He is the author of City of Ambition: FDR, La Guardia, and the Making of Modern New York (W.W. Norton, 2013). A graduate of Princeton and Columbia, he has written for the Atlantic, the New Republic, the New York Daily News, and the New York Times Book Review. He is currently working on City of Fortune: Urban Democracy in the Age of Inequality, a political history of 1980s–90s New York, to be published by W.W. Norton.