For New York Magazine’s March 28th - April 10th, 2022 issue, features writer Molly Fischer takes readers inside Columbia professor Adam Tooze’s rise to fame – exploring how the impeccably credentialed, improbably charming economic historian supplanted the dirtbag left to become the leading demystifier of our global polycrisis. “What Tooze offers [readers] is not a piercing and singular insight but a sense of rigorous mastery. His knowledge of capitalism’s plumbing allows him to explain how the world works with gratifying credibility,” Fischer writes. He has won a devoted following on campus and on Twitter, primarily among young men, known sometimes as “Tooze Bros” or “Tooze Boys.”
“I started talking to Adam Tooze in the weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine,” says Fischer. “As soon as the war broke out, he was doing podcasts and TV appearances and newspaper columns nonstop. My editor Genevieve Smith and I were initially interested in him as a public intellectual with a cult following; we had no idea how ubiquitous he’d become in the time I was working on the piece. Perhaps it’s not so surprising, though—he’s a master of explaining global catastrophes, and there’s been no shortage of those recently.”
“In a moment like this, if folks feel I can help make sense of things, I am all in. I will work around the clock,” Tooze tells Fischer.
Tooze was photographed for New York by Brian Finke.