Welcome back to the Weekend Press! Today, Suzy Weiss has two drinks with Lloyd Blankfein, who wasn’t bothered when a shooter interrupted the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. A polyglot bachelor who’s been to 803 restaurants in NYC is looking for love. Kat Rosenfield loves the new Michael Jackson biopic. And more!
But first: Will Rahn reviews New York City’s first-ever casino.
“It’s like watching a slow-motion mugging,” my friend Dale observed, as we walked past the tables at Resorts World New York City. This ugly little stump of a building, squashed in the hinterland around JFK Airport, is host to the first-ever casino in New York City. I visited on Thursday, two days after its grand opening, and was horrified by what I found.
All across America, casinos are spreading like weeds in an unkempt garden. Few who study the issue think they’re a good idea—casinos and their advocates have a habit of under-delivering when it comes to the new jobs and tax revenues politicians always promise the casinos will create. And then of course there are the social costs like addiction, or the savings accounts and college tuitions frittered away at the tables.
For a long time, New York resisted this creep. New Yorkers keen on trying their luck at the roulette wheel had plenty of options in the neighboring states of New Jersey or Connecticut. But thanks in part to then-governor Andrew Cuomo’s commitment to taking the path of least resistance, the legal path was laid for the gambling industry to suck the financial capital of the world dry.
I left New York’s first casino richer, but sadder, and with questions: What will the new casino do to the neat little neighborhood it’s sprung up in? What will it do to everyday New Yorkers? Is it worth it? — Will Rahn
Two Drinks with . . . Lloyd Blankfein |
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When shots rang out at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend, former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein wasn’t scared. Instead, he asked his tablemate if he was going to finish his salad. “People joked about it at the firm: ‘Lloyd’s good in a crisis, and if there wasn’t one, he’d cause it,’ ” he told Suzy Weiss when they met for coffee. They chatted about dieting, the price of gold, and his very honest new memoir, “Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs”—in which he includes a performance review from 2002 in which he was advised to work on his “willingness to occasionally lose a debate or argument.” | | |
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Was Michael Jackson Bad? |
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Critics have panned the new Michael Jackson biopic as “disingenuously airbrushed,” because it doesn’t mention any of the allegations leveled at the deceased pop star. But the box office tells a very different story: In its opening weekend, the film took $96 million, more than any other musical biopic upon opening—and moviegoers are raving about it. Kat Rosenfield loved the film, and in her latest essay argues that the reason it’s popular is that it captures what we’ve loved about MJ, throughout all his trials in the court of public opinion: his magnificent showmanship. | | |
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Plato’s Cave and the Rise of the Highly Educated Radical |
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It would be nice to believe that the 31-year-old computer science graduate who allegedly attempted to assassinate the president of the United States last Saturday was unusual. But unfortunately, if the charges against him are true, he’s part of an emerging class of highly educated and credentialed young men who grow up to do the previously unthinkable. How did we get here? In this week’s Things Worth Remembering, the University of Austin’s former provost Jacob Howland reflects on the wisdom of Plato’s Cave, which somehow explains everything that’s gone wrong with education today. | | |
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Spencer Pratt—once a reality television star, now a candidate for LA mayor—went viral this week with a video comparing the current mayor’s mansion to the burned-out plot that was once his home. “He knew what would be good TV,” says his former producer, Sophia Rivka Rossi, who joined Suzy Weiss on the latest episode of Second Thought. They talked about the secrets of her former colleague Ryan Murphy, who gave America Love Story; Rossi’s return to God; and, yes, acupuncture.
Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts, or watch the YouTube vid below. And if you want to keep up to date with everything Suzy does, don’t miss her newsletter!
