Robert Rosen

The 125th New York International Auto Show runs at the Javits Center through April 27. Automobiles have come a long way since 1900, but the cars of 2025, with their computerized systems, electric engines, and aerodynamic styling all have a similar look. With few exceptions, the cars at the auto show that caught my eye were the classic ones. Here's a sampling of what I saw.

Long before Paulie Walnuts was cruising around New Jersey in a Caddy, the car was a horseless carriage. Cadillac had been around for six years when the 1909 Model 30 was introduced. Its 4-cylinder engine produced 33 horsepower, could reach a top speed of 30 mph, and sold for $1,795.

The 1933 Pierce-Arrow 1240 2/4 Coupe looks like the kind of car that Woody Allen, in Midnight in Paris, would have his character Gil step into to be carried back to a more elegant time. (That car was a 1920 Peugeot Landaulet.) They don't make them like this anymore, and it's probably not a car you'd want to be seen in joyriding through the depths of the Great Depression. It sold for $3,500 fully loaded (about $86,000 in today's dollars), a reflection of Pierce-Arrow's reputation for luxury and quality.

The Fiat Topolino ("little mouse" in Italian) is a 2025 model that caught my eye. It gets the prize for Most Adorable Car. This "quadricycle" is a modern interpretation of the Fiat 500 "Topolino," which was produced from 1936 to 1955. The new Topolino can reach a top speed of 28 mph (not quite as fast as the 1909 Cadillac), and is perfect for parking on and zipping around traffic-clogged urban streets. You can buy an electric mouse in Europe for around $10,000, but Fiat has not yet announced plans to bring the Topolino to the US.

I was among the tens of thousands of people who marched in the April 5 New York City Hands Off protest against the policies of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Since then I've seen many pictures of the many signs people carried to express their rage and disgust with the administration's lawlessness, cruelty, and stupidity. But the sign in this photo, which I took on the corner of 40th Street and 5th Avenue, is the only one of its kind that I've seen. It says so much in so few words.

Make Lying Wrong Again

Make America Think Again

Make Humans Matter Again

Make People Care Again

Which seems to sum up everything Trump and Musk are not doing, have no desire to do, and are incapable of doing even if they wanted to.

Another nationwide protest is planned for April 19 in all 50 states. I will be marching in New York.

Tony El, host of the podcast Project Third-Eye Opened, invited me to come on his show and talk about my life and my books. Our conversation started out with John Lennon. But it evolved into a discussion of racism, Donald Trump, and the effects of being exposed to virulent bigotry as a child living in Flatbush in the aftermath of World War II.

This is Tony's synopsis of the show: What really happened in John Lennon's final days? How does growing up in Brooklyn shape a writer's journey? In this deep-dive and light-hearted interview, Robert Rosen shares insights from his bestselling book Nowhere Man and his most recent book, A Brooklyn Memoir. Check out this very intriguing and fascinating conversation about music, memory, and the power of storytelling.

You can listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spreaker, or YouTube.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram and Threads.

Anytime a new Beatles or Beatles-related book appears, the first thing I do, assuming I'm in the book, is check out what the author wrote about me. It's a good litmus test for the book's overall truthfulness. A recent example is Elliot Mintz's memoir, We All Shine On. Mintz, a former celebrity journalist who fell into John Lennon and Yoko Ono's orbit, stayed true to form and produced an entertaining work of utter bullshit. (You can read my review here o puedes leerlo en español aquí.) But every writer has an agenda.

Yoko, by David Sheff, is the latest Beatles-related biography to come along. Unlike Mintz's book, there's nothing fundamentally false about me in Yoko. This hasn't always been the case with Sheff. He's credited as one of the writers responsible for "The Betrayal of John Lennon," a story that ran in Playboy more than 40 years ago. I don't entirely blame Sheff for the unauthorized use of excerpts from my diaries that appeared in the article—200 words cherry-picked from 500,000 I'd written in the heat of the moment, which he then grossly distorted to make it sound as if I were a greedy ghoul drooling over Lennon's corpse. And I don't think it's entirely his fault that he used only 22 words from a two-hour interview with me because they were the only 22 words that fit the predetermined Playboy storyline. I think Sheff was a tool of his editor, G. Barry Golson—he was only following orders. And Golson's orders were to portray Ono as a saintly widow exploited by the vicious people surrounding her. A chapter in my book Nowhere Man, "An Open Letter to G. Barry Golson," describes in detail what happened with the Playboy story.

With Yoko, I think Sheff is still following orders—from Ono herself, probably through her attorneys, and from the Lennon family. (A New York Times review describes the book as "predictably sympathetic, but not fawning.") But perhaps Sheff has gained a bit of wisdom in the past 40 years or possibly stumbled across a few journalistic ethics along the way. This time he treaded very carefully over what he said about me. He did not distort anything I've written about Ono and even included a link to this website in the endnotes. I think he understood that to lie about me as he did in the Playboy story would have invited my further scrutiny of the book, in search of additional Mintz-style falsehoods. Which saves me the trouble of having to read and review a 384-page Yoko Ono biography.

It's literary style that interests me, and as far as I can see, Sheff has none, beyond an ability to compose grammatically correct sentences.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Instagram and Threads.