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Home Audio Episode 87: Mortadella and Mortality

Episode 87: Mortadella and Mortality

“It’s the best thing I’ve seen on television in a really long time,” Jessica says of Succession, the HBO series about an aged media mogul and the future of his empire.

“It seems like a crazy, almost to a surreal degree, fantasy. But it’s a little bit more real than I’m comfortable with,” says Michael, who speaks from his professional experience:

Before I moved to New York, I never really met anyone who I thought was fabulously rich. And it’s so happened that we were designing the invitation, say, for some kind of fancy gala dinner. And you’d meet with a big donor to the dinner, who would have to sign off on the invitations. And you think, Well, this person is really wealthy. They must be incredibly smart and poised and everything else.

And I swear to God in my career I probably met versions of the patriarch, Logan Roy, and all of the Roy children in various configurations. Like, it’s dead accurate. They’re exactly like that.

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By Michael Bierut & Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer and a former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Communications Arts and Eye magazines. A member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame, Helfand received her B.A. and her M.F.A. from Yale University where she has taught since 1994.

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