🚨 Announcing my next book | MAN IN THE MIRROR | Coming 9/29/26 🚨
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 city seeking more than Long Island could offer — collided tragically in a New York subway car. As the story spread, it became a kind of American Rorschach test: Did you see vigilantism or anarchy, resurgent white supremacy or a broken mental healthcare system, dehumanization or disorder? It was one case in one city, but it was also somehow a story about everything, everywhere.
Over the last few years, I followed a sprawling cast of characters connected to the case and the larger issues it raised. I spent time on the street with homeless folks, in City Hall with government officials, on a Marine Corps base with Daniel Penny‘s old unit, at subway stations with outreach workers — in every corner of a city facing the interwoven challenges of making people feel safe, caring for the most vulnerable, and grappling with impossible questions about mental illness and individual freedom.
MAN IN THE MIRROR is my attempt to get to the heart of this complicated case and, ultimately, the heart of this American age.
Cover Art by @arshraziuddin . Pre-order link in bio.
How the Epstein Files Show That Rules Don't Apply to the Elite
Journalist and author Anand Giridharadas (@anandwrites ) joins @joannacoles to unpack how the Epstein files have demonstrated a lack of consequences for wealthy Americans, particularly an absence of accountability.
Have a question or comment for us? Send us an email: [email protected]
Subscribe to The Daily Beast Podcast wherever you get your podcasts or at the link in bio.
#Epstein #EpsteinFiles #Accountability #Trump #Politics
The case against more billionaire taxation is that they’re busy thinking up ideas for our collective benefit and taxing them more would cramp their style, thereby hurting us in the process. The Epstein files open up a portal where we get to fact check this argument. What are billionaires actually focused on? What do they actually spend their time obsessing over?
Photos from a corner-to-corner flight over America. /What I always forget on the ground, and always remember in the air, is that America is an especially big country. I don’t simply mean that it takes six hours to fly across, although that is very big by world standards. I mean that it contains not only a diverse people but such a profoundly diverse landscape, range of livelihoods, relationships to authority and systems, histories with the weather, ties to animals, senses of community, fears, desired levels of proximity, distances from water. /
It’s the most obvious thing in the world, and yet it always takes getting back up there. The country is in a bad way. But it’s a big country trying to choose things together, and it encompasses a pantheon of ways of seeing. It helps me to remember that.
How Trump’s Threats Against Iran Show His ‘Abuser Psyche’
Journalist Anand Giridharadas (@anandwrites ) sits down with @joannacoles to unpack how the president’s headspace led him to say possibly the “worst thing any American leader has said in modern memory,” regarding threats against Iran.
Have a question or comment for us? Send us an email: [email protected]
Subscribe to The Daily Beast Podcast wherever you get your podcasts or at the link in bio.
#Trump #DonaldTrump #MAGA #Iran #war
I joined Joanna Coles of The Daily Beast to talk about the great distraction campaign that is Trump’s now genocidally framed war on Iran, the logic of murdering Iranian schoolgirls to silence American schoolgirls’ testimonies from the Epstein network, and what may be the most revealing email in all of the Epstein files.
Tonight on #thedailybeastpodcast @anandwrites talks about the harem of scholars Epstein had as well as the most shocking email of them all in the Epstein Files
