Raised in Ohio, Paris and Maryland, Anand Giridharadas was educated at Michigan, Oxford and Harvard universities. In 2003, he worked as a consultant for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company; in 2005, he moved into journalism, working for the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times. His third book, Winners Take All, an exposé of how the global elite use their wealth and influence to preserve the status quo, is out now (Allen Lane).
1. Performer
Taylor Mac
We came upon Taylor Mac at this intimate concert in a little jazz bar. He was wearing an elaborate headdress and a wild, colourful costume and in every song was playing with your assumptions about the masculine, the feminine, power, love. It’s so rare to see someone completely discombobulate and reconfigure ideas about gender and sexuality. I had this feeling of “this is what art is for”: instead of having awful political arguments about who gets to use what bathroom, here was an artist using art to make you question your own ideas without getting into any of those conversations. It was breathtaking.
2. App
Freedom
This app is how I’ve written most of my books – it disables your laptop from connecting to the addiction machine that is the internet. I think many of us don’t realise the extent to which, whether we’re teachers or lawyers or writers, we’ve basically become email monkeys, playing tennis with online messages. I get a lot of emails, like everybody else does, but I realised a while ago that if I didn’t shut them and the other addictive social portals off while I am writing for long stretches, no books were going to get written. And it’s changed my life.
3. Art
Hilma af Klint, Guggenheim Museum, New York
Hilma af Klint was an artist who locked up her work because she felt the world wasn’t ready for it. It turns out she was a pioneer of modernism, at that turning point of artists mustering the courage to paint what was in their heads rather than in the world. And she prophesied that one day this collection would be shown in a spiral temple. It’s a tremendous show that raises profound questions about art and how we think about the originators of cultural movements.
4. Book
Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States
I recently finished this extraordinary book. It’s a warts-and-all retelling of American history from Columbus in 1492 to the present as a story of phenomenal ideals and the extraordinary human exertion by those shut out of the reality of those ideals. It was a source of solace: you remember that, although often at tremendous cost, we did end slavery, we did get children out of factories, we did empower women to vote, we did enfranchise African Americans. It’s a real antidote to the hopelessness of the Trump era.
5. Play
American Son
This is a play starring Kerry Washington, among others, on Broadway. It uses the device of a white father and black mother anguished about what may have happened to their son over the course of a night when there has been a police incident. It’s a masterful attempt to make people realise what it’s like to be a white person who doesn’t really know how to have those conversations and what it’s like to be a black mother who is trained to assume the worst. It was really an empathy machine of a show. Highly recommended.
6. Place
Cancun, Mexico
With a wife and two small children, I gave in to the kind of all-inclusive Cancun resort that my entire life was built around avoiding, and I can report that it is phenomenal. When you age and decide to reproduce, your needs necessarily change: eating a coconut through a straw while pushing a stroller by the pool is the new reality and the faster you give into it the better for everybody. They had entertainment, beaches, a Bollywood night. There’s nothing more fun than a place where you can drop your kids off in a camp and be drinking a piña colada a few minutes later.