Coming from Evan Osnos: Field guide to the ultra-rich
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Cover: Scribner
Evan Osnos, a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2008, will be out June 3 with "The Haves and Have-Yachts," which he calls a "field guide to the ultrarich."
Why it matters: The book, a collection of his New Yorker pieces, "aims to capture the thinking and behavior of some of the world's most powerful people," Osnos tells Axios.
- "By assessing their tactics and obsessions, their manners and delusions, it attempts to show how the very rich see themselves and how they see the world that they increasingly control."
The backstory: The project long predated this administration. In 2016, "it was clear that the usual angles of political analysis couldn't explain what Donald Trump represented, because he is so much a creature of the money-world — and of specific ideas about fortune, government, liberty, dominance and what it means to be 'an elite,'" Osnos tells Axios:
"When Trump won in 2016, I was already writing my first piece in that vein, on the rise of doomsday prepping among the Silicon Valley and Wall Street crowds and why these hugely powerful people, many of whom had made their fortunes on accurately predicting the future, saw fragility in it. That reporting, partly in New Zealand, opened my eyes to a whole set of behaviors and habits growing with the assets of the ultrarich, and I started chronicling one after another — pop-star 'private gigs,' the fake-it-till-you-make it culture of aspiration, the low-tax trusts in states like Nevada, which explains why the Murdoch family feud is playing out in a Reno courtroom. I profiled Zuckerberg, visited him at home, drilled down on how he defines success and responsibility."
Context: It's a sequel to Osnos' "Wildland: The Making of America's Fury," published in 2021, on ways extreme inequality altered life in three places he'd lived — Greenwich, Conn.; Chicago; and Clarksburg, W.Va.
- "Wildland" focused on the "alarmed middle, animated by the perspective of frustrated residents of Appalachia and the South Side," Osnos says. "This new book is a view from the top."
Fun fact: This vein of reporting originated with a stranger who sat next to Osnos on a flight in 2015. "He worked in tech in Silicon Valley," Osnos recalls. "When I asked what stories were overlooked, he started talking, to my surprise, about prepping."
