Innholdsfortegnelse for 8/6-8/19/18 i New York Magazine

1 In New York’s latest issue, Rebecca Traister points to Elizabeth Warren as the candidate-of-the-moment to take on Trump (“Leader of the Persistence,” July 23–August 5). Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe tweeted, “Great profile of … my good friend and brilliant former colleague with humble roots and with a fierce commitment to struggling working-class and middle-class Americans, dreamers, asylum-seekers, and vulnerable families.” Former Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer added, “No one describes the current state of American politics and really America better than [Traister].” Protect Democracy’s Aditi Juneja wrote, “The one thing that she didn’t spend a ton of time on that I think makes [Warren] a strong candidate is her ability to explain complicated ideas simply. I used to send her clip from The Daily Show to folks as an example.”…

JOHN DAVID WASHINGTON is spinning a story about his father. He has a lot of them, but this one, from when he was 4 or 5, is really lodged in there. “He did Glory, and I remember being on set for the big scene when he dies,” he says, telling it the way you only do with formative childhood memories—hazily, with dicey detail. He recalls sitting in video village with his mom when his dad came “out of the darkness and smoke, on a hill, in a blue suit. He looks at me and says: ‘Son, you want to come down here, check out the set?’” For whatever reason, presumably to protect him from watching his dad die take after take, his mom said, “No.” But it didn’t matter; something…

Sheila Bair FORMER HEAD OF FDIC We just reinforced too-big-to-fail with all these bailouts, let’s face it. Other than Lehman Brothers, nobody took their medicine. Set the morality aside, it’s just dumb economics to have a system like this where you’re propping up inefficient, bloated institutions. I think we’ve improved things on the margin. But the financial system we have is basically still the financial system we had in 2008, with more capital and less reliance on short-term funding. Whether it’s enough—I hope it is. Corey Robin POLITICAL THEORIST In the ’90s and in the ’80s—when pensions were being switched over to 401(k)s—there was a strong sense that the stock market really was this kind of profound divination and assurance of all wellbeing. You’ve got a whole generation of people,…

DURING THE FINANCIAL crisis, the most important lie that political elites told themselves was that they had no other option. (As Ben Bernanke explained to congressional leaders when arguing for the Wall Street bailout, “If we don’t do this, we may not have an economy on Monday.”) But after a decade of populist revolts, no longer are policy-makers dancing on the head of a pin, seeking the right balance between global markets and technocratic nudging. The crash was an act of creative destruction, and the once unimaginable is now the stuff of cable-news roundtables. On the left, Democrats are debating Medicare for all, tuition-free college, and a federal jobs guarantee. On the right, Fox News is fulminating over the deep state and conservative intellectuals are mainstreaming the case for repealing…

Krystle Champagne-Norwood HOWARD UNIVERSITY / B.A., RADIO, TELEVISION, AND FILM “I was taking any kind of gig I could get so that I could stay in the industry and feel like my degree wasn’t a waste. My husband and I talk about how we know what it’s like to be broke, and we don’t want to go back that way. You could feel the desperation at the time.” Josh Troutman LIBERTY UNIVERSITY / B.S., BUSINESS WITH A FINANCE SPECIALIZATION “When I was in college, I wanted to do investment banking. I worked really hard but couldn’t quite get there, so I went to B-school in part to ‘catch up’ to where I’d be had I not dealt with the recession. If the recession never really happened, where would I actually…

IT HAPPENED FOR me with Madoff, the 21st century’s first famous Bernie. By “it,” I mean the early seeds of the realization that I shouldn’t believe anyone when it comes to money. I was in the 11th grade. My high school lost millions in the scam, as did my synagogue, as did the Mets, who I didn’t like then and don’t like now, but there’s nothing that makes a problem feel quite as real as when it affects both your rabbi and José Reyes. Millennial mistrust is everywhere, when you look for it. In a 2012 survey, 19 percent of us believed “most people can be trusted,” compared to 40 percent of boomers. In a similar survey, even fewer millennials trusted Wall Street “to do the right thing.” That wariness…

Dick Fuld LEHMAN CEO, 1994– 2009 Known as “the Gorilla,” Fuld claims he “got no golden parachute,” but his landing was padded by the $500 million he made from 2000 to 2007. He now heads Matrix Private Capital Group, managing the assets of a short list of very rich families. Hank Greenberg AIG CEO, 1968–2005 Greenberg built AIG into the world’s biggest insurer, with exposure to billions in bad credit-default swaps. He left with $202 million in stock and has since sued the government arguing the bailout didn’t sufficiently compensate AIG. Angelo Mozilo CO-FOUNDER, COUNTRYWIDE The rags-to-riches son of a Bronx butcher, the former CEO of Countrywide settled an SEC lawsuit for $67.5 million—a fraction of what he made—with no admission of wrongdoing. Recently, he offered career advice to Gary…

Rachelle Vinberg age 19 “The party scene was staged for the movie, but it wasn’t in any way less real. It felt exactly how it seems in the movie.” Ajani Russell age 20 “We worked collaboratively with Crystal for over a year before we started filming, and a lot of that process was rehearsing and writing the script. She would come in with a writer and we would talk about things that Crystal had witnessed or experiences we had together.” Kabrina Adams age 24 “I have so much behind-the-scenes footage. I went [to the set] even when I didn’t have to be there, when I wasn’t in the scene or anything. And I learned what aperture was and white balance, I never knew that before. The AD showed me. It…

HARPREET SINGH MANN Software Engineer Are you on your lunch break? Yes, my office is around the corner. I’m a software engineer at this start-up called Signifier. I’ve only been there about a year—before that, I was working in Toronto, which is the best city in the world, I believe. So why did you come here? I know, right? People keep saying “We’re trying to leave, and you’re coming into this country!” But I met a beautiful American woman. And that’s why. What’s your impression of New York? It’s awesome. But I do think Canada is a better country for Sikhs. Since I moved to the U.S., I’ve been assaulted twice for wearing my turban. Back at home, I have a Sikh friend who’s a member of federal Parliament. But…

COFFEE: “Mocca (Niels Juels Gate 70B) is where I go after kindergarten drop-off. You might spot members of the royal family sipping their morning coffee or ordering takeaway (while their security guards hide behind newspapers).” LUNCH: “Den Franske Sal is maybe Oslo’s best-looking restaurant—it’s hidden inside the National Gallery (Universitetsgata 13) and has a real classic Versailles look combined with modern elements.” DANCE: “Located in Grünerløkka, Dansens Hus (Vulkan 1) is great for seeing contemporary dance. Shows here feature both Norwegian performers and visiting ensembles from abroad, so I always check its site to see who’s traveling through.” DINNER: “I used to live next door to Kolonialen (Sofiesgate 16); it’s in St. Hanshaugen, and I still go there regularly. It’s run by one of Norway’s best sommeliers, Pontus Dahlström. I…

COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAMER Harlan Howard once described country songwriting as “three chords and the truth.” Though Howard released half a dozen albums under his own name, he earned his place in history by writing country classics, not performing them. The “truth” in his songs wasn’t autobiographical; he was after stories and sentiments that would still ring true emotionally even if someone else were singing them. There are famous exceptions, of course, but for most of country music’s history, singing and songwriting have been considered separate jobs. Despite the casual culture of Nashville songwriting, pros hired to write for Music Row publishing companies were expected to be productive, churning out quality tunes that could be pitched around town to label A&R people, producers, managers, and artists. There was a…

1. Hate the Real Me FUTURE “Loading up the cartridge right now, I hate the real me.” 2. God’s Plan DRAKE “I don’t wanna die for them to miss me.” 3. Self Care MAC MILLER “Can’t trust no one, can’t even trust yourself.” 4. Better Now POST MALONE “Drinkin’ Henny and I’m tryna forget / But I can’t get this shit outta my head.” 5. I Was Never There THE WEEKND FEAT. GESAFFELSTEIN “What makes a grown man wanna cry?” 6. Growing Pains ALESSIA CARA “Try to mend what’s left of my content incomprehension / As I take on the stress of the mess I’ve made.” 7. I’m a Mess BEBE REXHA “It’s gonna be a good, good life / That’s what my therapist say.” 8. Lucid Dreams JUICE WRLD…

Billy Joel When Paris Went Dark, by Ronald C. Rosbottom “You can probably look at every generation and find terrible things were happening.” Tao Lin The Collected Stories, by Lorrie Moore “How wild she would get with her metaphors really influenced me.” Roxane Gay The Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton “My favorite book by my favorite author. Witty and funny and tragic.” Rebecca Makkai The Best American Short Stories 2017 “This anthology is the best way to find your new favorite authors. Each year has a different flavor.”…

SOMETIMES YOU DON’T KNOW how deep the hole is until you try to fill it. In 2009, staring down what looked to anyone with a calculator like the biggest financial crisis since 1929, the federal government poured $830 billion into the economy—a spending stimulus bigger, by some measures, than the entire New Deal—and the country barely noticed. ¶ It registered the crisis, though. The generation that came of age in the Great Depression was indelibly shaped by that experience of deprivation, even though what followed was what Henry Luce famously called, in 1941, “the American Century.” He meant the 20th, and, to judge from our present politics, at least—“Make America Great Again” on one side of the aisle; on the other, the suspicion that the president is a political suicide…

THE ONE PERCENT. The crash didn’t invent inequality, of course; it had been booming for decades. But sometimes you only recognize something when you have a name for it. How did we ever talk about the economy before? KICKSTARTER, GOFUNDME, PATREON. When did we give up hope that the market would provide us with the things we cherished most, from art to entrepreneurship to health care? In retrospect, the answer seems obvious. BITCOIN. How could you even trust the Fed anymore? The older folks hoovered up gold, which basically doubled in value in the four years after the crash. Younger folks dove into cryptocurrency; bitcoin, the first, was registered as a domain in August 2008. “RECOVERY.” When you have the longest continuous period of economic growth in American history and…

WEALTH Total U.S. household net worth dropped by $11.1 trillion in 2008. The median income for 25-to-34-year-olds in America, $34,000, hasn’t budged since 1977, adjusted for inflation. Median household wealth collapsed. The number of Americans worried about the economy multiplied nearly sixfold. In 2016, the median wealth of a family headed by someone born in the 1980s was 34% below the level of earlier generations at the same age. The racial wealth gap, already large, ballooned. $171k Whites $20.7k Hispanics $17.6k African-Americans Mutual funds lost a third of their value. -38% The market value of all publicly traded companies was cut in half. From 2005 to 2009, the median value of stocks and mutual funds owned by whites dropped by 9% The median value of holdings for African-Americans dropped by…

[The financial crisis] was completely brought on by the elites of the country and Wall Street. When I got to Harvard Business School in 1983, a bunch of professors were coming up with a radical idea that’s had a horrible negative consequence on this country and to the fabric of our society: the maximization of shareholder value; this was preached as High Church theology. The whole thing of the financialization of Wall Street, of looking at people as pure commodities and of outsourcing and globalization, came from the business schools and the financial community that had these radical ideas, and nobody kept them in check. Go back and look at the postwar period. These companies had profit margins, and they traded on Wall Street, but there wasn’t this maniacal focus…

WHEN LEHMAN BROTHERS failed on September 15, 2008, I was a sophomore at the University of Maryland, and my fellow undergrads and I were petrified. What did this mean—would we ever be able to find jobs? It was the golden age of blogs, and my roommate and I cobbled together what happened by combing the web for experts we could trust and links to data about the derivatives market. Until this point, my politics could’ve been described as “social democrat.” I’d been an activist since I joined the antiwar movement as a kid, outraged at the American invasion of Afghanistan. A lot of my friends were radicals, but I took pride in being the reasonable one, and I assumed I’d end up in the Democratic Party fold. I spent my…

THERE’S A PICTURE of Lindsay Lohan I love to revisit and revisit, like a favorite song from my teen years. She’s at some swanky beach club—wearing nothing but a hot-pink string bikini, a straw fedora, gold gladiator high heels, and a court-mandated blood-alcohol-monitoring device. She’s tanned, flaunting that SCRAM anklet like she just bought it from Chanel. (Lohan, that delicious bitch, actually did try to get an interlocking-C decal made for the device.) It’s the perfect visual reference for naughty-aughties celebrity, but it also pinpoints the moment’s last gasp. Like someone clamped a big ol’ monitoring bracelet on the best, most gleefully demented era in celebrity gossip (2000 to 2009) and said, “No more.” If you’re the kind of person, like me, who whispers Kitson into the air as if…

1 11/29/2007 Following massive losses on subprime-mortgage securities, the firm’s co-president, Zoe Cruz—one of the most powerful women in Wall Street history and the head of the company’s trading business—is forced to resign. 2 9/21/2008 To qualify for aid from the Federal Reserve, Morgan Stanley converts into a “bank holding company,” a legal designation that opens it up to increased supervision and oversight from regulators. 3 9/29/2008 Needing additional cash to weather the storm, Morgan Stanley announces a deal with a Japanese bank to sell 21 percent of itself for $9 billion. 4 10/14/2008 Morgan Stanley accepts $10 billion from the U.S. Treasury as part of the TARP program. 5 6/1/2009 With a $2.75 billion purchase of 51 percent of Citi’s Smith Barney, the company begins a firmwide shift to…

THE GOAL: Find the best electric shaver. To assess the options, we tested everything—Brauns, Remingtons, electric foils, rotary blades, and all-in-one beard and body trimmers. THE VERDICT: The Philips Norelco Series 5500 shaver ($96 at amazon.com) provides the most effortless cut. It’s lightweight, fits comfortably in the hand, and catches hairs on the first pass. That’s because of a “super lift & cut action,” which sounds like a gimmick but draws hairs up, bringing them closer to the blades for a more accurate slice. Meanwhile, three rotary blades angle out from the center of the shaver, responding to the glide of your hand and following the curves of your face, creating a far smoother experience. It works for both wet and dry shaves and, as a bonus, comes with a…

5 PM Strolling around Waikiki Beach near Outrigger Resort in Honolulu. 11 PM Hanging out at Ba Hao cocktail lounge in Bangkok. Lagos DAY LAGOON HANGS + RECORD SHOPPING Getting around the historic waterside neighborhood of Ikoyi with creative director Papa Omotayo. 8 AM I head to a hole-in-the-wall joint run by a middle-aged woman fondly known as Mama Funke (nr. 40 Glover Rd.). There, I have the best ogi, a corn-based porridge, along with some akara, deep-fried ground beans. 10 AM Next, I’ll walk somewhere with a view of the lagoon. Queen’s Drive (more recently known as Oyinkan Abayomi Drive), with its stretch of palm trees, is five minutes from Mama Funke’s. There, by the water, I’ll jot down notes and plan the day. NOON My days tend to…

NEW YORK’S INCREASINGLY pricey, fraught dining landscape is filled with many challenges these days, but for lovers of that old totem of the local dining scene, Chinese food, the eating has never been better. Thanks to an influx of sophisticated young chefs and restaurateurs from the old country, the city is awash in more traditional and fusion delicacies than at any time since the Great Sesame Noodle Awakening of the mid-1960s. This is especially true down in the East Village, a region that my colleagues at the Underground Gourmet have christened “Chinatown North.” Wander the avenues below East 14th Street and you’ll find Yunnanese rice-noodle restaurants (Little Tong, Dian Kitchen), Taiwanese beef-soup parlors (the Tang, Ho Foods), newfangled “dry pot” and shellfish-boil establishments (Málà Project, Le Sia), and one-stop shops…

TAYLOR SWIFT HAS arrived in Chicago. Pedicabs swirl around Millennium Park blasting her hits as thousands of midwestern pop-music fans make their pilgrimage to Soldier Field, where they will be treated to glittery flights through the air, towering inflatable snakes, and an exploding mansion. But before they can see all that, they’re going to see Charli XCX. Well, some of them are. When Charli takes the stage at 7:10 p.m., the arena is about a third full. If this were her own show, she would have pregamed, but not on the Swift tour. “It feels weird to get really wasted and go onstage in front of a load of 5-year-olds and their parents,” she says beforehand. “It’s a bit like hiring a drunk clown.” Tonight in Chicago, Charli does seven…

THOUGH BILLY JOEL stopped writing songs long ago, he’s remained devoted to the art of songwriting. Going back to the mid-1990s, Joel has regularly conducted master classes at colleges across the country, during which he takes questions, performs, and shares advice about his craft—like he’s done here. Speaking from his home in Long Island, the man responsible for 33 Top 40 singles offered the following insights. What’s the most common advice you give to songwriters? Songwriting 101 is being able to play an instrument. It helps you to understand how music works. I try to get people to concentrate on that: Maybe you won’t have a good idea lyrically, but there’s nothing to prevent you from having a good idea musically. The basis of good songwriting is song, not story.…

FOR THE PAST DOZEN years, Arctic Monkeys songwriter Alex Turner has reigned as one of pop’s best lyricists, from his band’s early records, on which he sardonically documented after-hours pub life in Sheffield, England, to its new one, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, a concept album about a resort on the moon. Backstage before a concert at Forest Hills Stadium last month, he explained how he does it. 1. Write Early, or Late “Lyrics usually come to me in the morning, in the first 15 minutes of the day, or when I’m out in the middle of the night,” says Turner. “I carry a notebook, and I’ll write a line down in a bar, then maybe the next day I’ll look at it and think, Ah, that’s interesting, I’ll put…

THE VULTURE–APPROVED FILM Cargo , Netflix. The best in the emo zombie wave in horror, starring Martin Freeman as a man who has just lost his wife to infection and who is also staring down his own rabid turn. THE ESSENTIAL QUEER HORROR FILM What Keeps You Alive , in theaters August 24. It’s a lesbian thriller for the modern era about two women celebrating their wedding anniversary at a remote cabin when one of them is exposed as a serial liar and potential serial killer. THE COMING-OF-AGE HORROR FILM Mon Mon Mon Monsters , Shudder on Amazon. This Taiwanese horror-satire is populated by savage teen bullies and apathetic bystanders who make the people-eating monsters seem like extremely sympathetic characters.…

MANAGEMENT AT THE New York Daily News laid off half the paper’s editorial staff on July 23. Though the News will keep going, weakened and threatened, this is awful for obvious reasons, not least of all because a two-vigorous-tabloid town is a very good thing. Day to day, there’s a battle fought on the Daily News and Post front pages—“the wood,” in tabloid-speak. Which grabs your attention? Which makes the better joke about de Blasio? Sometimes one fronts the Yankees as the other goes with international news. The wood reveals more than just straightforward competition. Going back decades, one sees a visual manifestation of fundamentally distinct voices in New York. The News put the legalization of same-sex marriage on the wood (“U.S. GAY!”) as the Post ran a story about…

“On top of all the inequality in our country, we are going overseas and murdering people. Everything was rigged, and while we were all complaining that the system is corrupt, we just went on with our lives, feeling powerless. Of course I still have class rage. I have never had money.” —Mickey Smith, Occupy Wall Street protester, photographed in 2011 and interviewed in 2018. IF YOU WERE standing in the smoldering ashes of 9/11 trying to peer into the future, you might have been overjoyed to discover this happy snapshot of 2018: There has been no subsequent major terrorist attack on America from Al Qaeda or its heirs. American troops are not committed en masse to any ground war. American workers are enjoying a blissful 4 percent unemployment rate.…

THE QUARTER-CENTURY leading up to the crash was a golden age not just of financial gambling but of gambling more generally. Until the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, playing the ponies or numbers had in many places been a vice and playing the slots a crime. Casinos and sports betting were banned everywhere but Nevada and Atlantic City. By 2008, gambling was a hundred-billion-dollar industry touching every state except Utah and Hawaii. Riverboat gambling was reestablished, especially in the Midwest. Indian tribes opened gambling resorts in 29 states. Vast regional and national lotteries flourished alongside state ones. Gambling was in the Spirit of the Age. The expression “casino capitalism” came into vogue. But what did it actually mean? Partly it had to do with an erosion of character. The…

WHEN, IN 2012, I titled my book The End of Men, I did it partly for effect. My argument was true enough, that the 2008 recession had destroyed a certain model of manhood, made it obvious that for white working-class men it was becoming impossible to skip a college degree and live a comfortable middle-class life. But predicting cultural upheavals from economic shifts is always dicey. Would men and women really start to relate to each other differently? Would American manhood collapse into a victim identity—and each private demise collect into a tornado of public rage? As economic forecasters will tell you, human beings tend to surprise. Well, in this case they didn’t. We’ve arguably recovered from the Great Recession, with one glaring exception: Nearly one in five men between…

We did not do enough to help stave off foreclosure for some of the innocent victims of all this. Some of the people who faced foreclosure, it was their fault. They lied, and they overreached. But other people were misled, other people had reasonable expectations and then the market for their property dropped, and then there were other victims. Imagine you’re somebody who’s got a home, and you’re paying for it, and you’re in a neighborhood where there’s some sketchy people—and all of a sudden they’re foreclosed on, and the bottom falls out of your property, and your neighborhood goes to shit. It was bad for two reasons. One, the fact that we were bailing out the banks. But it was exacerbated by the failure to do any serious foreclosure…

REMEMBER WHEN WE thought that social-media self-marketing was a sign of narcissism? That must’ve been long before the deeply insecure, postrecession gig economy had set in—or at least before the intuition had set in that all of this “precarity” was, in fact, the new normal. Now every worker is an island—one covered in billboards advertising their personal brand. While some data suggests the uptick in temporary work isn’t as big as you might think, in the shadow of the crash, it definitely feels like we’re all scrambling to piece together a living, gig by gig—and to be visible is to survive. Even if you’ve mastered the art of 24/7 self-peddling, it’s hard to trust your actual talent or the value of your effort, because quality and popularity are interchangeable. Am…

IN JUST TWO YEARS, beginning in 2007, millions of middle-class jobs disappeared, many of them never to return. At the same time, workers who lost their jobs or took pay cuts were faced with home foreclosures and a grim job market. Those nearing retirement age watched as 401(k)s and IRAs lost $2.4 trillion. Ten years on, one might be forgiven for thinking things are getting better. But it’s the wealthiest Americans who have gained the most from the recovery, which means income inequality is widening. How did it play out in real time? At first, the recession hit the wealthy pretty hard. The one percent bore almost 50 percent of the income losses in those years. But between 2009 and 2011, nearly every penny of aggregate gains in household wealth…

THE POLITICS OF Britain and the U.S. can have a strange, synchronized rhythm to them. Margaret Thatcher was a harbinger of Ronald Reagan as both countries veered suddenly rightward in the 1980s. Prime Minister John Major emerged as Thatcher’s moderate successor as George H.W. Bush became Reagan’s, cementing the conservative trans-Atlantic shift. The “New Democrats” and the Clintons were then mirrored by “New Labour” and the Blairs, adapting the policies of the center-left to the emerging consensus of market capitalism. Even Barack Obama and David Cameron were not too dissimilar—social liberals, unflappable pragmatists—until the legacies of both were swept aside by right-populist revolts. The sudden summer squall of Brexit in 2016 and the triumph of Trump a few months later revealed how similarly the Tories and the Republicans had drifted…

Is Dan Kluger really a Bensonhurst pieman trapped inside the body of a fine-dining chef? First the ABC Kitchen alum introduces a nice grandma pizza to his Loring Place menu; now he’s pushing sausage calzones: unusually crisp and thin-crusted half-rings of stuffed dough shaped less like giant empanadas and more like edible boomerangs. There’s housemade sausage stuffed inside, along with Murray’s mozzarella and fresh ricotta. But what really distinguishes this calzone from what you find at your corner Sal’s or Vinnie’s is that the soppressata slices are placed on the outside of the dough, so that they sizzle and curl up in the manner that, according to pepperoni-pizza connoisseurs, makes life worth living. On the menu at Loring Place; $18; 21 W. 8th St., nr. Fifth Ave.; 212-388-1831…

AT A STUDIO in 2016, Dave Longstreth was working by himself on a chord progression, as he usually does when writing for his band, Dirty Projectors. “It’s normally a pretty solitary process,” he says now. But that time, Solange was there, as were Sampha, a British songwriter and producer; Blue, Solange’s engineer; and a bunch of other creative people, all part of what Longstreth calls “the camps,” to make Solange’s 2016 album, A Seat at the Table. “I’d have a melody from her, and would be just harmonizing on it, and she would come over and say, ‘Ooh, I really love this chord and that chord, but this one is too dissonant,’” he recalls. “To be just a spoke on the wheel was a novel experience, and to be thinking…

GROWING UP IS HELL. Your body changes so quickly you can almost sense it happening. Your hormones trip off thoughts you can barely manage or understand. In adolescence, before we settle into the people we are going to be, pop music serves a dual purpose: It is a beacon for teenage friendships and romances. It can also serve as guidance for the passage into adulthood. “If you were a kid on the margins,” television personality and podcast host Dave Holmes wrote of discovering MTV in his 2016 memoir, Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs, “you could turn on your television and get a window into a world you could see yourself in someday.” Good pop songs are nuggets of wisdom from people who have been through the worst…