Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City
Author Anand Giridharadas discusses his new book with author and journalist Jodi Kantor.
In 2023, the lives of two men—Jordan Neely, a homeless man known in better days for his Michael Jackson impersonations, and Daniel Penny, an ex-Marine who had moved to the big city seeking more than Long Island could offer—collided tragically in a New York subway car. In Man in the Mirror, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Anand Giridharadas renders this deadly encounter and its aftermath as a propulsive crime story that opens onto a larger human drama: the search for belonging in an age of estrangement.
Inhabiting the perspectives of an unforgettable cast of characters, Giridharadas immerses us in the places where this story plays out, from the corridors of power in City Hall to subway benches where New Yorkers spend the night, from a Marine Corps base to a Harlem church in mourning—and, ultimately, to a courtroom where a riveting battle unfolds. In his painstakingly reported, richly novelistic narrative, these characters’ strivings and struggles—to care for loved ones and strangers, to protect the public, to seek justice—reveal the humanity behind the headlines. Through one character’s eyes and then another’s, Giridharadas presents a chapter of American history too often reduced to divisive clickbait as something far more complex and full of life.
At once panoramic in its scope and finely detailed in its emotional immediacy, Man in the Mirror is a tour de force of narrative reporting and an indispensable portrait of our times.
Copies of Man in the Mirror, as well as best-selling works How to Start and She Said by Jodi Kantor, will be available for purchase.
Registration required here. Seats are limited. Please use a different email address for each registration.
This event is sponsored by the Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights and the Technology Policy & Innovation (TPI) Concentration at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.
Tuesday, November 17, 2026, 6:00 - 8:00pm
Food will be served.
Columbia Journalism School, Lecture Hall, 3rd Floor, Pulitzer Hall
2950 Broadway, New York, NY 10027