Why America Can’t Solve Homelessness — with Anand Giridharadas

“I became interested in what was erased by that hasty metabolizing and spitting out that we do with so many of these stories,” Anand Giridharadas tells Scott Galloway, explaining why he spent three years reporting on a subway killing that most Americans processed in a news cycle and then forgot. In May 2023, Jordan Neely, a Black, mentally ill, homeless former Michael Jackson impersonator, boarded an F train in Manhattan begging for food and saying he was ready to die. Daniel Penny, a white former Marine, put Neely in a chokehold, dropped him to the ground, and held the hold for roughly five minutes after the train had emptied—long enough to kill him. The case became an instant Rorschach test: Penny was either a white supremacist vigilante or a hero restoring order; Neely was either a menace finally stopped or a victim of systemic neglect. Giridharadas’s new book, Man in the Mirror, argues that the real story is not the binary but what the subway car contained: a distillation of America’s failing systems, its crisis of belonging, and the political emotions of an authoritarian age.

The Homelessness Crisis Is Not What Most People Assume