How the killing of Jordan Neely on the NYC subway divided America

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Jordan Neely knew how to draw a crowd. For years, he danced as Michael Jackson in New York's subways, people stopping in their tracks to record him doing the moonwalk. But in May of 2023, Neely boarded a crowded subway in crisis. He was homeless, living with serious mental illness and shouting threats. Passengers were afraid. A former Marine named Daniel Penny stepped in and put Neely in a chokehold for six minutes. Neely died, and a video of the encounter divided the country. To some, Penny was a man doing what the police weren't able to do. To others, Neely was a victim, another Black man whose life had been treated as disposable. The case went to trial, and a jury acquitted Penny of criminally negligent homicide in December of 2024. Within days, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance invited him to the Army-Navy game, alongside President-elect Trump. Soon afterward, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm gave him a job. Journalist and author Anand Giridharadas spent more than two years investigating what the video couldn't show. He spent time on the streets of New York City with the homeless, workers who tried to help Neely, and the lawyers and activists who fought over the meaning of his death. Now, as Americans prepare to vote in the midterm elections, his new book, Man in the Mirror, hopes, asks a question that goes far beyond that subway car. What happens to a country when people lose faith in systems and start taking matters into their own hands? Anand Giridharadas, welcome to Fresh Air. It's an honor to be here. Okay, Anand, almost immediately after that video showing Penny putting Neely in a chokehold, people began to fight over what they saw, and instantly several narratives begin to build. And your book actually reveals the machinery that emerges. There are the powerful lawyers, there are the political figures, there's Al Sharpton, and they're all working to kind of shape how these two men would be seen. And you even write about how Sharpton tells the lawyers representing Neely's family that if they lose control of the narrative, they actually risk their chance at justice. Was he right? You know, I wanted to write a story that I felt would be a story that would take us to the heart of America and what it means to live in this country in this moment. And part of that story, as you point out, is the process by which we make and argue over stories, right? The narrative machinery in this country right now, the way on social media a story like this one is turned into fodder, clickbait. And what happens when that happens is human beings become caricatures. So Jordan Neely was either, in the telling of people right after this case, you know, a career criminal who was finally put down, or he was a victim of every systemic injustice in American life. Daniel Penny was either a hero, a Batman, who kind of stood up to, you know, anarchic Gotham, or he was a vigilante in Donald Trump's America. There's a remarkable moment in one of the 911 calls from the subway on the day that it happened. A passenger tells this dispatcher when they call 911 that Daniel Penny is actually doing justice, the justice that the police is supposed to do. And this caller sees Penny as doing the government's job, essentially. What did you come to understand about that belief in particular, that when authorities aren't there, someone like Penny has to step in? You know, I spent a lot of time talking to people about this, and I spent a lot of time thinking about that idea and the emotion of abandonment that you're describing in that 911 call. The person was saying to the police, can you get someone over here? He's doing y'all's justice. That emotion was not only in that caller. I think that emotion was the thing that was in common in that subway car. I think Jordan Neely had felt abandoned for a very long time and had reason to feel that way. By his own account, Daniel Penny would claim that he, he felt abandoned in terms of law enforcement not being there and in terms of all the systems that had allowed Jordan Neely to be in that subway car in that condition instead of all the other conditions that he might have been in had there been a better system of care. The passengers, besides that 911 caller, shared this sense of abandonment. But I would venture that a lot of people listening to this today who may never have ridden the New York City subway, may never have been to New York, understand that sense of abandonment. But one other thing I was thinking about as you talk about this sense of helplessness that people feel that they have to take things into their own hands, we've actually seen this before. I had historian Heather Ann Thompson on to talk about Bernard Goetz. And for those who may remember that case, it was back in 1984. He shot four black young men on a New York subway. And some people saw him as a hero. Others thought of him as a vigilante. Now here we are 40 years later, and we're having almost the same argument about Daniel Penny. And so this impulse isn't new. What do you think has changed? You know, I think one of the major differences between then and now is the level of safety in New York, in our cities generally, and in New York and in the subway system. You know, the 80s by comparison were a genuinely scarier time. And that, you know, horrific crime happened in a time and a moment when there was a lot of fear and evidence-based fear in that system. You know, New York City in the 2020s is very, very different. You know, and the crime rate is drastically lower. But I think all of our cities, while drastically safer, I think we're in a slightly, you know, precarious place coming out of COVID. It was hard for all of us. Right? A lot of people lost people they love. But for people who are already on the edge, on various edges, the edge of housing, you know, the edge of mental health, the edge of connection to others, even before COVID touched our shores, there was a collective, you know, a collective trauma that I think we're still not reckoning with. And our cities in 2023, arguably still today, you know, bare, bare evidence, there's still evidence of having been through that. You know, New York City, like San Francisco, like Seattle, like a lot of the places folks may be listening to this, has a public space that often seems to be functioning, doing double duty, as a kind of psychiatric facility. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Reasons, you know, to do with failures of systems of care to hold people, reasons that have to do with budget cuts, reasons that have to do with the failure to, to, to build a new mental health apparatus after deinstitutionalization in recent decades. But also the fact that our cities are often places of last resort in a country where, where other places are, can be more cruel and more intolerant. And so this, this case occurred not in a moment of, of real, you know, acute, acute crime panic, but I think in a moment in which the subways fell to just a little bit, a little bit wild, it felt like there was a, a lot of people suffering. But I think this case occurred, this moment occurred in the context of those roiling emotions. Let's take some time to talk about these two men, Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny, who, who they were before they boarded that train. You wanted to understand how Neely ended up homeless and struggling with mental illness. And one of the things that you found that is pretty devastating is that when he was 14 years old, his mother was murdered. Can you briefly tell us what happened? Yeah, you know, he, he came into this world in a, in a already precarious situation. His mom was in and out of shelters, in and out of relationships with abusive men. And when he was 14, as you say, she sort of failed to wake him up one morning. And that was very unusual in their relationship. She was a very attentive mother. He, you know, he would describe her as his best friend in the world. And it turned out that her boyfriend had murdered her. She was later found on the side of the road in New York City, stuffed into a, into a duffel bag. And in an eerie, eerie moment that, that, you know, I found in the reporting, when the New York City medical examiner at that time ruled on the cause of her death, it wrote compression of the neck, chokehold. No one, no one knew that a decade and a half later, that same office would be writing literally that same phrase on the death certificate of her son. Who was protecting Jordan at that time? Do you know what his life was like at the time? I think there was some combination of, he didn't have a particularly close relationship with his father. I think there was some, This has been a little bit hard to uncover, of living with other relatives, foster care, you know, but again, more, more precarity. And he also at that time, got into the Michael Jackson impersonator world and community. And I think it became a little bit of a new home, right, a place where there was, you know, kind of norms and rules and costumes and a culture and people. And one of them is Moses Harper, who was Jordan's close friend and mentor in this Michael Jackson community. And she said, you know, nothing could have ever replaced his mother. But the Michael Jackson community represented this way in which Jordan Neely could become active in his healing, created a world in which he could, you know, take this step today, take that step tomorrow, obtain that costume, learn that kick, and become make something of himself. And, you know, he came to. He came to be well enough known in that world. And beyond it, you know, there are YouTube videos out there that you can go find, where, you know, European tourists and others are like, looking for tracking down the Michael Jackson guy in Times Square, finding him in the subway, finding him on the street. You know, that was probably, in the short arc of his life, a moment of thriving. There's something extraordinary that you uncovered in an internal memo that was prepared. For the mayor's office. And it describes an encounter with Jordan Neely at a subway station in Brooklyn. The date on this is April 2023. It's April 8th, just over three weeks before he died. How close did the city actually come to getting Neely off the streets that night? Very close. Heartbreakingly close, you know. And he had been, just to give a little bit of a context for that moment, you know. He was 30 by that point. You know, he had a record of interactions with the police that went back, you know, more than a decade. But it was very trivial stuff at the beginning. It was essentially the stuff of, you know, what it takes to be homeless in New York. Jumping turnstiles, sleeping rough. And then in more recent years, it had gotten more serious. And he'd committed a couple of violent crimes, assaults, punching a woman in the face, things like that. Gone to Rikers. He'd been charged. And then, as part of this alternative to incarceration program, and there are programs like this, you know, popping up around the country where folks get an alternative to going to prison that is considered more restorative, more in line with actually helping people who have substance issues or other issues. He gets to avail of one of these programs. Prosecution, defense, they all agree. And he gets sent to this kind of rehab facility. In the Bronx, instead of prison. And one day he just walks out of that facility. And then in April 2023, just a few weeks before he died, he is Coney Island, one of the terminal points on the subway system. And he's acting erratically on the platform. Outreach workers try to deal with him to no avail. The cops have some interaction with him, but they don't actually realize that it is the guy who is out, you know, with a warrant for his arrest. Because he walked out of this program. And they don't talk to each other. They're different agencies. So, right. Right. And the outreach workers who are there that night don't quite realize that he's a guy that their agency knows very well, just maybe not those individual workers. And he sort of runs off into the night. And, you know, a few weeks later, he's dead on the floor of a different subway car. I wanted to understand his heart and mind. What drove him so that you could kind of understand why he made the choices he did on the train that day. And you find people from his hometown who spoke about him, but they also spoke about New York almost as something to fear. And I wondered, what did growing up in that world, from your view, teach Penny about danger in particular and about protecting other people? You know, you're exactly right. And Daniel Penny comes from a town in central Long Island called West Islip. And I wanted to understand him the same way I wanted to understand Jordan Neely's story. I spent time in his town. I spent time on the beaches that he surfed. He was a big surfing aficionado. And I spent time on, you know, his favorite beach on Long Island, just watching the surfers taking in that atmosphere. I wrote to the Marine Corps, spent time with his former unit. I deeply wanted to understand all the worlds that shaped him. Long Island and these central towns in central Long Island have this very complicated relationship. On the one hand, it's very out of the city, but it's right there. A lot of people commute in every day for work. Some don't. These are towns, you know, that were largely populated by white flight in the last several decades. And I came to understand it. And, you know, one of my other characters is, is Daniel Penny's lawyer, Tom Kenneth, who also comes from those towns. And he really helped me understand that world that they both come from, which is, in many ways, these are towns that are almost like middle class refugee camps from the squalor and terror of New York City. Oh, what a way to look at it. Right. And, and maybe even understanding immigrant stories is a more helpful framework for understanding these places. You know, if I think about my own life, I think about my own life. I think about my own parents who left India in the 1970s. There's this very complex set of emotions around, you know, in some ways, I can catch my parents slipping into India is the best about this and that. On the other hand, they think India is the worst, which is why they left. Right. Immigrants have very complicated relationships to the places they leave. And we don't think about that with places that are 45 minutes away from a metropolis. But I actually think that is the way to understand the town in which Daniel Penny grew up. And the reason I say it's important is, you know, I think about my own life. I think this is the same complex relationship to the Oz of the city that Donald Trump has from kind of outer boroughs of Queens. And what I mean by that is these are communities where there's often a contempt, often barely concealed for all the people that one wanted to get away from when one left. Can you give us a quick play by play of what happened on that train from Penny's perspective? So Daniel Penny is sitting on the F train he's gotten on earlier in Brooklyn. It's now in Manhattan, heading uptown. Second Avenue station, a 30-year-old black mentally ill homeless man named Jordan Neely walks in, within seconds, throws his jacket to the ground, says, I'm hungry, tired, thirsty, ready to go back to jail, ready to die. He's kind of moving this way and that way towards different passengers. And I think by some accounts had his earbuds in. And so I don't know how much of this he heard versus saw, but noticed something was happening, takes his earbuds off and makes a decision by his account that, you know, he presumably had training that other people might not have in the subway car. He's going to do something. And so he comes up behind Jordan Neely and wraps his arm around Jordan Neely's neck and drops Jordan Neely to the ground over Daniel Penny's body. Was there anyone who, at a certain point, as the minutes ticked by, yelled or told Penny that maybe you should let him go or you should stop? I think there was this passenger's video footage that became the main piece of evidence in the trial saying, hey, man, you got a hell of a chokehold. My wife's in the military. This guy was actually FaceTiming his own wife, this onlooker, FaceTiming his own wife to kind of show her what's going on and saying, my wife's in the military. You got a hell of a chokehold, but careful, you're going to catch a murder charge. He soiled himself, saying, speaking of Jordan Neely, that's sometimes a sign of loss of life. Like, careful, man, you're going to catch a murder charge. There was a second person who, we don't have the sound of this testimony, this intervention on camera, but he testified in the trial. His name is Joseph Kabbaler. He claims that he was helping Penny kind of by holding Jordan Neely's arms at different points. Daniel Penny could relax the chokehold or not do the chokehold. In other words, what he testified in the trial is he was concerned about the chokehold because the chokehold is a lethal maneuver and there are lots of ways to restrain people. There's lots of ways to incapacitate people. You know, a punch or a kick or lots of things if you're a U.S. Marine that you might have in your arsenal to, you know, knock someone out of being a danger to others, particularly when everybody else is out of the subway car. But Joseph Kabaler claimed that his offer to Penny that he would hold his arm so Penny could relax. The chokehold was sort of rebuffed. Our guest today is journalist and author Anand Giridharadas. We'll be right back after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. You write about how a few hours after Neely died, Penny sat with two detectives, and there's a video of this that the jury watched. He calls Neely a crackhead three times in this video as he's talking with these detectives. He says, I was on the phone listening to music. I wasn't paying attention. He was a crackhead. You know what I mean? And then you notice something in that tape. Every time he says it, every time he says he was a crackhead, he's looking at the detectives to agree with him. And I'm just wondering from you, what did you see in that room in that video when you see that interaction happening? That video you're describing, is perhaps one of the most pivotal moments in this entire legal case that resulted. Because by all accounts, this was a complicated situation in the moment. And even the prosecution that ultimately brought a case against Penny acknowledged that it was complicated. They even acknowledged in their opening arguments that he was a nice kid who actually originally intended to do the right thing, tried to subdue Jordan Neely to protect other people. And slow it down. Protect other people. Because people on the train felt afraid. Yes. This was not an average Tuesday on the subway. This was a scary moment by pretty widespread consensus. A mother threw herself over a stroller to protect her child. People thought this was going to be the day they were going to die. There was real fear in the subway car. And Daniel Penny gets up and puts Jordan Neely in a chokehold. And the government says, up to that point, he was doing the right thing. But what the government argued was that it went on way too long. Because within seconds of Daniel Penny putting Neely in the chokehold, the train got to the next station. The doors opened. Everybody who wanted to got out. And from that point, the chokehold continued for another five minutes or so. And, you know, in the Marine Corps, you're not allowed to hold a chokehold more than five seconds. So five minutes is 60 times longer. And so the question the government raised was, why did he hold it so long when he knew that he was going to die? And when he knew he had this training to know better? And the answer they came up with is he dehumanized Jordan Neely. And this video was the heart of the evidence for that claim. What the government saw in that video and showed the jury was that, you know, Daniel Penny and these detectives are sort of bro-ing out. They're comparing military tattoos. They're talking about what units in the Marines one of them was in and the other was in. They're vibing. And then Daniel Penny starts to use this language to describe what happened. This dehumanizing language. He repeatedly calls Jordan Neely a crackhead. He also uses the word squirming many, many times. A lot of kind of animalizing language. These NYPD detectives, he loses them. They don't respond. Yeah, they don't. They go cold. And he he sort of then starts to solicit bids for connection. Like, you know what I mean? Am I right? You know what I'm talking about? Just a crackhead. And what's really striking is they don't seem to know what he's talking about. And that piece of evidence, along with a video of the immediate aftermath, I think became central in the trial because the government wanted to show that what Daniel Penny did is something actually we are all at risk of doing when it comes to folks in crisis on our streets, which is not seeing them as full people. Do you know what the jurors were hung up on that ultimately led to the acquittal of the criminally negligent homicide charge? I mean, Tanya, this was a very strange resolution of the case from a legal point of view that I think no one has quite made sense of. So there were two charges. There was a higher charge that would have carried, you know, ultimately somewhere in the order of magnitude of 15 years, 20 years, that kind of thing. And, you know, that was for second degree manslaughter. And then there was a lesser charge, criminally negligent homicide. The jury hung on the more severe charge, which means, to be clear, they couldn't get to unanimity to convict him and they couldn't get to unanimity to acquit him. And now the jury moves on to the second charge, which is the lesser charge, much, you know, less jail time at stake. And very quickly, whereas the first charge had taken a long time, several days to grapple with, almost immediately they acquit Daniel Penny. And it's a little bit strange to think that you had a jury that was bitterly divided over days about whether he deserved, let's say, 15 or 20 years in prison, but in total consensus that he did not deserve one or two or three years in prison. I'm just wondering, as you sat down with him, did he have remorse? Did he have remorse? Did he have remorse? I can't know what's in his heart. I didn't sense that kind of sadness or remorse. And not only did I not necessarily pick that up in that brief conversation we had at his victory party a year and a half after the incident, but one of the things that's striking in both the body cam video on the scene when they first get there, as well as the interrogation that I was describing, is that even in those moments, forget remorse, he doesn't even know what's in his heart. He doesn't even seem to have curiosity about what may have happened to that guy. He doesn't know at that point that Jordan Neely has died. And I would imagine for a lot of people, if even if you thought you're totally right and you'd put someone in a chokehold, you'd restrain them, that, you know, in the minutes afterwards and people talking to you about it or the two hours later when cops are talking to you about it, you might say, hey, how's that guy doing? Is that guy okay? Did he make it? And the absence of that was quite striking. Particularly to Daniel Penny, though, there is a contradiction because he talked to you about how much he loved New York. He specifically pointed out that he loved the diversity of New York, the crowds, all the different people living together. But almost immediately after that acquittal, then President-elect Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are celebrating him. He's photographed with Rudy Giuliani. How does a young man who loves New York become a hero to people who see the city as a symbol of everything that is really gone wrong, not only with the city of New York, but with America? You know, as you say, this is a place that he chose to leave, right? And I think part of why he chose to leave it, and I asked him about this and we talked about this when I attended, I was the only reporter who somehow got into his victory party when he won his case. And I said, look, when I went to your town, everybody just kept talking about how dangerous New York City is, how lucky they were. To have gotten out of it. How resentful they are both towards kind of the people of color and others who they perceive as dangerous and the elites in Manhattan that they resent as kind of being above them and looking down on them. And he said, yeah, you know, I don't want to throw shade at anybody in my town, but I always was different than people in my town. I wanted a bigger world. And, you know, I think he got that in the Marines, a lot of people who go into the services. That's when he prevailed in his case. And actually, even before that, when the when the incident first happened, the people who glommed on to him were people who wanted to use this story as a partisan scoring point as a kind of vindication of the notion that cities are dangerous. And I think to be clear, at the beginning, there was no evidence Daniel Penny, as a young man shared, the views of the people who glommed on to him. And, you know, Ron DeSantis promoted the fundraiser that allowed him to have a very well funded legal defense, probably is one of the reasons that that he was prevailed in his case. When the case was going on, his lawyer, Tom Kenneth was telling me while I was reporting, we are staying away from all these people. Ron DeSantis is reaching out. We're sending polite declines. That's not energy we want, because we're trying to fight a case in Manhattan, one of the most liberal places in this country. But as soon as they won the case, those kinds of friends were, were all over the place. And when I was still at the victory party, I was sitting with Daniel Penny's lawyers, Tom and Stephen Razor. And at that moment, Stephen Razor said, I'm so sorry, my phone's ringing, I got to take this call. I looked down at his phone right as he was, you know, hurrying off into a corner. And I saw the name Kyle Rittenhouse on his phone. And I said, I'm so sorry, I got to take this call. And I saw the name Kyle Rittenhouse on his phone, who, of course, you know, was involved in shooting people in Kenosha, Wisconsin during protests in that city a few years ago. And what did Kyle Rittenhouse call to say? I was not included on that phone call, but he was offering his congratulations to the team. Do you know, did you get a sense how Penny sees his popularity among these people, among the right, specifically MAGA? You know, I didn't get a chance to talk to them about that. I only, you know, had a limited chance to talk to them. But my sense is, and this was actually my sense meeting a lot of the people in the Marine Corps that, you know, in his unit, he sort of gave the impression of a kind of blankness ideologically. And that was one of the things that then became very strange that all these people really wanted him to be their symbol and projected onto him all these ideas. And then he, of course, willingly embraced it. He embraced the money that came from it. And then, most dramatically still, at the end of the case, not only was he content to appear with J.D. Vance and Donald Trump at the Army-Navy game, but shortly thereafter, he got a job offer that gobsmacked many people. This is someone who, you know, I think has not graduated from college. He was offered a job as a partner at the venture capital firm in Silicon Valley called Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most powerful financial institutions. On this planet. And he was made a partner. And specifically, he was made a partner on their American Dynamism team, which is a team that, you know, invests in startups that do weapons systems and drones and other things supposedly in the national interest. Is he still there? As far as we know, he is still there. If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist and author Anand Giridharadas. His new book, Man in the Mirror, examines the death of Jordan Neely on a New York subway and the deep divisions his death exposed. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. After Daniel Penny was acquitted, something happens outside of the courthouse. So one of Jordan Neely's lawyers, I believe, he urges people to take care of one another, like help somebody who's hungry, give someone a coat, stuff like that. But then there's an activist out there who goes further, and he's calling for Black people to have their own way of life. And he's calling for vigilantes. And this was an interesting juxtaposition, because I wondered, how do you view these radically different ideas about what we really owe each other? You know, at that moment, what I was realizing was I had spent the last year and a half hearing Daniel Penny's people make an argument that was basically like, the system wasn't there, the system wasn't responsive. Daniel Penny stepped into a void and did what he had to do, took matters into his own hands because of this void. And then in the jury deliberations during that moment, was the Mangione assassination of Brian Thompson of UnitedHealthcare. And as that case started to become better known, a similar argument started to develop around Luigi Mangione, this time on the parts of the left instead of parts of the right, that Luigi Mangione was stepping into this void of a. cruel healthcare system and stepping in because so many people were abandoned and he felt abandoned. And then when Penny was acquitted, you had, first of all, various people say various versions of the system's rigged. The system's not listening to us. We need to take care of each other outside of the traditional roots of the system. And then Hawk Newsome, Black Lives Matter activist in New York, says, yes, if they're going to have vigilantes, we need black vigilantes, but we also need to make our own schools, we need to have our own media, we need to have our own everything. And I just thought to myself, gosh, is this the last kind of common thread? The idea that you could hear on the far right, the far left, and elsewhere, that we're abandoned, the system's rigged, no one's listening, take matters into your own hands. I guess I tried to step back and say, well, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't say, what is it about the condition in which so many Americans have been left that this idea of taking matters into your own hands has become so appealing? Jordan Neely was not some anonymous, unhoused person that the city had never encountered. He had actually been arrested. He had been hospitalized many times. He had been treated for mental illness. And he also had been approached repeatedly by outreach workers. In fact, you point out in the book, his name was on a special list of its 50 most challenging cases. Officials were actually discussing him in meetings. It's remarkable. You know, when this happened, I think I, like a lot people, had this presumption that probably most of us have when we just walk down the street and we see someone in trouble, which is, come on, why is no one doing anything? Why aren't people, you know, being taken care of? And one of the government officials said to me, I hate this notion of slip through the cracks. He said, every article about Jordan Neely is going to say slip through the cracks. And he said, it's a tempting story, but it's just not true. Jordan Neely, as you said, was discussed once a week or thereabouts in like a PowerPoint presentation in the mayor's office of the city of New York. So when, Jordan Neely is being discussed weekly in the mayor's office in New York and he still can't be saved, it's a different kind of problem. It's not a simple problem of, well, we should be spending money. Well, we should have some eyes. Well, we should have a program. We have all of that. So if we have all of that and we still can't save a life like that, it suggests deeper problems. And I think I would highlight two. One, these are actually vast systems with an incredible, incredible number of agencies and they struggle to talk to each other. Yeah. Hallmarks of bureaucracy. Right. Particularly when you're dealing with individual human lives in real time. But I think if that may be kind of obvious to anybody who's interacted with the bureaucracy, there's a second issue, which is there's a philosophical and moral challenge here that we have to wrestle with as a public, which is when people are in crisis in public space and can't take care of themselves. But they're not an imminent danger. They're not threatening anybody. They're just slowly decaying in public space. And I think we can all think about people we see in our lives in that space. Do we as a community have the right to grab them off the street, to force them into a hospital, to force them to stay in that hospital? Where does human autonomy and freedom over your body end and the community's ability to know better what you need? Again, this is a moral conundrum that we need to wrestle with as a people. Anand Giridharadas, thank you so much for this book and this conversation. Thank you so much for having me, for reading it so deeply and closely. Anand Giridharadas' new book is Man in the Mirror, Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City. Coming up, John Powers reviews the new film, Fatherland. This is Fresh Air. And the new dramatic film, Fatherland, the Nobel Prize-winning, author Thomas Mann, travels across war-battered post-World War II Germany after years in exile from his homeland. He's accompanied by his brilliant daughter, Erica, with whom he has a problematic relationship. Our critic-at-large, John Powers, says Fatherland packs in a world of ideas and feelings and history into a gorgeous, almost flawless film that doesn't waste a single second. Artists are notoriously self-important. But a-ha! But a-ha! A handful carry themselves as if they were the Matterhorn, stony, daunting, towering over the concerns of ordinary mortals. One of these was the majestic German writer Thomas Mann. After the teenage Susan Sontag paid him a reverential visit in the late 40s, she wrote in her diary, I interrogated God this evening. Although, in truth, she'd found the man to be as disappointing as his work was inspiring. This Olympian figure lies at the center of Fatherland, an exquisite gem about Mann's 1949 return to Germany after 11 years in America shunning the Nazis. Made by Pavel Pavlikovsky, it's the third in his trilogy of films set in mid-century Middle Europa that includes the Oscar-winning Ida. Clarking in at a taut 82 minutes, this highly literate film wields a feathery touch as it weaves together a family drama, a portrait of post-war Germany, and a portrait of post-war Germany. A taste of Cold War wrangling and the intersection of personal and historical guilt. It begins with an intimate phone conversation between Mann's daughter Erika, played by the great Sandra Hülle, and her adored brother Klaus, that's August Diehl, a writer who's gifted and gay and despondent. Calling from her parents' modernist villa in Pacific Palisades, California, he's in a messy bedroom in Cannes, Erika urges him to join her on their father's upcoming visit to Germany to accept the Goethe Prize. But Klaus has bitter feelings toward their remote and censorious father, whose colossal shadow dwarfs them both. Played by the shrewd veteran Hans Zischler, Mann begins his tour of the homeland with Erika serving as a glorified assistant. She runs interference, edits his speeches, even shaves him. He's as pampered as a panda. In historical, fact, Mann made this trip with his worshipful wife. But Pavlakoski rightly thinks that Erika's dynamic with him would be more interesting. She's an inmate of fatherland. The other meaning of the film's title becomes clear during their travels to Frankfurt in the American sector and Weimar in the Soviet one. The bombed-out reality of both is evoked in a thrillingly seamless weave of archival footage and newly shot material. Pavlikovsky captures how, as the divided Germany rebuilds, both West and East are eager to claim this Nobel laureate for their respective ideologies. In Frankfurt, war-ravaged but Americanizing fast, Mann's visit is overseen by a CIA agent. He lectures in marbled theaters to a well-heeled audience, many of whom had been down with the Nazis, including Erika's ex-husband, a slippery eel who was the model for the cynical actor in Klaus's novel Mephisto. In the already poorer and plainer East, he's supervised by a general, gives his speech to Communist Party faithful, and is offered a big job by a writer friend who's a true believer in the Soviet cause. Steering clear of either side, Mann lectures about the good German culture found in Goethe's idea of love. Mann's own idea of love is trickier, at least in practice. Halfway through, there's a family tragedy, but Mann barely seems touched. He insists on pushing on with the tour, much to Erika's hurt and anger, which Jule captures in all its nuances. Her filial respect flags, and she begins reminding us of the impressive woman she actually was. A one-time actress, she'd written anti-Nazi books, and reported on Allied forces after D-Day. Erika challenges her father into confronting the family's catastrophe. But Mann may be even better repression, than at fiction. He simply bottles up whatever pain he feels, seeking refuge and solace in high culture. I suspect that this is something that Pavlikovsky understands. His own work is shot through with the tension between powerful, often dark passions, and aesthetic perfection. You see this clearly in the trilogy, where the harsh realities of love, family, and history are embedded in beautiful, almost fanatically precise, filmmaking. Meticulously staged, and shot in elegant black and white by his superb DP, Wuka Shaw, these films are stripped of narrative fat, and obvious emotional cues. It's as if Pavlikovsky is using a rigorous artistic form to manage his own painful obsessions. Because Thomas Mann was famous for turning out long novels, his greatest, The Magic Mountain, runs over 700 pages, it almost feels like a joke, that this movie about him should have the shapely brevity of a short story by Chekhov or Joyce. Yet it does, daringly so. Fatherland ends with an abrupt epiphany to the strains of Johann Sebastian Bach, a finale that brings with it a moment of release. And for a short time, anyway, we glimpse the vulnerable man inside the redoubtable mountain. John Powers reviewed the new film, Fatherland. Tomorrow on Fresh Air, across the country, communities are fighting plans to build massive AI data centers, and taking the battle to the ballot box. Brookings scholar Daryl West talks about the growing political backlash against the AI boom, and who benefits when technology comes to town. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director is Sam Brigger. We'll see you next time. Director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.