The Gods of New York: Jonathan Mahler on the 1980s That Built Today’s City

Episode descriptionIt’s the book many of my podcast guests recommended –and that I’m also now reading: The Gods of New York. In it, New York Times journalist Jonathan Mahler argues the last years of the 1980’s shaped the city we know today. Previously, in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, Mahler had gone back to 1977, when New York was literally and figuratively on fire. Now, he zooms in on just four years — 1986 to 1990 — and the larger-than-life characters that dominate them.To close the first season of the Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know podcast, I speak with Mahler about the “gods” of that era — Ed Koch, Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Al Sharpton, Spike Lee, Larry Kramer, Benjamin Ward, Linda Fairstein and others — and how tabloids, Wall Street, crack, AIDS, and a wave of racial flashpoints pushed the city from a working-class metropolis to a global capital of finance and inequality. We get into Joyce “Billie Boggs” Brown and homelessness, Bed-Stuy’s transformation and Black political power, and what Mahler thinks Zohran Mamdani and this new political moment need to learn from that history. Mahler also talks about how he reported the book — more than 200 interviews and deep archival digging — why he still believes in “inefficient” research in the age of AI, and what he’d tell young journalists coming into the profession right now. And, because life is not all New York doom, he leaves us with a big, sprawling novel recommendation: Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. In January, we’ll be back with season two of Juan Manuel Benítez Wants to Know, with more conversations about New York and the people shaping its future.Books and essays we mentionJonathan Mahler, The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986–1990 Jonathan Mahler, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning: 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City Jonathan Mahler, The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight over Presidential Power Jonathan Mahler, Mamdani’s Rise Marks the End of a Chapter in American History, New York Times guest essay (Aug. 11, 2025) Kiran Desai, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny