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The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

The Just Enough Family

Liz Lange is the clothing designer known for introducing fashion and sex appeal to maternity wear in the 1990s. It’s less known that she is also the niece of the late Saul Steinberg, the stout, high-living corporate raider whose 1980s excesses—and losses—helped inspire Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Ariel Levy, the New Yorker writer, is a good friend of Lange’s, and in her riveting new podcast, The Just Enough Family, Levy relies on Lange to guide listeners through the Steinberg family’s improbable tale. Lange is a lively, down-to-earth, and disarmingly candid interviewee, and so are all the other family members who vividly describe life as they lived it throughout their extraordinary, richly complicated rise and fall. These people came from nothing, then had too much of everything, then lost it all. The Just Enough Family is a fascinating, vicarious look deep inside the 0.01 percent of yesteryear and—bonus—an ominous cautionary tale for the tech and hedge-fund billionaires of today. —Alessandra Stanley

Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg attending a black tie event in 2005. Photo: Adam Scull/Zuma Press.