Kim Phillips-Fein is a historian and associate professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. She is the author of Fear City: The New York City Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Metropolitan, 2017) and Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal (Norton, 2010).
Kim Phillips-Fein
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Writing on Public Books
Philanthropists Will Not Save Us
What unites Mark Zuckerberg and the Koch Brothers? For many, their politics appear to set them apart. At least before the Cambridge Analytica revelations …
Philanthropists Will Not Save Us
What unites Mark Zuckerberg and the Koch Brothers? For many, their politics appear to set them apart. At least before the Cambridge Analytica revelations …
The Big Picture: Trump’s New York
The lobby of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, right next door to Grand Central Terminal, presents a generic corporate luxury—an aesthetic of high ceilings, sleek fountains of black granite, dark wood pillars. As a reporter for the New York Times wrote in 1980, shortly before the hotel opened, the glass-wrapped exterior looks like […]
New York’s Austerity Man
At times, New York City politics can seem like midnight television, the same sitcom reruns airing in an endless cycle. Such was the feeling this fall, when former Mayor David Dinkins released his new memoir, A Mayor’s Life: Governing New York’s Gorgeous Mosaic, at the apex of the mayoral campaign. Shortly after it came out, […]
The Alchemy of Finance
For a few years in the late 1990s, the myth of a New Economy was everywhere. The old economy, with its pesky booms and busts, was a thing of the past, replaced by a new era of infinite prosperity powered by globalization, the Internet, and—most of all—the stock market. Lured on by the promise of […]
