Good evening, everybody. Welcome to Politics and Prose. Hello and welcome to Politics and Prose. We're going to get started in just a second, but before we do, we just ask you please silence your cell phones and refrain from talking during the event. And then also during the Q&A portion, if you just line up behind the microphone, it's behind this white pillar here, and ask your questions into the microphone as well. If you can't stand for any reason, just let a staff member know and we can walk a microphone over to you.
Tonight I'm excited to welcome Anand Giridharadas, celebrating the release of his new book, Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City. In 2023, the lives of two men, Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer, collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.
Anand Giridharadas is the New York Times bestselling author of The Persuaders, Winner Takes All, The True American, and India Calling. A former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times for more than a decade, he has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Time, and is the publisher of the newsletter The Ink. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Giridharadas will be joined in conversation with Terry Moran, an award-winning journalist, writer, and broadcaster who spent nearly three decades at ABC News. Today, Moran is an independent journalist and the founder of Real Patriotism, where he writes, reports, and hosts conversations about American politics, culture, and civic life. Please join me in welcoming Anand Giridharadas and Terry Moran.
Hi everyone. Hello to you. This is amazing. I was just telling him, I'm going to embarrass him now. It's an extraordinary book. It really is. It's a great, brave work of reporting, and it gets at so much of who we are right now. And I was telling Anand that I found myself again and again on the verge of tears, which is a tribute to what he does with this book, or a testament to my own age, because tears are an old man's privilege. But it's been great.
And I thought, because he's a beautiful writer, just a wonderful writer, and I thought let's listen to it, because as Anand was saying, this is such a dark subject and it reaches to so many places. The book is not — it gets at those places but sets them in the context of our country at this moment and more deeply and profoundly of human nature. And I'm going to lay one more compliment on you. Don't stop me. And it's this: the book that I thought of as I read it is one of the books that I'd say is one of the great books about America, that if you want to understand really who we are, you read The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer. Not just the account of an execution, but of us as Americans. And this has that quality of ambition, and something Mailer didn't have as much: love.
Thank you. Thanks to all of you for being here. It's my parents' hometown — well, my hometown by virtue of my parents and Washington. So thank you to all their friends who showed up, and three other people. Terry, I'm so honored. I wanted to read you — we were just talking about it back there — I wanted to read you a scene from the book that has nothing to do with the case of Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, because most of this book is not about this really dark moment in a subway car. But the only way to sort of explain the book quickly is to say that it's a story of a thing that happened in a subway car.
Most of this book is about people trying to have very different outcomes happen, trying and failing in all kinds of ways, trying and succeeding in all kinds of ways. And one of my main characters in the book — there's four main characters in the book — one of them is a guy named Johnny Grima, who is one of the most prominent homeless activists in New York. The New Yorker had written an article previously about his homeless activism, and he happened to be on the same train that day of this incident. The most prominent homeless activist happens to be on the same train during the most prominent killing of a homeless person of a generation.
And he's a witness. He comes into the car, he tries to pour water on Jordan Neely's head in those final moments. And so I followed him for the next two years as he dealt with his grief and his guilt and all kinds of other things. And somewhere along the line, a lot of migrants started entering New York and other American cities. And Johnny got very involved, in addition to his homeless activism with domestic homeless folks, with helping migrants. And he got very involved with the Fani people from Guinea in West Africa. And he sort of became the guy to see in New York if you were a Fani tribe member in New York City. And in the middle of that association, he starts to have a realization about his new friends and some of his older friends.
Hanging around Tompkins Square, Johnny couldn't help but notice differences between the poverty of the people he had long known and the poverty of the newcomers he was befriending. At the southeastern corner of the park, where he now spent many of his days, the Fani guys and other mainly West African migrants huddled close, talked nonstop, traded news from home, kept it up, borrowed scooters, broke any morsel of food they had into sub-morsels to give others, hustled and sold things, traded tips on the shelters, prayed. When Johnny walked by, the men sitting on the benches and the railings turned into a sea of friendly nods and call-outs: 'Hey, Johnny. Mr. John.'
The situation almost every migrant there faced was grim, but everyone was pursuing some splendorous tomorrow: organizing papers, awaiting a date, devising a way to make money, asking after a lawyer. It wasn't an energy he had seen much of. His regular entry point to the park was the southwestern corner at 7th and Avenue A, the long-standing hangout of the local domestic homeless people Johnny had known all his life. He loved those people. And of course, they had their own forms of mutual support, but the vibe was different. People sat apart from each other, often strung out, lost in their own world. There was in many of the men a hardness that served as a protective shield.
There were constantly beefs about stolen belongings. These people had no one to lean on and no one who could lean on them. They lived with a rugged American aloneness. The project of Johnny's life in recent years had been to try to change this a little: to try to cultivate solidarity, get people to hang together in resistance, watch other people's stuff, let a struggling woman sleep in his tent — the smell of piss be damned. But he was the first to admit that his ideal of solidarity was constantly threatened by the American tendency towards separateness that even he harbored deep within himself.
He would organize people together and then get into a rage against them and post about them online in a way that made it impossible for trust to regrow. He would camp out with comrades and hold off the police, but then the stress would eat into him and he would feel his heart shrinking and his patience curdling. How had Dio and the other guys suffered so much and still held on to certain things that Johnny and everyone Johnny knew had struggled to keep? Johnny didn't have an answer, but he was starting to have questions he hadn't had before. These new friends had made him look again at his own poverty, caused him to see different varietals of poverty. Their poverty was thick and dense and inbred, and his was a poverty of resources compounded by isolation.
In the winter months that followed, in the company of Dio and the Fani guys generally and others, Johnny felt his depression lifting. Normally when he saw a police officer, his brain flipped and he was war-ready. Now he paused before yelling or whipping out his phone. He chose his battles more thoughtfully. Being around the soft-hearted did wonders for your soul, it turned out, as did feeling needed and useful and missed. Across town, Ashwin Vasan, the health commissioner of New York City at the time, was betting much of his agenda on clubhouses built on the elemental theory that people needed to be needed.
'Mr. Johnny. Yo, John.' Johnny sipped on little cups of Senegalese coffee with the migrants, broke off and shared some of his roast beef and cheese hero with lettuce, tomatoes, and mayo, and told them where he had been when they worried after him.
And that's how this book works. Your reporting is extraordinary — to be on the scene, it seems, everywhere, or close to the lives of the people you're reporting about, and then to draw out of that, and to be in that moment where Johnny is recognizing the distinction between thick poverty — poverty that is ameliorated to some extent by the solidarity of family and of clan and of ethnicity, of faith — and American poverty, which is shattered and alone. But it's that reparatory thread, and that's what I want to ask you about. How did you do this? I mean, there's a journey here, it's your journey, it becomes our journey in reading it, but I'm interested in the moment of decision: 'I'm going to do this.' And did you know it would take you to this many places, and all these different parts of New York and everywhere else that you went to see deeper into the lives of the people who were caught up in this terrible tragedy?
I love that question. One way to think about it is, I think one of the things you and I share is that our journalistic lives were upended by the Trump era. I'll say yours much more violently than mine. But I think for both of us, Trump maybe changed a calculus about how to use the skills that we have. And for me, my version of that was: I started out as a foreign correspondent in India many years ago, and this is sort of what my work sounded like. I mean, I was 20 years younger and not as seasoned, but this is the kind of work I did.
I would sit, you know, in the soil of a farm with a cauliflower farmer making a decision about whether to shift a crop, and going through the calculations about credit and loans and Monsanto, and just trying to understand what it is like to be him. And there were a lot of migrants in India going from North India to, you know, a city like Bombay — hundreds of millions over a period of years. And I was like, what is it like to be that migrant? And I would ride a third-class train with them for 24 hours and then follow them as they entered Mumbai. How do you enter a city of 20 million people when you know nobody? What do you do, literally? What is the first thing you do? I don't know. So you find out. You report. That's what I did. That's how I formed myself as a reporter and writer. And I did two books sort of in that vein.
And in the Trump era, I think I felt — not necessarily in as conscious and clear a way, but one step after another — I felt called to take more of a stand on things, to be more clear about things, to name things specifically, to say this is bad, this is good, this shouldn't happen, these people should be listened to, etc. And I don't think it was — I'm not here to renounce it or say it was wrong at all. I did what I did in that moment because that was the thing that felt like it needed doing. But 10 years in, 11 years in to that — not just a presidency, but a culture. This era is a sort of political culture. I started to feel really tired by me being in that mode, which is ultimately a mode of kind of theology at some level.
It's a mode of chanting mantras sometimes instead of thinking. And sometimes mantras need to be chanted, and I'm very glad there are people who chant them. It's really important for people to keep saying Donald Trump is a dangerous president. Donald Trump is a dangerous president. I am not suggesting that's not important work. It is vital work. We need 10 times more people to be doing it. But I had a friend who sort of held up a mirror to me and said, 'We don't need you doing that. We need you doing this other thing that very few people can do, have the training and experience to do, which is to go into various worlds and deeply, immersively capture what it is to be like all kinds of people. That is a really specific skill, like flying a plane or anything else.'
And having an opinion on the internet is sort of anybody's — it's the most democratic thing. You know, we don't need you to do the thing that everybody in the comments can do. And so it was a friend intervention, actually. And then this friend called me and told me one day to write this book specifically.
Wait, there's a couple of questions here. First, good for your friend. And he said — he or she said — this book...
The critique part was over years.
My friend Sam Dolnick, I might as well name him. The book is dedicated to him. He's now an editor at The New York Times. We were in India together as foreign correspondents for different places 20 years ago, and he would sometimes text me my own tweets.
Yeah. I think the worst one that he thought was the worst one, because I worked at The New York Times for 11 years and then I didn't anymore. And sometime there was some terrible headline that was just really both-sides in Trump, and I think I tweeted something like, 'Headline writers, we are watching you,' or something, which I thought was a totally reasonable thing to tweet. And he was like, 'Are you trying to threaten our headline writers? What are you using your platform to try to put our headline writers in danger?' It's like, that's a ridiculous interpretation of that tweet. He's like, 'But we had this...' And then I would actually rib him for like, 'Where's The New York Times on Trump?' So, and to be honest, that's his story to tell whether he was affected by any of that, but I think he was.
But I was deeply affected by this notion that the kind of thing I just read you — this is not left versus right, blue versus MAGA. Most of us do not understand 99% of other people. Native-born people struggle to understand immigrants, vice versa. People struggle to understand each other across these racial lines, but also weirder lines. You know, people walk down the street past — and this is a book where homelessness is a big component — everyone today walked by someone in that kind of situation. You don't generally interview them. You generally project stories based on extremely limited amounts of information. They may be doing the same about you.
And I realized that that thing that I did as a foreign correspondent in India, which I did because I had no illusions about understanding anything in India besides being brown — that was sort of my major, major qualification. And so I worked in those days. I really asked every obvious question. I really drilled into, 'But why? But why do you...' with my friends even in those days: 'But why do you date and sleep around for 10 years, but then you can only marry someone that your parents choose? Like, just why?' And I thought, what if I turn this kind of way of working — the foreign correspondent's way of working — on my own city, on America right now, and do what is called sometimes immersive journalism.
So it's not just interviewing someone, but it is just living in their world for a while. And so if you notice that scene and a lot of the book, I don't actually quote people a lot, which is — I quote them when they are talking to someone else. I don't quote them when they're talking to me. Everything they said to me, I metabolize and render back in my own words.
Thank you. And so this is a book ostensibly about a case and ostensibly about certain issues, but it is actually a book which, artistically, I think is trying to get you to do the thing I did, which is to inhabit lots of other people's lives and stretch yourself to see if you could think for a second what it's like to be this person and this person and this person — which I think in our struggling democracy is maybe the most important and imperiled civic act.
Absolutely. We'll get to that. But you do that so well because you get to know these — it reads like a novel. You know, Moses Harper, the Michael Jackson tribute artist, right? Johnny, and all these people that you get to know. And so it opens into this world. You think you're going to read a book about a trial, about a murder, a homicide, and a trial, and you do, rivetingly. But the path there is through all these other places, and it's great. But let's start with one person. Let's start with Jordan Neely.
Now, when I picked this up, obviously I'd heard of the case. I was living in DC at the time, but I'd heard of the case, but I kind of knew it at the same level everybody did. I saw the horrible pictures of him dying in the subway. I didn't really want to see any more of that. I looked at the fellow who had put him in the chokehold, Daniel Penny. I thought, you know, that's pretty long. At some point you probably let him go. What did you learn about Jordan Neely?
So the basics of the incident, first of all, for those who didn't follow it or didn't remember: it's 2 p.m. on a day in early May, uptown. 'Stand clear of the closing doors.' So hands kind of push through the door, the doors open again, and Jordan Neely gets in. Daniel Penny is already in the subway car, having come from Brooklyn where he was taking architecture classes. Jordan Neely, you know, former Michael Jackson impersonator when his life was going better, now in pretty bad trouble — homeless, psychiatric distress — enters the train, throws his jacket to the ground, screams, 'I'm hungry. I'm tired. I'm thirsty. I'm ready to die. I'm ready to go back to jail.' People have slightly different memories of the words, but that's sort of the general consensus.
New York is a city where a lot of things happen every day, and by general consensus in that car, based on witnesses, this was more than that. A lot of people described it as very scary.
Very scared, including people who had ridden the subway for 50 years and had a lot of things happen to them. This was different. Daniel Penny, 24-year-old Marine, comes up behind Jordan Neely, puts his arm around his neck, drops him to the ground over him, holds him for the remainder of that ride, which is one of the shortest rides in the entire New York City subway system — couldn't have been more than 30 seconds. The doors open at the next station, Broadway-Lafayette. Almost everybody gets out except whoever wants to stay in to help, watch — whatever, a couple of people — and there's kind of no one left to protect in that sense, right? Because everybody's gone.
And from that point onwards, the chokehold goes on for another five minutes, which is — the Marine Corps manual says you can only do a chokehold in the Marines in training for 5 seconds. So it's 60 times longer than the Marine Corps guidelines. And Jordan Neely dies. And from the moment it sort of came up above ground, it was immediately reduced to this Rorschach test, right? Daniel Penny is either — like, everybody knew where they stood immediately. It was almost like the perfect story, like junk food for the kind of social media mall, right? So it was either Daniel Penny is a hero standing up against urban anarchy in America's cities, or he's a white supremacist vigilante in Trump's America. Everybody was sure it was one of those two.
Jordan Neely was either a bum, vagrant, hobo, career criminal who someone finally put down, or he was a victim of systemic injustices. And no one who thought one of those frames was true thought there was any truth in the other frame. And this is sort of how we all metabolize everything now. And so it got that treatment. It's a viral story on the way up. It's spit out just as quickly. Everybody forgets, moves on. You all live here. I'm sure you paid attention to it for a moment, many of you, and then probably didn't think about it again until Politics and Prose sent out a newsletter. And this is what we do to these stories.
And the way we do it is almost perfectly designed to learn nothing — like junk food. I mean, it sort of feeds us, gives us the illusion of being fed with information. We feel like we're doing the civic thing of learning about our community, but actually it's like empty calories, right? And I decided, you know, what may seem like a puzzling choice from the outside, to sort of spend the next three years of my life inside that subway car, so to speak, inside that story, because I was convinced that, contrary to this reduction that had occurred, actually all of America had entered that subway car with these guys.
Everything was in there: our system failures, the sense of abandonment so many people feel, the racial enmities and hostilities that are roaring in this era, the permission structure of violence that this president has created, media and sensationalism and the way narrative-making works, activism. I mean, there was nothing — there was nothing that is happening at that big level that wasn't actually there in that car. But it's really hard to see things at a high level. I find it's really hard to — you know, we all think you turn on the news, and I'm sometimes on the news talking about the country at that level. It's hard to see, and it's hard to make anyone else think another thought or alter anyone.
So I thought, what if you could just look at America in the subway car, right? Every subway car, I say in the book, is a temporary country, right? It's a group of people. The doors close. It's exactly like a democracy. You don't get to choose who you're in the subway car with, but you do have to make it work with them. And sometimes things happen and there's a collective decision that is even wordlessly made: What are we going to do? How do we feel about this? Is this normal? Is this not normal?
A friend of mine who lived for a long time in New York and had a very complex multicultural background, she said, you know, when she rides in the subway, she said the subway is like a reverse chameleon in New York. It takes on the cultural and ethnic qualities of the people who live above it. And she said you could feel when the train — you know, the 45 or the 23 — crossed 125th Street, there was a different vibe that started to take hold, just the way people related to each other. The comfort that people had with each other was different when it entered Brooklyn. Even though you're underground, it started to resemble the people above it.
And I thought it would be a way to look at America in a way that maybe we could still look and not be fully convinced that we all knew what we thought. And I think that proved true. And I'm glad that my friend called me out and reminded me to go back to that kind of work.
And spend years on that subway car. I mean, there was an old joke for a while — I'm not sure it's nice to say anymore — but how do you make all the white people disappear out of a subway car? You cross 125th Street. And that was when Harlem was Harlem back in the day. But I want to know about the choices that were made by the system. Okay, that Daniel Penny turned himself in, or, you know, was right there, went down to the station house. You've got the account of his interrogation — I'm not sure you'd call it that — but there's one word that comes out of that which seems to change the dynamic of the whole story, right? There were people who were scared, he was a good Samaritan in the eyes of some, and he kind of went too far, whatever. But the word 'crackhead' comes up in this conversation, and you see that as pivotal as to what happened then in the system. Can you explain that?
This is a really interesting legal case, among all the other ways in which it's an interesting story, that it was a legal case that in a way did not succeed in court, that I think will probably be studied a long time from now. And here's why. So the government's case that they ended up bringing was a complicated case, because a lot of people — and even when I've written articles about, you know, the review in The New York Times, all the comments, even in The New York Times, New York Times subscribers — like, there's comment after comment being like, 'I'm glad someone stepped in and put him down and dealt with him.' That's, you know, that's 90% of like New York Times comments on the review of my book, which, you know, that's fine, but that's — this was like, there was a lot of people who, even in blue cities, were like, 'What choice did he have?'
So the government, I think, was facing an uphill battle if that's public opinion and you have a jury trial. So what they said was, 'Okay, what happened in those 30 seconds or whatever it was when the doors were closed and the train was moving? Let's grant him that.' That's —
It's scary. People were scared. The law can't be there. The car is moving, the doors are closed. With a nod to Robert McNamara, I call it the 'fog of car' in my chapter on that. And you can't judge necessarily, let's say, what is happening in that moment. But then the government says the train pulls in, everyone leaves, there's no one to protect. How do you explain the next five minutes?
And the government's theory, which again may have proven too abstract or conceptual for a jury to be won over, because they lost the case — the government's argument was: you can only understand those extra five minutes, and the fact that it was 60 times longer than the Marine Corps manual allows, the only rational way to explain it is that one person did not fully register another person as a full-fledged human being like him. That it would be hard to imagine him equally doing that same thing in that same way regardless of who that person was. That if it had been a Marine Corps buddy, one might imagine it would have gone down differently. If it had been someone he knew who ended up getting in a fight with him at a bar, you might imagine it would have gone differently. In other words, that the specific way it went down was related to an attitude to that body.
Now, this is a difficult and subtle legal argument to make. They based it on two pieces of evidence that are pretty solid for that kind of argument and striking. One is the video, body cam footage right after the police get to the scene, which shows — and I want to acknowledge we have some officers here, I think, from Transit Authority. Is that right? Yes. Thank you for being here. Body cam footage when the police arrive, and it's a really striking scene where there's about half a dozen NYPD guys and EMTs and others all over Jordan Neely's body, and they are frantic about saving his life. And if you look at the way they're behaving, they've probably dealt with this kind of thing many times in the past.
But they are acting as though the loss of this life would be a calamity for all the world, right? Screaming at each other, and they're going wild to save this one life of a person, you know, who's visibly homeless and soiled. And for all the debates about police that we've had in this country in recent years, what you see there is a lot of police officers who are taking a human life to be an extremely serious thing to defend. And Daniel Penny is standing off to the side with a very different attitude than any of those cops. And it's really clear in this video.
And in fact, the prosecutors showed the NYPD guys, who didn't really want to arrest Penny, they showed him this video, and it moved some of these cops to say, 'Yeah, you're right. His relation to this body is different from the way we relate to folks like this. There's something here.' And then there's an interrogation video from two hours later. These cops, these detectives, are broing out with this guy. It feels like a manosphere podcast for the first several minutes: 'Hey man, I love your Death Before Dishonor tattoo.' 'I got a tattoo. I was in this unit in the Marines. What unit were you in?' You know, you feel like they're going to get a season two renewal for their podcast.
And then Daniel Penny starts describing what happened, and he immediately starts using language. He says 'crackhead' multiple times: 'Well, he was just a crackhead.' 'You know, he was just a crackhead.' 'You know, these crackheads throwing people in front of cars.' He says 'squirming' eight times. Lots of other dehumanizing language.
And we all are alive in this moment, right? This is not 1995 or 1990. We're alive in this moment where that language is around us, where we're being told, you know, about what's happening with Haitians and pets and this and that, right? Dehumanizing language is central to what is happening in this country right now. And what is so fascinating in that moment is these two NYPD guys who are broing out with Daniel Penny — you know, maybe that's part of their job — obviously, when it takes that linguistic turn, you can see these cops like pull all the way back. It's really striking. He loses them.
And so then Daniel Penny starts doing this thing that we all do in that situation, which is throwing in the 'you know what I mean' or 'am I right?' You know, 'just a crackhead, you know what I mean? Just a crackhead, am I right?' And strikingly, they don't know what he means, and they don't seem to think he's right, and he loses them. And it is striking again that these cops who deal with these kind of situations all the time actually seem to be holding a line of: that is not how we think about these folks at all. That may be how you think about these folks.
So the government brought that case, and I say all that again — I'm not taking a side in this book — but when I see 90% of New York Times comments being like, you know, 'he had to just put him out,' I think it's worth dwelling on why the government felt that this was a case to bring. And the last note I'll say on this is: the lead prosecutor, who's one of the people I write about in the book, Daphna Yoran, she came to the event last night in New York, along with the woman who co-wrote the song 'Man in the Mirror' with Michael Jackson, which is amazing. I may play that video for you later.
Daphna Yoran felt — she told me that this case had to be brought not because Daniel Penny was going to commit more crimes, which is what you're normally worried about as a prosecutor, but because this line of 'you can't dehumanize other people' was really important to defend. Now, that was her motivation, and she lost the case.
It's a hard case, as you point out. It reminds me a little bit of the case of the officers who beat Rodney King within an inch of his life. And the problem with that case was somewhat similar: is that the prosecution had to acknowledge that the initial use of...
force was legitimate. He was up on PCP and he was a big man and he was resisting an arrest. And so the job of the prosecutor is while they're beating him to say, 'Okay, that one's okay. That one's okay. That one's okay. That one's okay. And now that's illegal.' And that's definitional reasonable doubt if in that case, and I think juries have a hard time with that kind of thing.
And as for Daniel Penny and the way that the cops saw him as dehumanizing Jordan Neely, you thought of the line which I read because I didn't hear the original funeral oration by Reverend Al Sharpton in which he said if he'd been an Elvis impersonator — because Jordan Neely was a Michael Jackson impersonator — he'd been an Elvis impersonator and a black guy had taken him down and choked him out, would he have walked out without... he'd been put in jail. There would be no bail and he'd be convicted. And that's not really an indictment. It is of all of us, I suppose. But I want to ask you, having covered the trial, would you have voted to convict?
I mean, to be... I can't answer that. I mean...
I know, that's why I asked him.
This is why Trump tried to get you fired. [laughter]
Um, I spent so long... I mean, I could do that mode, but I spent so long trying to train myself, retrain myself to not do that mode, and try to tell this story from everybody's vantage point. Not because I don't think we need people to do that mode, but I think you compromise the thing that I'm trying to do here.
Um, you know, one of my... these four characters, you heard Johnny Grimo was one of them, the guy I read at the beginning. Moses Harper is another, who was Jordan Neely's close friend and mentor in the Michael Jackson dance community. Um, Ashwin Vasan, the health commissioner of New York City at the time. Um, and who's my fourth character?
Uh, no, not Daphne. Um, wow. This is like the fourth day of tour. Say it again.
