We remain trapped in Reagan-era contradictions, the decade when America roared and workers lost their security. From The Boston Globe Karen Nussbaum, cofounder of the 9to5 nonprofit organization, featured in the 2021 documentary “9to5: The Story of a Movement.” GLOBEDOCS FILM FESTIVAL Reporters like to say that our stories are the first draft of history. It’s a comforting cliché, implying that even if we miss the grand trajectory of an era while typing on deadline, our dispat

From The Guardian ‘You can just see the way he looks at the world: the glitz, the cheapness, the gold brocade everywhere. That screams 1980s’ … Donald Trump in 1987.Photograph: Joe McNally/Getty Images Donald Trump is “so much a creature of the 80s but even in the 80s, everyone made fun of him,” Jonathan Kaufman said. General Electric CEO Jack Welch, “the most prominent business figure in the country, maybe in the world, mocked him. No one took him seriously. “Even today, if

From Bloomberg John Rogers was a Wall Street pioneer during a decade of Black advancement, but his success reveals a divide within Black America that has only grown wider. Illustration: Matt Williams for Bloomberg Many Americans worry about the wealth gap between Black and White America. Less noticed is a divide that has grown even faster: the one within Black America. The top 10% of Black earners now make almost 10 times what the bottom 10% make, a wider gap than among White

From the show notes... "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Kaufman — director of the School of Journalism at Northeastern University — joins me to talk about his new book, "When America Roared: How the 1980s Saved, Then Broke the Country and Led Us to Today." We get into Reagan's media deregulation, the death of the Fairness Doctrine, Jack Welch and the rise of mass layoffs, the Federalist Society's origins, and how so much of what's broken today traces straight back

A sold-out event, interviewed by Jill Abramson, former executive editor of The New York Times! Thank you, Brookline Booksmith, for hosting such a memorable evening.

From Time.com fotograzia—Getty Images Like most Americans, I arrived at the election watch party on Nov. 4, 1980, expecting a long night. It was a little before 9:00 p.m. in Chicago. By 9:05 the television networks had called the election for Ronald Reagan and against Jimmy Carter. I was 24. The party’s host, a good friend and conservative, Reagan-supporting medical student, laughed exuberantly. Stragglers walking into the party were stunned that the election night was alread

Read the full piece at The New York Times. I spent the 1980s in newsrooms and boardrooms, watching companies get reshaped, watching regulators get dismantled, watching a small group of conservative strategists play a very long game. At the time, I thought I was covering a temporary correction, a pendulum swing that would eventually swing back. It didn't. In my new guest essay for The New York Times, I argue that we're not living after the 1980s. We're living in them. The deca