on September 29:

Preorder MAN IN THE MIRROR

And if you want to join a special live conversation with Sam and me on September 23, in which I share more of my own transformation behind this book, sign up here:

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It’s a conversation in two acts. First Jacob Weisberg joined me to discuss Profiles in Cowardice, his new book about capitulation under Trump. Then Robert P. Jones joined me to talk about Backslide, his new book about White Christianity’s devotion to Trump, enabling of authoritarianism, and, in Jones’ view, commitment of “apostasy.”

Two writers, two books, two acts, and a common underlying question: Can democracy, a system of citizens standing up, endure without spines?

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What happens when people and institutions fold? When accommodation and collaboration and looking the other way become the norm, not the exception?

It will be a conversation in two acts. At 12:30 p.m. Eastern, Jacob Weisberg will join me to discuss Profiles in Cowardice, his new book about capitulation under Trump. Then at 1 p.m., Robert P. Jones will join me to talk about Backslide, his new book about White Christianity’s devotion to Trump, enabling of authoritarianism, and, in Jones’ view, commitment of “apostasy.”

Two writers, two books, two acts, and a common underlying question: Can democracy, a system of citizens standing up, endure without spines?

Join us right here at 12:30 p.m. live.

Join the live

And tell me what questions you have for Jacob Weisberg and Robert Jones.

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We are published by two different imprints (Hi, Riverhead!, hi Knopf!, thanks for reading!!! and also for everything!!!), but they are part of the same conglomerate. I thought corporate consolidation was supposed to solve problems like this. Alas.

Ultimately, they agreed to separate our pub dates by three weeks. So Priya went yesterday, and mine is September 29. And this whole month everything is chaos.

Beautiful, lucky, maddening, joyous chaos.

Yesterday, we both woke up at 4:30 a.m. to get prepared for Priya’s launch day and “Morning Joe” appearance. I accompanied her there and played the role that so many young boyfriends now seem obligated to play: director of social media chronicling. Then she dropped me off at a three-hour podcast taping I was doing in Dumbo, in Brooklyn, and she was off to Washington, D.C., for a launch event there. Then I was with the kids, and I asked them if they could play quietly so I could nap, because of the 4:30 a.m. wake-up, plus naps are my secret, and then I had to take them with me to get my haircut back in Manhattan, because I couldn’t look the way I was looking for Priya’s big launch event tonight. I know this because Priya, the least judgmental person on earth, has repeatedly asked me of late about any upcoming haircut plans. The woman who cuts my hair cuts it with a knife, in addition to scissors, which provided huge entertainment for the kids. They were more engaged by this than by the gorgeous art books she had generously handed them, after apologizing that her selection was limited because most of her art books consist of nudes. Then I took the kids to dinner, during which a gigantic crisis erupted for Priya. But it’s OK now!(?)

This morning, I have the kids solo as Priya returns from D.C. Just had a long morning can-you-wake-me-up-Papa hug with my daughter, who likes to be introduced to the day, and a consultation about hair gel with my son — there is a school orientation today and a play date involving board games. Tonight is Priya’s big launch. And my task list for today involves: finishing my toast for Priya tonight, sending out invites for my book events, consulting a dermatologist about this skin thing, and maybe a run?!

But it’s all part of the madness of the joy. Or so we are trying to tell ourselves. To be honest, we have been stressed about it all summer — it’s hard to bring into the world something people keep saying no one wants anymore: books. It’s hard for both partners to do it. But I don’t believe those prognostications. Priya and I decided, with help from wise friends, that the way to face this situation is to find the joy in it.

Prove THEM wrong: Read this book

The reason the coincident pub dates were a problem, in our minds, was because of how much we would be asking of people. It wasn’t the logistics. It was the sense of shame in asking for so much from so many people, all at the same time. We are more comfortable offering than asking, hosting than guesting, but here we are.

So I am very intentionally not going to apologize to you for spamming you with all of these things happening and these invitations. I’m going to keep sharing with you in the spirit of sharing our family’s chaotic joy. In my work, you go away for a long time, and you report and learn and think and write. And then you return to the world, and sometimes, as it happens, your wife is landing on the same runway at the same hour.

So I hope you take all of these offerings and invitations in the spirit in which they are intended, as portals into that which we most care about and have most carefully nourished and tightly held in these years. Thank you for being in this with me and us.

And now to those offerings and invitations:

If you live in or around New York:

— I want to see you at the big launch event at the 92Y on September 30. It’s going to be an amazing night. Tina Brown is the greatest chat partner I could have asked for. Get tickets here.

— Also for New Yorkers: I’m doing a really cool and special thing with the McNally Jackson bookstore: an in-person book club series. The store is organizing New Yorkers to read the book in tandem over three months, and there are going to be three meetings — with yours truly in attendance — and we’ll discuss it all. RSVP here.

If you live anywhere at all:

— Please come meet me on book tour. All the dates here — along with a new Southern California date because you all asked for it! And also here on my website.

— A lot of you have complained about cities not on the list as of yet. I hear you, and I urge you to tell your local bookstore to invite me. That’s how it works, and I am more than eager to come wherever books are read. And you can also catch the big launch event on September 30 via streaming here.

If you like true-crime investigative series:

— I’m trying a new experiment with this book: a companion YouTube investigative series where I unspool one piece of evidence from my reporting at a time. The first episode just dropped, and I’m really proud of trying something weird and new.

If you like conversation full of laughter:

Not long ago, Priya and I did our first joint podcast interview with our friend Monica Lewinsky. It is a truly hilarious conversation in which we share more than we should have, and nonetheless I will share it here.

OK, I was just summoned to go make breakfast and see my daughter’s new Doc Martens — she apparently went with black, not the sparkly pink, she updated me. All of life, in all its high and low variety. Grateful for all of it and for you being here.

On May 1, 2023, as the world began to get word of a death on the New York subway, a video clip began to make the online rounds. It showed a chokehold on the floor of an uptown F train — the incident at the heart of my new book, MAN IN THE MIRROR.

But there is another video at the burning heart of the case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny that I’m betting you haven’t seen: the interview of Penny by detectives shortly after the incident.

For my new YouTube investigative series accompanying the book, we are taking one piece of evidence at a time and unspooling the reporting slowly, to show you the work.

This week, in the first episode of the show, Emma Goldberg of The New York Times and I break down the interrogation video most of the world hasn’t seen which ended up being pivotal to the government’s bringing a case against Penny for allegedly causing Neely’s death. Did one word used by Penny change the course of this case?

Here’s what we see in those thirty minutes of the interview: two detectives and a young Marine veteran first finding common ground, swapping unit numbers and deployment stories, and then, slowly, the ground shifting under all three of them.

In this episode, Emma and I watch the tape together, minute by minute, and trace the exact point where the language changes, where the word “crackhead” enters the room, and where I observed the detectives quietly pulling away from camaraderie with Penny. It’s a small, human turn, and I’ve come to believe it explains more about why this case was brought, and why it went down the way it did, and why it matters not just on the level of two men or of a city but of the country itself, than almost anything else I found in two and a half years of reporting. I hope you’ll watch it with us.

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Order Priya’s incredible book here:

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My wife and I fight a lot, and I really need to talk to someone about it. So here goes.

To quote Churchill, we fight on the beaches, we fight in restaurants, we fight in bed, and I believe we, too, have fought on hills.

Just yesterday morning, we got into a fight about our differing parenting styles with regard to our eight-year-old daughter’s big new idea to have nothing functional in her room and instead devote all shelf space to a “gallery.”

When we first started dating, we got into a big honker about, to me, Priya’s surprising expectation that I should pay for all the groceries when her parents were visiting, that I should let them stay in my apartment since hers was “too small,” and that, in deference to their Christian mores, I should find another place to sleep.

This is ongoing, but she continues to be really mad that I may or may not have given her the impression that I was more open to the possibility of religion during literally our very first makeout session. IT WAS OUR FIRST MAKEOUT SESSION, PRIYA.

Now, I’m not airing this dirty laundry just because I think that all of these fights clearly reveal who is the sane, grounded one. I’m also sharing this because I think the world deserves to know a dirty little secret of one of its greatest fighting experts.

Priya Parker secretly hates conflict.

When we have these fights, her hands get clammy within five to eight seconds. There are certain veins in her forehead that will make a very pronounced appearance. She may have nightmares for three days running after a spirited intellectual discussion about whether recycling is an “actual thing.”

Pretty interesting, then, that she has become one of the world’s premier experts on conflict resolution. Pretty, pretty interesting.

Now, you would think that hating conflict would be a problem as a conflict expert. It would sort of be like Andre Agassi hating tennis.

But, famously, Andre Agassi does hate tennis. So I guess you could say Priya Parker is the Andre Agassi of conflict. She doesn’t like it. But she has absolutely mastered it.

And today is a very special day in our tempestuous household because Priya has just published a book whose simple, gargantuan ambition is to help everyone else master it, too—and in doing so recover some of the community and connection missing from our lives. It’s called The Art of Fighting, and it’s a master class.

She will be a lot less mad at me about some of what I’ve written above if you order the book right now. So do it for me.

But, mostly, do it for yourself and your people. I’ve had the unfair advantage of learning these ideas by living alongside Priya for years, and they have changed how I understand marriage, friendship, family, work, democracy, and what it means to stay in relationship with others when things get hard.

Order THE ART OF FIGHTING

Before I go further, a few programming notes: Priya will be on my usual stomping grounds of “Morning Joe” at around 7:30 a.m. Eastern this morning. And then she will join me for a live right here on Substack probably around 8 a.m. Eastern — but subject to pub day vagaries. Let’s see what she has to say for herself.

And we just did our first joint podcast appearance, on “Reclaiming, with Monica Lewinsky.” Watch that on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I actually don’t think we fight too much. Or any more than other couples. Our fights are not throwing-things fights. I don’t think they’ve ever risen to shouting. But we are two people who think a lot about how to live, and how others live, and how the world is, and I think it’s hard to be like that and not collide with your greatest love.

Sometimes when we’re having one of our arguments — Priya has a term for these that I love: “worthy grapples” — the kids will look a little alarmed. And Priya sometimes pauses and looks at them and says, “Papa and I are fighting because we love each other.” And this will either seem strange to you or totally sensible to you, but it represents the core of Priya’s thinking and approach in The Art of Fighting. We don’t fight with people we don’t care about; we don’t fight about things we don’t care about. We fight with and about that which we love.

Here is Priya’s thesis in a nutshell: Fights form. That’s what she believes and what she has taught me. Far from conflict being a sin, a problem, a distraction, an inconvenience — or any of the other things we call it to stave off actually facing things — Priya argues that conflict done well is generative: it lets us define ourselves, it is how we make things, it is a creative act.

Declaring independence is pretty conflictual; it’s how you make a country. Refusing to do some ritual at your wedding is conflictual; it’s how families break free of traditions that no longer serve. Criticizing and primarying incumbents in your own political party is conflictual; it’s also how parties reform.

Think about friend groups you may have had that thrived for years, and then something happened, and maybe no one said anything, and, great, terrific, some big blowup was avoided. But you know what? After a while, the group sort of fizzled. There are still birthday texts, maybe. But they’re no longer calls, and the joy has gone.

What Priya is trying to do with this book is teach you how to fight well. To avoid the two bad options our culture keeps offering us: unhealthy peace and unhealthy conflict — avoidant behavior, saying nothing, suppressing what we actually think; or, instead, burning the house down.

There is another way: facing conflicts thoughtfully and intentionally, putting things on the table, and getting through to the other side. An alternate title for this book was “Through”, but I’m not allowed to share that.

Priya is not trying to teach you to fight better because she thinks fighting is good. She hates it, remember. She is trying to teach you because she is angry and sad about how much human connection never comes to be simply because people can’t face conflict.

Her argument is that if you face the hard things with your people — if you grapple rather than ghost, bother rather than bounce — what awaits you on the other side isn’t merely a restoration of whatever existed before. Sometimes it’s a kind of closeness that could not have existed without the fight.

In this book, you will learn actual skills. You will learn why gossip can be good, actually. Why you should have paintball fights at work. How to look for the “relational longing” at the heart of so many conflicts. How to decide which conflicts shouldn’t be faced. How to know when a group should dissolve.

Order THE ART OF FIGHTING

Many of you will already know Priya’s work from her classic book “The Art of Gathering.” That book and this new book seem different. But if one is about how to bring people together, the other is about what inevitably happens when you do. And they are bound by the following trait of Priya’s, to which I have more of a view than anyone else.

Priya is scandalized by how much more meaningful our lives could be, how little it can take to make them so, and how seldom we do. It makes her mad how much work life sucks for most people. How much meetings suck. It really pisses her off when we go to weddings, and all these amazing people from every facet of a life are in one place, and then nothing is done to help them become more than just a disparate group of people. And it makes her angry, I know this deeply, to see groups of people who could find so much more in each other, who could be for each other so much more than they are, not realizing that potential because it feels easier not to say what needs saying.

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The last thing I want to say is that Priya, unlike many who share wisdom on Instagram, actually lives her ideas. Her work is fundamentally about trying. Trying to make things better. A prospective British publisher once passed on the proposal for “The Art of Gathering” with a snide note about how the book was marred by the American idea that things can be made better.

Well, they can. Priya knows how. And if you are willing to learn from her, as I am about 60 percent of the time, then you can, too.

Once we were on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard. Our firstborn, Orion, was maybe a year old or so. She was holding him, and he was holding a French fry from the fried-seafood mecca, Nancy’s. A seagull swooped down toward Orion, and its beak fully enclosed the French fry, but it overshot, and some of the webbing between Orion’s thumb and forefinger was caught in its bite.

In that quarter of a second between realizing what was about to happen and it happening, Priya and I both yelled at the seagull, but we yelled very different things.

I screamed “No!!!!!” at the seagull while thrusting my chest out toward it and trying to scare it, trying to make it think that its descendants would never know peace if it came an inch further. Priya, in that same moment, made a different sound. I think the word she said was “Hey!!!!” But the point was more how she said it. It had the tone of a kindergarten teacher whose young charge has begun to fingerpaint on the window.

She didn’t like what the seagull was doing. But, more important, she thought the seagull could do better. She believed in the gull. She wanted to teach it another way.

Order THE ART OF FIGHTING

I am a strange mix of excited, nervous, proud, terrified, and impatient to get MAN IN THE MIRROR into the world, on September 29. But I have much less complicated feelings about coming to meet all of you. About that, I am unreservedly thrilled.

Honestly, book tour is one of the best parts of my work. Not all writers like it. Some say they write to avoid such human contact! But for me, it’s the honor of this work.

I am ready to give the world this book and ready to meet you and talk with you and record funny videos with you for your spouse and sign your books and learn from you about the ways these ideas show up in your life. Something I’ve learned along the way is that every book acquires more ideas after it is published, because of the people you meet and what they share with you afterward.

So let’s meet! Here is what I dream of: Ink community members packing the rafters at every stop. Sure, we’re going to let in everyone. But for me, it all starts with you, because without you, the writing I do wouldn’t be possible. I mean that.

I will be in conversation with some truly remarkable people on this tour: Tina Brown! Terry Moran! Rebecca Solnit! Junot Díaz! And many others you will see below.

Before I share the dates and info below, a special note to my New York people. You may have seen my note the other day, in which I shared how Sarah McNally, one of America’s great booksellers, called MAN IN THE MIRROR “the best New York book since THE POWER BROKER.” Well, I want a loud and passionate Ink crowd on launch night in NYC — September 30. Get your tickets now before they sell out! (They also have virtual streaming tickets available if your city isn’t on the list below.)

Come to 92Y

Now on to the tour dates, with a bit of bonus content below them: some photos from old stops along the beautiful book tour trail.

NEW YORK
When: Wednesday, September 30 at 6 PM
Where: 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY
In conversation with Tina Brown
Tickets (for in-person and streaming)

WASHINGTON, DC
When: Thursday, October 1 at 7 PM
Where: Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008
In conversation with Terry Moran
Info

CHICAGO, IL
When: Sunday, October 4 at 7 PM
Where: Chicago Humanities Fall Festival at Northwestern University, McCormick Auditorium
In conversation with Alex Kotlowitz
Tickets

SEATTLE
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 7:30 PM
Where: Town Hall Seattle, The Great Hall, 1119 8th Ave, Seattle, WA
In conversation with Steve Scher
Tickets

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
When: Thursday, October 8 at 7:30 PM
Where: City Arts & Lectures, Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA 94102
In conversation with Rebecca Solnit
Tickets

BOSTON
When: Tuesday, October 13 at 6 PM
Where: Harvard Book Store at the Brattle Theater, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA 02138
In conversation with Junot Díaz
Tickets

CALGARY, AB
When: Saturday, October 17 at 7:30 PM
Where: Calgary Wordfest
In conversation with Zain Velji
Tickets

When: Sunday, October 18 at 1 PM
Where: Calgary Wordfest
In Conversation with Kurt Andersen & Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Tickets

ST. LOUIS, MO
When: Tuesday, October 20 at 7 PM
Where: St. Louis Public Library, Clark Family Branch, 1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63131
In conversation with Ryan Krull
Info

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

MIAMI, FL
When: Saturday, November 21-Sunday, November 22 (details to come)
Where: Miami Book Fair
Info

JAIPUR, INDIA
When: Thursday, January 14-Monday, January 18, 2027 (details to come)
Where: Jaipur Literature Festival, Hotel Clarks Amer
Info

I want to hear from you! What city will you be joining us in?

Leave a comment

And will you send this to 3-5 friends and family who might like to come meet me? Or maybe you want to bring your book club….

Share

And now, back to the archives for some of my favorite past book tour photos:

Now, for those who like the longer version:

Meet people where they are.

A couple of books ago, I learned something from some of the activists and organizers I was writing about. Many of their fellow travelers, these subjects of mine felt, were building movements for pluralism but being exclusionary in their way of working. They gatekept instead of inviting in. They seemed more interested, as the old line goes, in finding heretics than converts. The remedy, these people told me, was to meet people where they are. This applied to Trump voters, but it also applied to people simply encountering unfamiliar concepts.

Meet people where they are.

It’s a good mantra to live by. And it’s why I’ve been working on something secret, until now, alongside my new book, MAN IN THE MIRROR. In the old days, you just wrote a book and dropped the book and the book was the thing. In the new world, often annoyingly, but maybe in certain ways for the better, the book is part of a conversation, but it is not the whole conversation. I realize that so much of the conversation now is happening in other places, whether on Substack or in spaces like YouTube, where a great many people spend hours going deep on various subjects.

So I’ve decided to make a YouTube show building on, but certainly not replacing, the book. Whereas the book takes a tremendous amount of reporting and digging and investigating and interviewing and document sifting, and renders it all in (hopefully!) smooth, polished prose designed almost to conceal the labor, the YouTube show is going to do something different: I’m going to take one piece of evidence at a time from my extensive reporting, and show it to you, and analyze the light it sheds on the case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny.

Today, the trailer drops. I’m so excited to share it with you here. The first episode will be out in a matter of days, and I will share that again as well. I want to know what you think of this approach in the comments.

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And…come meet me during my book tour. An initial rundown of dates here:

And don’t miss this special offer to share my behind-the-scenes process and artifacts with those who are with me on this project from the very beginnings. Thank you!

I am a strange mix of excited, nervous, proud, terrified, and impatient to get MAN IN THE MIRROR into the world, on September 29. But I have much less complicated feelings about coming to meet all of you. About that, I am unreservedly thrilled.

Honestly, book tour is one of the best parts of my work. Not all writers like it. Some say they write to avoid such human contact! But for me, it’s the honor of this work.

I am ready to give the world this book and ready to meet you and talk with you and record funny videos with you for your spouse and sign your books and learn from you about the ways these ideas show up in your life. Something I’ve learned along the way is that every book acquires more ideas after it is published, because of the people you meet and what they share with you afterward.

So let’s meet! Here is what I dream of: Ink community members packing the rafters at every stop. Sure, we’re going to let in everyone. But for me, it all starts with you, because without you, the writing I do wouldn’t be possible. I mean that.

I will be in conversation with some truly remarkable people on this tour: Tina Brown! Terry Moran! Rebecca Solnit! Junot Díaz! And many others you will see below.

Before I share the dates and info below, a special note to my New York people. You may have seen my note the other day, in which I shared how Sarah McNally, one of America’s great booksellers, called MAN IN THE MIRROR “the best New York book since THE POWER BROKER.” Well, I want a loud and passionate Ink crowd on launch night in NYC — September 30. Get your tickets now before they sell out! (They also have virtual streaming tickets available if your city isn’t on the list below.)

Come to 92Y

Now on to the tour dates, with a bit of bonus content below them: some photos from old stops along the beautiful book tour trail.

NEW YORK
When: Wednesday, September 30 at 6 PM
Where: 92nd Street Y, 1395 Lexington Ave, New York, NY
In conversation with Tina Brown
Tickets (for in-person and streaming)

WASHINGTON, DC
When: Thursday, October 1 at 7 PM
Where: Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008
In conversation with Terry Moran
Info

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
When: Saturday, October 3 at 6 p.m.
Where: Godmothers, 2280 Lillie Avenue, Summerland, CA 93067
Tickets

CHICAGO, IL
When: Sunday, October 4 at 7 PM
Where: Chicago Humanities Fall Festival at Northwestern University, McCormick Auditorium
In conversation with Alex Kotlowitz
Tickets

SEATTLE
When: Wednesday, October 7 at 7:30 PM
Where: Town Hall Seattle, The Great Hall, 1119 8th Ave, Seattle, WA
In conversation with Steve Scher
Tickets

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
When: Thursday, October 8 at 7:30 PM
Where: City Arts & Lectures, Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA 94102
In conversation with Rebecca Solnit
Tickets

BOSTON
When: Tuesday, October 13 at 6 PM
Where: Harvard Book Store at the Brattle Theater, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge, MA 02138
In conversation with Junot Díaz
Tickets

CALGARY, AB
When: Saturday, October 17 at 7:30 PM
Where: Calgary Wordfest
In conversation with Zain Velji
Tickets

When: Sunday, October 18 at 1 PM
Where: Calgary Wordfest
In Conversation with Kurt Andersen & Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Tickets

ST. LOUIS, MO
When: Tuesday, October 20 at 7 PM
Where: St. Louis Public Library, Clark Family Branch, 1640 S. Lindbergh Blvd, St. Louis, MO 63131
In conversation with Ryan Krull
Info

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

MIAMI, FL
When: Saturday, November 21-Sunday, November 22 (details to come)
Where: Miami Book Fair
Info

JAIPUR, INDIA
When: Thursday, January 14-Monday, January 18, 2027 (details to come)
Where: Jaipur Literature Festival, Hotel Clarks Amer
Info

I want to hear from you! What city will you be joining us in?

Leave a comment

And will you send this to 3-5 friends and family who might like to come meet me? Or maybe you want to bring your book club….

Share

And now, back to the archives for some of my favorite past book tour photos:

Sarah McNally is the founder of McNally Jackson, one of the great independent bookstores of New York City and of the United States. She is a reader to her bones. And when she said MAN IN THE MIRROR is the best New York book since THE POWER BROKER, I almost fainted. I hesitated before sending this short post today, but then I thought to myself: Book writing is so lonely and painful at the beginning, and these moments of elation should be enjoyed and shared.

I don’t know if the book I have written is indeed the best New York book since THE POWER BROKER, but I hope it is, and I want you to be part of all that is to come.

For those of you in New York, our September 30 evening together at the 92nd Street Y is going to be electric. If Sarah is right, all the more so! Be there on the night when this New York book takes flight.

Join me at 92Y

And I’m going to come see the rest of you all around the country, and even in a few other countries. Tour dates coming this week, so stay tuned for that!

And it would mean so much to me to have you in this community be my first readers and get in on the ground floor of this book. Hopefully we pick up many others along the way. But it is so reassuring to me to have you all here from the beginning.

Preorder MAN IN THE MIRROR

Thank you for everything, always.

Anand

Is Hanauer pulling up the ladder after securing prosperity for himself? Is he an ungrateful class traitor? Is he not enough of one, with his basic faith in the power of markets? Are socialists dangerous, as some suggest? What do even the ones Hanauer respects, like Zohran Mamdani, get wrong? We discussed all of this and more.

And check out his booklet on the subject, MARKETS BUILT FOR HUMANS, here. Unlike anything else these days, it’s free.

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