Anand Giridharadas is a big-tent social creature — someone who gets around. During a very short trip into Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn recently, he ran into two people he knew and two he did not, strangers who approached to say they admired his work. Most writers are not street-level recognizable, but Giridharadas is advantaged by a thick swirl of gray hair stacked on his head like a dusty meringue.
He is a television pundit, a Substack pundit, a journalist in the more traditional idiom and an author of five books. His latest, “Man in the Mirror,” landed this week as a prodigiously reported exploration of the fatal meeting between Jordan Neely, a homeless and mentally ill Michael Jackson impersonator, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine.
To New Yorkers, the broad outline of the story is familiar — Penny boarded the F train in Downtown Brooklyn on a spring afternoon in 2023. Neely, who suffered from depression and schizophrenia for much of his life, got on four stops later, delivering an unhinged rant. Responding to the frightened look of other passengers, Penny would later tell investigators, he restrained Neely in a chokehold. It continued past the point at which Neely’s body went limp. Eighteen months later, Penny was tried and acquitted on charges of negligent homicide in a polarizing case that consumed the tabloids and by extension the whole city.
In writing the book, Giridharadas hoped to “recover the people at the center of the story from the clickbait,” as he told Tina Brown onstage at the 92nd Street Y, one of the many promotional appearances he secured in recent weeks. To that end, the book winds deep into the biographies of the primary characters — not just Penny and Neely, whose own mother, in a devastating parallel, was killed at the hands of an abusive boyfriend who strangled her, but the lawyers and activists and outreach workers involved in the case.
Neely was Black and Penny white, and the story quickly erupted along racial fault lines and warring perceptions about the prevalence of crime. The outcome of the trial had its own reverberations — celebrated in quarters where post-pandemic New York was envisioned as a place besieged by lawlessness and decried by those who saw Neely as the helpless victim of a brutish, unthinking Dirty Harry.
Reporting the book, Giridharadas frequently retraced the route that brought the two men together. Last week I joined him for another pass. Penny had boarded the F train at Jay Street, close to New York City College of Technology, where he was studying architecture.
We got on the train at that typically busy stop, and when it pulled into Second Avenue, Giridharadas set a timer to illustrate just how quickly the tragedy had unfolded. According to eyewitness accounts and transit records, Neely had boarded there, and by the time the train reached the next station — only about 30 seconds later — he had already made his threatening remarks and Penny had gone on the offensive, gripping his neck for another five minutes.
“I felt from the beginning that the this story condensed and contained so many of America’s crises in one subway car,” Giridharadas told me. “The level of fear-mongering in media, our inability to care for the vulnerable — it was all there in that one place.”
Giridharadas, who turned 45 last week, initially came to the attention of many readers with his 2018 book “Winners Take All,” in which he argued that billionaire philanthropy amounted both to hypocrisy and con, given that the extremely rich were so often spending their tax-free earnings on social problems their own wealth hoarding had created. Class has remained his longstanding obsession, one fomented in the early 2000s when he was living in Mumbai, first as a consultant for McKinsey and later as a freelance contributor to The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, writing about India.
It was a formative time for him. The country was going through a period of rapid, historic economic and cultural modernization. At the same time there were only so many outlets for a new, pervasive ambition.
“In India there is no escaping the intricacy of hierarchies,” Giridharadas said. “While you can’t transpose the reality of one place to another, once you acquire a way of looking, a lens, you can use that everywhere.” He applied it, for example, to his exhaustive analysis of the Epstein files for his newsletter, The Ink. “I noticed how detail oriented Epstein was about whether people had eaten or not when they came to his house. This is not a typical, American rich guy behavior. But it is the typical behavior of the elites in more traditional and developing countries where power and even abuse can be mingled with a microattentiveness to whether you’ve eaten. Jamie Dimon is not checking if you’ve eaten. But a Nigerian billionaire will.”
Giridharadas returned to the States in 2009, in the wake of the financial crisis, and began sensing the same sort of despair around the prospect of social mobility that he had witnessed in India, a country his parents had left in the 1970s. They initially lived in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and then Paris and ultimately Washington, D.C., where Giridharadas attended high school at Sidwell Friends and, according to his parents, compulsively watched “Meet the Press,” argued with them and read Supreme Court opinions, beginning in eighth grade. He was “a renaissance teenager,” his mother, Nandini, told me — one who also built a putting green in his family’s driveway.
One of the most illuminating parts of this latest book examines Penny as a son of Long Island’s South Shore, specifically West Islip, which Giridharadas writes is a “social universe where families even if economically middle class were culturally working class.” The town, as he tells it, looked toward New York City suspiciously. But, in Giridharadas’s view, it was too easy to define Penny by a certain set of suburban fears and provincial values. He wanted a bigger life, an urbane one. Last year, in fact, Penny was hired by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Giridharadas wrote “Man in the Mirror” in two years, a short span for a book of its length (442 pages) and seriousness. His first draft exceeded 1,000 pages. Priya Parker, his wife of 16 years, a specialist in conflict negotiation and also a writer, said he did it keeping “quote unquote office hours, working nine to five.” He would read his daily output to her while he cooked dinner in their home in Brooklyn. Giridharadas has played the piano since he was a child and thinks about writing in terms of musicality. “He’ll sit at his desk,” Parker said, “and tap the desk to feel the rhythm of the sentence and think, ‘Does this rhythm work?’”
Parker’s latest book, “The Art of Fighting,” also came out last month, and the couple scheduled their book tours so that they did not overlap. They are parents to two children, ages 11 and 8. They met in Mumbai, where Parker also worked. At the time, she was in a relationship, and Giridharadas played a long game facilitated by some very good luck. In the fall of 2008, he left the distractions of Mumbai behind and moved to Goa to quietly write a book. As it happened, Parker’s mother and stepfather were moving to Goa as well, and Giridharadas offered to connect them to a real estate broker. “Priya would sometimes get late-night phone calls, India time, from her mom telling Priya how much fun they were having with her buddy Anand,” he said. “I guess Priya eventually wanted in on the fun.”
He and Parker both ended up in Cambridge, Mass., where Giridharadas had enrolled in a doctoral program in political theory at Harvard, which he later abandoned.
On Monday evening, Substack hosted his book party at Public Records, a bar near the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. It drew the couple’s professional friends and thought leader friends and various members of the city’s elite progressive political class — the Democratic congressional candidate Brad Lander; Preet Bharara, the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York; the City Council member Crystal Hudson. Giridharadas had already led a discussion on the Penny case for employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and was promoting the book to his Substack subscribers, writing that he was prouder of this effort than anything he had ever done, with the exception of his “jasmine tomato broth.”
“There was a time of peak magazine world, New York media,” his friend the political commentator and MS Now host Chris Hayes told me. “I never experienced that firsthand, but Anand seems to embody that in a way and seems to exist in a different time. He is a profoundly charismatic guy and wholly himself. There’s a version of him that would be holding forth all the time. But he has a real reporter’s curiosity, and he listens. You can bring him into any room anywhere, and he’ll make friends.”
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