2021-03-21
52 分钟In a word: networks. Once it embraced information as its main currency, New York was able to climb out of a deep fiscal (and psychic) pit. Will that magic trick still work after Covid? In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, guest host Kurt Andersen interviews Thomas Dyja, author of New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess and Transformation.
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner, and this is a special bonus episode of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club.
In case you are not familiar with the format, it works like we select a very good book.
We interview the author at length, and rather than force the author to provide a slapdash summary of the book they've spent years writing, we have them read actual excerpts hand chosen for maximum effect.
This episode features two people I happen to be exceedingly fond of, and I'm guessing you will be as well.
Conducting the interview is Kurt Anderson, the author of several very good books himself, most recently evil the unmaking of a recent history.
He also created and hosted the public radio show Studio 360, and before that he co founded and edited Spy, the magazine of satirical journalism that took aim at various blowhards, scoundrels, and terrible ideas.
He also happens to have lived in New York City for the past few decades, and the past few decades of New York City is the very topic of the book we'll be hearing about today.
The author is Thomas Deja, and the book is called New York, New York, new four decades of success, excess, and transformation.
If you care even a little bit about New York City, and possibly even if you don't, this book will enlighten and quite possibly thrill you, here's Kurt Anderson.
You know what log rolling is?
In early America, a guy clearing land, cutting down trees, would get his neighbor to help him roll the logs away into a pile, and then sometime later, the favor would be returned.
Soon it became an all purpose idiom for trading favors.
So when I was one of the editors of Spy, we had a monthly column called Log Rolling in our time, where we'd track authors who had given blurbs praising each other's new books and kids.
This was way back before the Internet, so it meant searching through physical bookstore shelves for hours, practically as hard as clearing timber.
Anyhow, I am here by a log roller in my time because I blurbed the excellent book we're about to discuss, a book I'm also repeatedly quoted in, and I'm good pals with its author.
My name's Thomas Deja, but I can call you Tom.
Yeah, absolutely.
It gets even more sorted.
Tom's wife, Suzanne Gluck, is my agent and Stephen Dubner's agent, too.
And Stephen Dubner worked for me when I ran New York magazine.