Jonathan Mahler and Kathy Wylde in Conversation with Thomas Dyja: The Gods of New York and a City Transformed

Please submit questions for the speakers in the chat starting on October 20 at approximately 7:30 pm ET.

Award-winning author Jonathan Mahler joins longtime New York City leader Kathy Wylde for a conversation with bestselling author Thomas Dyja about the birth of modern New York and the forces that continue to transform the city today.

Offering an immersive portrait of a city on the brink of seismic change, Mahler’s recent book, The Gods of New York — named one of the best books of 2025 by The New York Times Book Review and just out in paperback — is a sweeping chronicle of four tumultuous years in the 1980s that changed the city forever and anticipated the forces that would soon divide the nation. Could New York be both a great working-class city that lifted up immigrants and the money-soaked capital of global finance? Could it retain a civic culture when the rich were building a city of their own and vast swaths of citizens were losing faith in the systems meant to protect them?

For decades, Kathy Wylde has endeavored to help resolve these tensions, working at the intersection of business, government, and civic life, giving her a close-up view of how the city’s next chapter is unfolding. In a conversation with New York historian and author of New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation, Thomas Dyja, Mahler and Wylde offer deep insight into how the New York of the of the late ’80s became the New York we know today.

What makes New York resilient? What should we preserve, what needs to change, and who gets to shape what comes next? Don’t miss this essential conversation about how New York reinvented itself at the end of the last century, and what it will take to do so again.