On a new episode of an intergenerational podcast, guest Sloane Crosley and co-hosts Clementine Ford, Vincenzo Barney, and Christian Lorentzen discuss the 1970 documentary Norman Mailer vs. Fun City, USA, about Mailer’s failed 1969 campaign for the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City, and tomorrow’s mayoral election. Topics discussed include: the co-hosts’ whereabouts and the origins of their names; the time Matt Damon met Prince and the time Sloane avoided meeting Matt Damon; a visit to a Brooklyn cheese shop with two movie stars; Meghan McCain’s literary collaboration with Michael Ian Black; NYRB singles meet-ups; Arthur Hammerstein; the alliance of Sloane’s grandmother with New York Mayor Ed Koch; Simon & Garfunkel’s 1980 concert in Central Park and all the joints smoked in the audience; Howard Hughes, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio; the nature of charisma; speaking in paragraphs vs. speaking in sentences; Norman Mailer’s dialectics; his notion of an experimental city where the entire population took LSD daily and whether after four years it would result in an epidemic of liver cancer; public housing towers of 50,000 units built of Legos; the visionary New York of Ghostbusters 2; Curtis Sliwa as cat person; Andrew Cuomo as dog person; Corinthian leather; socialism; fear; the city’s newspapers’ hostility to Zohran Mamdani; the unsuitability of members of Generation X for political leadership; the inevitability of Millennial political hegemony; the specter of a right-wing Zoomer anti-Mamdani in 2029, and much more. Thank you for listening.