Jonathan Mahler on the 1980s New York that made Trump — and Michael Chabon’s comic-book Gotham

Send us Fan MailFew cities lend themselves to myth quite like New York, a city that reinvents itself so often that each generation claims its own version. In this episode, we speak with journalist Jonathan Mahler about The Gods of New York, his sweeping portrait of the 1980s city of ambition and excess, when figures like Ed Koch, Donald Trump, and Al Sharpton weren’t just characters in the story—they were battling, in public, for the city’s soul. Mahler, best known for Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, traces how money, media, race, and power collided in a decade that helped shape the New York we live with now. We also talk about a very different but equally electrified New York dreamscape: Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and the comic-book imagination as a kind of hope machine.