At the AIR MAIL shop on Hudson Street, the “Night at the Newsstand” series is fast becoming a Greenwich Village institution, much like sipping a cappuccino in the garden.
On Monday evening, building on the first two installments—in June, actor Griffin Dunne talked with writer Lili Anolik about his memoir, The Friday Afternoon Club, and in July, chef René Redzepi joined writer Dana Brown to discuss his Apple TV+ show, Omnivore—Moby Group C.E.O. Saad Mohseni and former Viacom C.E.O. Tom Freston discussed Mohseni’s new book, Radio Free Afghanistan.
Mohseni explained how, in 2002, he left a successful investment-banking career in Australia to start Moby Group in war-weary Afghanistan. The Taliban had only recently been toppled when he launched a small-scale radio network that has since evolved into a full-fledged media empire with a presence across the Middle East and Africa.
With the help of insightful questions from his longtime friend Freston, who was on the founding team at MTV, Mohseni enumerated his struggles and triumphs over the last two decades, from watching employees die in suicide bombings to launching Afghan Star, the country’s first reality-TV singing contest.
The speakers’ close friends and family sat with rapt attention. They included Louise Grunwald; diplomat Jamie Rubin; journalist Dexter Filkins; screenwriter Nick Pileggi; editor Tina Brown; writer Ken Auletta and his wife, literary agent Binky Urban; Mohseni’s partner, Alexandra Meyer; and the actress and artist Carey Lowell.
After a lively Q&A session, during which the speakers explained that Afghanistan isn’t quite the country they knew in their youth—when travel posters boasted it was home to the “world’s friendliest people”—guests swarmed about the room trying to get their hands on a copy of the book.
Writer Bob Colacello gossiped with Gallery Books editorial director Aimée Bell, while a crush of journalists—Christiane Amanpour, Bobby Ghosh, Anup Kaphle, Jenna Krajeski, and Elizabeth Rubin among them—talked shop and pawed at Mohseni nearby.
As the white wine dried up and only crumbs of the Sant Ambroeus finger sandwiches remained, the mix of worldly guests came into sharper focus: there were screenwriter Howard Gordon and artist Rachel Feinstein on the one hand, and on the other, American chargé d’affaires to Afghanistan Karen Decker and diplomat Rina Amiri.
With President Biden in town and the U.N. General Assembly making the city streets nearly impassable, your chances of convening such an eclectic group on a Monday night are even lower than usual. But if you have Mohseni’s determination, pretty much anything is possible.
Jack Sullivan is an Associate Editor at AIR MAIL
