New York in the 1980s; the Cultural Marxism bogey; Notes on "Taste"
Reading, Watching 05.24.26
This is a regular feature for paid subscribers wherein I write a little bit about what I’ve been reading and/or watching.
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When the Clock Broke is now out in paperback and available wherever books are sold. If you live in the United Kingdom, it’s also available there. The UK edition is also apparently available all over the world, too! I’ve received reports now of book sightings in places as far as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Christchurch, New Zealand. It seems relatively easy to find in Commonwealth countries and at English-language bookstores abroad.
I also do a film podcast with Jamelle Bouie of The New York Times. On our Patreon, we have a lot of bonus content, including a weekly politics discussion.
Next Tuesday, June 2nd, I will be presenting a paper as part of the The Past, Present, and Future of the Trump Era mini-conference at Cambridge University. My paper is entitled “How the Clock Broke: The Recession of 1990-91 and its Political Consequences.” I’ll share the whole thing after the conference, but for now, here is the final intro:
Shortly before he was first elected in 2016, Donald Trump declared, “If you remember the early ‘90s, other than, I would say, 1928, there was nothing even close. The conditions facing real estate developers in that early ‘90 period were almost as bad as the Great Depression of 1929 and far worse than the Great Recession of 2008. Not even close.” The fact-checkers fell on the statement and pronounced it another one of Trump’s doozies. Looking at the national aggregates they were correct: the peak-to-trough employment contraction in 2007–09 was several times what it had been in 1990–91, and the second downturn lasted longer. But Financial Times columnist Matthew Klein, in a piece that ran a few days later, observed that the fact-checkers had missed what Trump was saying. The period coincided with Trump’s own near-ruinous bankruptcies, and from the parochial perspective of a Manhattan real estate developer such hyperbole was understandable: New York City lost ten percent of its total employment between 1990 and 1992 and did not recover to the pre-recession level until the end of 1998. If you look at a chart of the total non-farm employment in the New York metropolitan area, the supposedly booming 1990s looks like a wide valley. Whatever happened, it was etched permanently in the brain of Donald J. Trump. And, as I will argue, the period left its traces on the nation as a whole, albeit in ways that remained imperceptible.
