I think it’s fair to say that Alex Gibney, director of the new documentary Musk—a nearly four-hour prosecution of the world’s richest man—sees his quarry as both devilish and foolish, a “confidence man” with a talent for stock pumping and résumé inflation. These are all generically undesirable qualities, for sure, but when cohabitating inside the mind of a trillionaire they become terrifying.

Gibney is arguably the most famous documentarian in the country, and I don’t envy anyone, regardless of their bank balance, who ends up in his crosshairs. (If you’re somehow unfamiliar with his IMDb page, he’s the guy behind Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief; We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks; The Armstrong Lie; etc., etc.)

Many of Gibney’s broad criticisms of Musk seem to me uncontroversial: the personal foibles, the verbal recklessness, the boundless confidence that, when coupled with wealth and power, inevitably curdles into narcissism. He grants Musk’s many successes but excoriates him for the manner in which they were achieved.

But don’t despair: Gibney and I disagree on plenty when it comes to Musk, and when I spoke to him earlier this week we mixed it up on a bunch of issues, including a few of the film’s darker implications that struck me as...a bit off.

Because Musk is being released in theaters today, we’ve shifted this week’s release schedule by a few days. And a new written piece is forthcoming, which will, in part, cover America’s other most famous documentarian...

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We don’t yet know who was behind today’s attempted terror attack on a FlyDubai flight from the UAE to Israel. But early reporting offers enough detail to draw some fairly obvious conclusions: one of the plane’s pilots, described by former co-workers as a “religious extremist,” stabbed his co-pilot and seemed intent on turning the plane, full of Israeli passengers, into a suicide bomb. I’m a little less cautious than the New York Times, so I’ll say it with reasonable confidence: this was a terrorist hijacking of the Islamist persuasion.

In the 1970s, hijackings were depressingly common, usually carried out by Palestinian groups and their allies (who, thankfully, lacked the suicidal instinct). In his new book, The Jackal: The Rise and Fall of Carlos, the World’s First Super-Terrorist, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Joby Warrick writes that “after Arab armies were crushed by the Israelis in 1967, leaders of the [Palestinian] movement shifted the battle to a new arena: commercial aviation.”

Everything old is new again.

Warrick draws a direct line from the secular terrorism of the 1970s to the jihadism of today, and the thread running through it is that era’s most famous practitioner, Carlos the Jackal, the first “celebrity terrorist.” Carlos, he argues, was the “human face of a dangerous new form of international terrorism…which became the template for later groups such as al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.”

Warrick and I discuss how Carlos laid the groundwork for modern Islamist terrorism, why European states so often caved to his demands, the horseshoe theory of violent extremism, the Soviet Union’s role in facilitating his murderous rampages, and Warrick’s very odd meeting with Carlos in a French prison.

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Picking up the pen again after an interminably long, entirely self-imposed hiatus. What to expect? A backlog of pieces about junk history, short epistles on whatever annoys me (basically everything), various unexpected and potentially unwanted recommendations (forgotten books, films, records), unpublished stuff from the archives (lost interv…

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Michael Musto is the great chronicler of a New York City that no longer exists. The former Village Voice columnist, doyen of downtown, inveterate gossip, Zelig of cool, was both journalist and participant, the guy who partied with “king of the club kids” Michael Alig and was the first to report, in a suggestive blind item, that the drugged out “party monster” had murdered and dismembered another drugged out party monster.

It’s an ever-shifting roll call, but if I were to catalog the most quintessentially New York characters of the last half decade, Musto would always rank in the top ten (above Robin Byrd, but just behind Lou Reed). In my conversation with him, we talk about Alig, being called a “gay Nazi” by Rosie O’Donnell, an AIDS-era “suicide party” that he declined to attend, and why he rejects nostalgia for the lost city that he helped make so famous. “I went from fighting gentrification to crying that Kmart closed,” he told me.

His new generation of fans and admirers, nostalgic for the downtown scene of the ‘70s and ‘80s, regularly call Musto iconic, which seems an appropriate designation. Musto isn’t so sure. “[It] means ‘I have no idea who you are or what you did, but I know you did something. And if I could hire you, I still wouldn’t.’”

PS: Here’s the blind item Musto wrote that first broke the story of Michael Alig’s murder of Angel Melendez

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Allow us, ladies and gentlemen, a brief political interregnum at The Moynihan Report. The midterms are soon upon us. The president is historically unpopular. And the opposition party is in the throes of an identity crisis. So perhaps all this is worth discussing with someone who is a Democrat, understands Democrats, and is influential amongst Democrats.

Jon Lovett is a very bright, open-minded sort, someone with whom I often disagree but regard as an honest broker, even when he’s catastrophically wrong about an issue. If you’re unfamiliar, Lovett was a speechwriter for President Barack Obama and is one of the founders and hosts of the progressive powerhouse podcast “Pod Save America.” As one journalist recently noted, if you want to seize the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, it would be unwise to skip a “Pod Save America” appearance.

We mixed it up a bit, but I have little desire to debate individual issues on this show—I have another show for that, which is more indulgent of my ideological narcissism. I wanted to get a better sense of how Democrats are handling this moment and internalizing the lessons of the previous one, if they are at all. We discuss the disappearing centrists; the war over “Zionism” (and whether he identifies as a Zionist); unlikable candidates; the brutality of getting cut from his Little League baseball team; “Woke 1.0”; litmus tests and red lines; and why, during the cultural meltdowns of recent years, Jon was “a little bit afraid to just say plainly what I thought.”

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Penelope Spheeris is one of the most punk rock women alive. And I have to thank her for setting me on a more righteous cultural path. You see, in the late 1980s, I was a middle school hair metal fan. Did I see Ratt play at the Worcester Centrum in 1987? And was Poison the opening band? Did I have multiple records by the semi-obscure Japanese metal band Loudness? Perhaps. The metal interregnum was brief, thanks to Spheeris’s masterful 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. If you’ve seen the film—packed with terrible bands “treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry,” to quote a film Spheeris almost directed—you’ll understand why. If you haven’t, find it online posthaste.

But first, watch this amazing conversation I had with Spheeris last month, during which we talk about the lost movie she made with a cocaine-addled Richard Pryor; how she ended up directing big Hollywood films like Wayne’s World and Black Sheep; her...errrrr...unvarnished feelings about Tina Fey, Brittney Spears and Jennifer Aniston; and how the ratbag Weinstein brothers precipitated her retreat from Hollywood. One of my favorite interviews of the year.

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Last month, I sat down with the irrepressible and often irritable Chaim Witz (a.k.a. Gene Simmons), Kiss’s bassist, co-lead singer, and perennial pitchman, to discuss his mother’s survival of multiple Nazi concentration camps, the #MeToo movement, the death of Ace Frehley, his failures as a father and husband, writing songs with Bob Dylan, and why he sold the Kiss catalog to a Swedish company.

A few notes about the interview, just for you subscribers: I’m not sure why, considering my comically Fenian last name, but Simmons assumed I was Jewish. While I didn’t confirm his suspicion, I also didn’t correct him. But I did object, rather forcefully, when he declared that I was a dead ringer for Robin Williams.

Gene was an extremely fun interview, but I must admit the tenor of the conversation improved dramatically when, during a brief stoppage to fix a technical issue, I told him my best Jewish mother joke, which he so enjoyed that I expect to see it in the liner notes of his next record. Relax. One can safely tell a Jewish joke when the recipient thinks your Jewish.

And a big, slobbering thank you to all who have subscribed, free or otherwise (though “otherwise” is always preferred). I have yet to figure out what will be paywalled, but there will be enticements to encourage further fiscal irresponsibility. What would Gene Simmons do?

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Yes, dearies, The Moynihan Report is indeed back. And your intrepid host, who has never seen an episode of Star Trek (but who is a deep and unapologetic student of T.J. Hooker), determined that a TMR reboot required the wisdom and durability of William Shatner. So off to Los Angeles I went, to Comrade Kirk’s unassuming and slightly bedraggled office in the Valley, where Shatner and I kibitzed about AI, heavy metal, Brian May, Pascal’s wager, quantum physics, space, God, Roger Corman, and…death.

One more thing before you watch: do you really need to subscribe to another Substack? Why yes, you do. Because while Shatner and I mostly avoid politics—it intrudes, as it always does, but in a pleasant, Canadian manner—subscribers will, later today, receive the first TMR newsletter. It contains an essay on the proliferation of politicized junk history, one that accuses a best-selling writer (and former TFC guest) of massaging and misattributing quotes, and ends with recommendations that will make you a smarter, funnier, and inevitably more annoying dinner-party guest.

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