đ¤ˇââď¸Iâm just talent, part of a comedy/storytelling festival.đŹ Also, still a work in progress, doesnât come out for a year.
Novelist and historian: The Breakup (2026), Evil Geniuses, Fantasyland, Heyday, Turn of the Century, etc. Co-created Command Z (with Steven Soderbergh) and Studio 360, New Yorker writer, New York editor-in-chief, Spy co-founder https://www.kurtandersen.com
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đ¤ˇââď¸Iâm just talent, part of a comedy/storytelling festival.đŹ Also, still a work in progress, doesnât come out for a year.
Thatâs because Iâve barely finished it and doesnât come out for a year. Probably shouldnât have named it, made it sound too imminent.đŹ
I think so: tickets.frigid.nyc/event/6897:1...
If you're in NYC this Thursday at 7pm, please come hear & watch me read from my forthcoming novel The Breakup, my pal Susan Morrison talk about her A+ Lorne Michaels & SNL book, and us talk to each other. At cozy Under St Marks Theater, 94 St. Marks Place. Tickets: www.eventbrite.com/e/in-convers...
Great lead headline right now, @nytimes.com.
The New York mayoral polls of the last month. Mamdaniâs in a very strong position. Say that in addition to his â40% he evenly splits the â10% undecideds with Cuomo. Cuomo would then need at least 8 out of 10 of all Adams and Sliwa supporters to win. Highly unlikely. Go Zohran.
Note to Mark Zuckerberg: This pearl-clutch from you on Threads about this post was especially galling right now given that you just instructed your staff to let Metaâs AI pornbots get it on with children on your site.
Hey look, Donald Trump â the leaders of three countries of 3 billion people got together just to laugh at you! Just imagine the fun they had discussing in detail what an idiot you are. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/w...
Happy September. Gift links to two great stories that delighted me the weekend. One about the cat in Darren Aronofskyâs new movie Caught Stealng, a d the other about a great Onionesque site about Marin County. Movie cat: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/m... Marin County: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/u...
The writer Ginia Bellafante's Big City @nytimes.com column became an absolute New York treasure over the last 14 years. This final one ââ smart, rigorous, heartfelt, altogether splendid ââ is typical. Although the column's ending, I learned, her regular pieces in the Times are not at all. Lucky us.
Iâm assuming the Navy, from Pentagon admirals to the captain who commands Naval Station Great Lakes an hour north of Chicago, are at least as appalled as the rest of us at the prospect of Trumpâs ICE cops using their base as their perch for nabbing people off the streets of the city.
Just listened to this convo with the great @sherrodbrownoh.bsky.social, whom Iâm enthusiastically supporting for Senate in 2026. And had an alternate-history reverie: he ran for president in 2020 and won, was just re-elected and now in his 2nd term. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/f...
Washington D.C. now, predecessors in Beijing, Moscow and Berlin
Super-interesting from the finance industry newsletter Short Squeez: now that Trump is trying to turn the Bureau of Labor Statistics into a Trump propaganda vehicle, professional investors are making all kinds of other plans to get legit reliable data.
I donât think so. I think most and possibly all of them are just cynically putting up with it.
Iâm so deeply curious about what each of these cabinet members say when they go home and talk to trusted loved ones, what they say about these Pyongyang spectacles. And about the whole freaky otherworldly fever dream in which theyâre players.
Iowaâs Senate has a 2/3 Republican supermajorityâwhich it just lost. In the stateâs first special election this year, in Cedar Rapids, the Democrat won by 4% a seat the GOP had won in 2022 by 22%. In the special election yesterday in Sioux City, the Dem won by 10%; the GOP had won it by 10% in 2022.
If this is how deranged he is and they are 217 days in, what is the madness 1,242 days from now? www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/u...
The Grifter and His Suckers meme coin $TRUMP market value Inauguration eve: $75 now: $9 DJT/Truth Social stock shares election eve: $52 Inauguration eve: $43 now: $18
Probably not a coincidence. Nor a coincidence that that the Federal Reserve governor he wants to fire (left) and the attorney general who busted him in New York (right) look like this. 2/2
Trump wants to fire a Fed governor for allegedly having mortgages on 2 âprincipal residencesâ to get a lower rate on one. The guy the NY courts have found committed fraud for 10 years, giving banks and insurers âblatantly false financial data" to borrow more on better terms. 1/2
But more to the point, sirâwhat about going to hell?
And also how theyâll define âdesecrate.â
If heâd looked like this in his 40s when we made him a character in Spy, we might not have focused on his weird little fingers. Instead of the short-fingered vulgarian he couldâve wound up as blubbery Ronald McDonald understudy Donald Trump.
2/2 The worldâs most effective tyrannical anti-democratic regime, still calling itself âcommunist,â is using corrupt Mayor Adams to oppose democratic socialist Mamdaniâwho Adamsâs & Cuomoâs buddy and ally Donald Trump absurdly calls "a 100% Communist Lunatic.â Itâs Chinatown, Jake.
Remarkable reporting on Chinaâs intense system of payoffs and threats of NYC politicians to toe their line on Taiwan and Hong Kong. And such an exquisite irony here regarding Zohran Mamdani versus the scared conservative corrupt New York establishment. 1/2 www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/n...
If you have doubted that for Trump and all the Republican flying monkeys, spectacular cruelty is the point, doubt no more. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08...
Thoughts and prayers. x.com/kbandersen/s...
Alex Jones and some medical caregivers on TikTok and thus the internet plausibly think Trump has congestive heart failure. The average life expectancy of all male CHF patients his age is 3.9 years. But if itâs at Stage D, the most severe, odds are he wonât make it to 2027.
Monday;Trump to Macron: "I think [Putin] wants to make a deal for me, you understand that?â Later: Trump announces to the world heâs arranging a Zalensky-Putin summit meeting Today; Putin reminds Trump that heâs just his pathetic little American TACO bitch
Rod Serlingâs introduction: âThis, as you may recognize, is a map of the United StatesâŚOn a given morning not too long ago the rest of the world disappearedâŚA monster had arrivedâŚ.Just by using his mind, he moved an entire community back into the dark agesâŚ.This is the Twilight Zone.â
I was grabbing a thank-you kiss emoji just now and happened to noticed this Twilight Zone emoji Iâve had for years but never use. Seemed like a sign. The little monster from âItâs A Good Lifeâ (1961) is old now. ďżźďżźďżźďżźďżźďżźďżź
âOnly on day oneâ turns out to have been another Big Lie. This morningâs headlines here on day 214.
Appalling story. Great reporting and writing by Debra Kamin, perfect lede ââespecially the quick perfect parenthetical bios of the co-founders. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/r...
Absurdly, Marco Rubio now holds four jobsâSecretary of State, National Security Adviser, U.S. A.I.D. director, and head of the National Archives. The State job pays him $251K. I wonder if heâs getting paid anything for the other three? Their normal salaries are $500K combined.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/n...
To rich âTrump-friendly donors hosted by a conservative executive and his brother Andrew Stein,â a convicted federal tax evader, he says: âTrump himself as well as top Republicans will say the goal is to stop Mamdani. So I feel good about that.â Wow. @ZohranKMamdani.bsky.social thanks you, Andrew.
My God yes he is. Or dick or asshole, take your pick.
The mafia makes money extorting protection payments of 5%-10% (or more) of legit businessesâ revenues, paid under trumped-up pretexts. Exactly what Trumpâs doing with universities: pay us $50M-$221M-$500M Brown, Columbia, Harvard (because antisemitism) or we 86 your research grant billions.
The shocking ugly truth: âHe feels no gut solidarity with the trans-Atlantic alliance and its shared commitment to democracy, free markets, human rights and the rule of law.â www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/o...
Just got this from a friend. Love it.
âI think Pootie likes me, I mean like she really likes me, for real. Crazy, right?â
Fact I just learned: only 9% of Americans donât wear seatbelts, but theyâre 50% of the ones who die in car crashes, and 60% of the 200 a year who die crashing into deer and other animals.
Mail-in ballots are not a source of fraud in our virtually fraud-free elections. In 2024, increased mail-in GOP votes helped Trump win. So aside from a new way to look leaderish for a day and deflect attention from bad newsâŚwhy? Because on Friday a big in-kind campaign donor and hero told him to.
Exceptionally true, sharp, no-BS headline for a lead news story in the New York Times.
He also said that Putin told him that âno country has mail-in voting.â Trump is a credulous moron. But surely Putin knows the truth, and if he actually said this he was just lying for fun to his most useful idiot ever.
Agree. But what Iâm talking about isnât a tax, itâs us citizens, via the federal government, sharing in big profits of companies we invest in early, as private investors do.
Wow. Thatâs a very long tail. Thanks, Daniel!
And though it wasn't classified information that endangered a military operation in progress, I did like learning that Trump and the other Americans got a "phonetic pronouncer" guide for how to say "Mr. President POO-tihn."
In the Signalgate tradition of breathtakingly reckless national security incompetence when it comes to, uh, security. www.npr.org/2025/08/16/n...
He's paying $2300 for a one-bedroom apartment in Astoria Queens that he moved intp when he was making $50K a year. And half of apartment renters in NYC ARE beneficiaries. Won't stick, won't hurt.
Of course it's a shakedown. Of course HE'S a crook. But lmy point: ike other of his norm breakings and precedent settings, the idea could outlive him and open the way for sensible virtuous leders to use the new powers for good.
It was not a âpress conference,â just Trump rambling and Putin reading a speech, so nobody could ask the two key questions about this odd alternate history by Putin of his war. To Putin: You invaded Ukraine because the U.S. refused in 2022 to do exactly what? And Trump: Would you have done that?
Mamdani should start making that point -- more specifically, that Cuomo wants anyone paying less than 30% of their income on rent of a stabilized apartment will lose rent stabilization.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/n...
The New York mayoral candidate who hasnât lived in New York for years tries to make an issue out of Mamdaniâs $2300 stabilized 1-BR Queens apartment. Times: âThere were some signs it was gaining traction.â Really? Because not one is reported in this storyâno polling, no voter reaction, nothing.
South Sudan denies theyâre discussing this with Israel.
Well, considering the forced removal of people from militarily occupied territories, South Sudan is lots closer to Gaza than Madagascar was to Poland. (As envisioned in 1940 for Polish Jews by the Nazisâ Madagascar Plan. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagas...)
Whadayaknowâtwo sensible smart anti-Trump editorials in a single WSJ opinion section, one dubious about the new highly partisan chief federal labor statistician, the other mocking the Administrationâs latest idiotic lie about the tariffs. www.wsj.com/opinion/all-... www.wsj.com/opinion/trum...
www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Interesting: the 10 top Mamdani staff/advisers are 3 âCity Hall veteransâ & ex diBlasio & Obama aides, ex Kathy Hochul & Jerry Nadler aide, ex state assembly chief of staff, ex Hillary Clinton campaigner and media guy for indy Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn. Plus 3 Democratic Socialists.
Of course. Mazzucato and other economists have laid out plans for doing this routinely and systematically. So taxpayers as early R&D investors share big upsides like private investors do.
Corporate taxes are for all businesses help pay for all the social things that let all business thrive. What Iâm suggesting (a la economists like Mazzucato) is a systematic fair deal for the modern economy so specific government R&D funding of specific companies share upsides like other investors.
Of course not. Its crude and heâs dumb and corrupt. But this norm-breaking (like all the bad ones) can outlast him.
Of course. But many of the norm-breakings will outlast him, maybe this one for better instead of worse.
But the norm-breakings for better and worse can outlast him.
Thatâs what itâs cone to mean in practice in its Milton Friedman/Koch Brothers form. Just as American. âconservatismâ has been redefined by MAGA the last decade. But they still have independent meanings. Organizations like the ACLU and FIRE are both in their different ways libertarian enterprises.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/t...
âŚ.Nvidia got DARPA money to research energy-efficient computer architectures, and Energy Department grants to research super-powerful âexascaleâ computing. And Tesla in 2010 got a $465 million loan from the DOE And federal funding underlies almost every new pharmaceutical. Etcetera, etcetera. 2/2
Iâm a fan of the idea of government/citizens directly sharing profits from tech research (e.g. the internet) they fund, as Mariana Mazzucato advocates in Mission Economy and The Entrepreneurial State. So this seems to me like a *good* (unique?) smashing of norms by Trump. For instance, NvidiaâŚ. 1/2
Somebody please go interview a bunch of the thousands of paying AOL subscribers (of the 1.5 million total) who were still using dial-up modems to connect.
Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/u...
She sat for an interview in her West Wing office, but weirdly the reporter apparently didnât try to get her to reconcile that âlibertarianismâ with *any* of the unprecedented right-wing P.C. government constraints on institutional and personal freedoms it was her job to enforce for 7 months. 2/2
Profile of the Trump minion in charge of expanding federal power to quash private universitiesâ academic freedom has only this little summary of her beliefs, near the endââshe described [them] as a libertarianism that abhors political correctness.â But doesnât ask her about the contradictions!1/2
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/t...
âŚ.Nvidia got DARPA money to research energy-efficient computer architectures, and Energy Department grants to research super-powerful âexascaleâ computing. And Tesla in 2010 got a $465 million loan from the DOE And federal funding underlies almost every new pharmaceutical. Etcetera, etcetera. 2/2
Iâm a fan of the idea of government/citizens directly sharing profits from tech research (e.g. the internet) they fund, as Mariana Mazzucato advocates in Mission Economy and The Entrepreneurial State. So this seems to me like a *good* (unique?) smashing of norms by Trump. For instance, NvidiaâŚ. 1/2
open.substack.com/pub/adamtooz... podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/o...
Big fan of economic historian @AdamTooze.bsky.socialâs @OnesandToozep.bsky.social podcast. On his new episode he offers a fantastic way to frame Trumpâs very stupid view of global trade and tariffsâhimself & America as giant Gulliver needlessly tied down by annoying Lilliputian foreign countries.
South Park's ICE recruitment video: pretty great. Also great: South Park and I have been around long enough to remember "South Park conservatives" and see the show's satirical sensibility remain đ consistent for the 20 years American "conservatism" transformed into its grotesque current state.
Really good piece by Hollywood journalist @SharonWaxman.bsky.social about Hollywoodâs fast dumb panicky herd mentality rush from pre-woke to woke to post-woke. Show business: hysterical in both senses of the word. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/09/o...
Really good, fascinating, scary story. It is absolutely next-level Fantasyland. Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/31/n...
New York City population is about: 35% white 28% Hispanic 22% black 15% Asian Public school students are: 16% white 42% Hispanic 20% black 19% Asian The new 9th grade at Stuyvesant, most selective of 8 test-based-admission public high schools: 18% white 3.5% Hispanic 1% black 65% Asian 12% mixed
Case of the Trump flunkies rushing to fly Venezuelan immigrants to the Salvador prison, defying a federal judgeâs order. The 2 (of 3 randomly picked) appeals panel judges voting to overturn are the only Trump-appointed judges of the DC courtâs 15. He won a 35-to-1 long shot. So: luck or Satanic aid?
You folks who wanted Trump elected because heâd keep the U.S. military out of messy unnecessary interventions: in just 7 months heâs joined Israel in a war on Iran, deployed 4700 soldiers and Marines to L.A. now this. Happy? www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/u...
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/07/n...
Andrew Cuomo, tough guy whoâll stand up to Trump to protect New York? On Wednesday he told 50 NYC business leaders: âPersonally, I donât want to fight with him, I donât think heâs going to be eager to create a conflict with us.â Instead, Cuomoâll help him âfind a way to be a hero in New York City.â
According to @The_Budget_Lab, the 18% tariff tax Trump is imposing on every American consumer will soon raise the prices of fresh produce by 7%, clothes & shoes by 38% and the average new car by $5800. Etc. Plus raise unemployment and slow economic growth. Voters are going to punish Republicans.
Just as Bill Clinton campaigning for Andrew Cuomo was key to him winning the Democratic primary for mayor of New York in June, Donald Trump backing Cuomo now is sure to carry him to victory in Novemberâs general election. www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/n...
Make America Worse Again $7 billion appropriated last year to help 900,000 low-income families install solar panels. Jobs for installers. Each homeâs energy costs cut by $400 a year forever. CO2 emissions reduced by 8 trillion tons a year, ultimately reducing energy costs more.
Very successful week for the movement to return to the Dark Ages.
I wonder if Warren Buffet is aware his Berkshire Hathaway-owned energy company Chevron is paying for straight-out Fox News-created propaganda promoting Trump and a new tax provision that costs $10 billion a year and has nothing whatsoever to do with the energy business?
Example of why Andrew Cuomo lost the primary. and why he should and probably will lose the election in November. His comments early today about Israel and Gaza his and pathetic backtracking lie a few hours later:
Fascinating nuanced Bloomberg podcast with a smart NYC real estate industry guy on Mamdani fearâhow the biggest developers are scared of losing their corrupt-ish edge because heâll make the system more fair, whereas typical market-rate landlords stand to benefit. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/o...
Such breathtaking stupidity. Youâd flunk 7th grade math for this.
This weekendâs episode of The Real Idiocracy: Charlamagne Tha God calmly tells GOP chair Lara Trump on her Fox News show that real conservatives are about to use her father-in-law-lawâs Epstein scandal to depose him and retake the GOP, prompting an unhinged late-night Trump rant.
How much do I loathe this smiling generic GOP normieâex Fed/Treasury technocrat, b-school economics teacher, Bush-McCain-Romney minionâwhoâs agreed to be Trumpâs designated liar/propagandist trying to delegitimize government statistics? Like Dr. Faustus, Dr. Hassett is hellbound.
Strongly, highly, enthusiastically recommend you listen to this A+ interview by @timmiller.bsky.social of @osbornforne.bsky.social, the fantastic independent populist candidate for U.S. Senate in my home state of Nebraska. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...