MAILER V MAMDANI

On a new episode of an intergenerational podcast, guest Sloane Crosley and co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen discuss the 1970 documentary ⁠Norman Mailer vs. Fun City, USA,⁠ about Mailer’s failed 1969 campaign for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, and tomorrow’s mayoral election. Topics discussed include: the co-hosts’ whereabouts and the origins of their names; the time Matt Damon met Prince and the time Sloane avoided meeting Matt Damon; a visit to a Brooklyn cheese shop with two movie stars; Meghan McCain’s literary collaboration with Michael Ian Black; NYRB singles meet-ups; Arthur Hammerstein; the alliance of Sloane’s grandmother with New York Mayor Ed Koch; Simon & Garfunkel’s 1980 concert in Central Park and all the joints smoked in the audience; Howard Hughes, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio; the nature of charisma; speaking in paragraphs vs. speaking in sentences; Norman Mailer’s dialectics; his notion of an experimental city where the entire population took LSD daily and whether after four years it would result in an epidemic of liver cancer; public housing towers of 50,000 units built of Legos; the visionary New York of Ghostbusters 2; Curtis Sliwa as cat person; Andrew Cuomo as dog person; Corinthian leather; socialism; fear; the city’s newspapers’ hostility to Zohran Mamdani; the unsuitability of members of Generation X for political leadership; the inevitability of Millennial political hegemony; the specter of a right-wing Zoomer anti-Mamdani in 2029, and much more. Thank you for listening.