Elliott Williams

Al Sharpton, Michael Bloomberg.

Wait, that guy who's an investment banker who's sort of creating these little computer boxes, he's going to end up being mayor and running a billionaire and all kinds.

And just think about how many national figures just emerge from the crucible of 1980s New York City politics.

And then,

of much of like, I feel like the other than the characters, the human characters in the book, the grit and grime and disorder of eighties, New York is a central figure in my book.

And I think people saying, wait a second, the subway is going to be this glassy space age place without graffiti and homicide happening on it, where people aren't littering and urinating all the time.

Wait a second.

They're

that stretch to the heavens and are all made of glass.

And, you know, you don't walk through Washington Square Park or Morningside Park crunching on crack pipes everywhere you go.

People just would be mind blown by what New York has become for reasons good and bad.

I mean, a lot of the character that made the city the city, you know, take out the safety because everybody wants to feel safe.

But a lot of that character, you know,

you know, has been, for lack of a better term, sacrificed for the, like I said, the labradoodle-ness of New York City.

And it's just a different place.

And I don't want to leave the impression that it's a hyper local story just about New York.

There's a reason why one of the verses in We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel is AIDS crack Bernie gets because these were literally the enduring sort of forces driving a lot of America and sort of what American fear and American trauma was in the 1980s, a lot of which we are still grappling with today.

And yes, it starts in the city and is of the city, but this is a broader look at who we are as Americans and the country we live in.

Yeah, two alive, two dead.

OK.