ABSTRACT: Like playgrounds, changing tables, and choking hazards, day cares are easy to ignore until a baby shows up. Then, as the cliché goes, everything changes: when you’re a parent, child care becomes the organizing principle of your life, along with playgrounds, changing tables, and choking hazards. Unlike these other things, child care is not simple. In New York City in particular, the way we take care of kids is less a system than a patchwork of very expensive solutions glued together with Band-Aids, popsicle sticks, and prayers.

Abstract: Zohran Mamdani first became visible to me and many others just over a year ago, when he posted a video where he spoke to working-class New Yorkers in the Bronx and Queens about why some of them voted for Donald Trump. In that video, which subsequently went viral, Mamdani swept aside the superficial argument about whether support for Trump was motivated by racial and xenophobic animus or economic anxiety. He simply asked people and listened to what they said. Mamdani advanced his mayoral candidacy on a few clear propositions demonstrated that day. Ordinary people are worried about their material and social standing as they try to build their lives in one of the most unequal and expensive cities in the world. “Affordability” has been Mamdani’s watchword ever since; he used it to ground a winning campaign. The essence of that campaign, however, grew from a more fundamental democratic insight: that politics begins by meeting people where they are, convincing them that you will listen to them, and building trust that you will stand for them and lead them to a better future.

ABSTRACT: The Silver Meteor pulls out of Miami’s Amtrak station on time at 8:10 a.m. It rumbles past the sun-bleached industrial landscape, and the large car window is lit up by the low-lying autumn rays. “Have a Safe and Productive Day” reads a squat white wall, directed at the train cars and framed by palm fronds and power lines. I do the opposite: close my laptop, close my book, and remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s words—“And ever again, in the wink of an eye, / Painted stations whistle by”—as my co-passengers and I zip past Hollywood, then Fort Lauderdale, then Deerfield Beach. The fluorescent lights illuminate an interior of scuffed vinyl and tired textiles, but extrawide seats and expansive windows make up for these deficiencies. I take out wool and needles and start to knit a vest, measuring the journey in centimeters of fabric; stations tick by in tidy rows of stitches.

ABSTRACT: Over several weeks this spring, the New York times offered two revealing reports on the mindset of the Democratic Party's lead-ers. the first indicated that major donors were gearing up to "spend tens of millions of dollars" to "find the next Joe Rogan" in an effort to counter the popularity of right-leaning podcasters and improve the par-ty's reputation among younger, less affluent voters. the second declared that lead-ing Democratic figures were withholding endorsement of Zohran Mamdani, the par-ty's nominee for mayor of New York City. this reticence emerged even as it became clear that Mamdani had earned his surprisingly decisive primary victory in part by appeal-ing to just those voters whom donors had hoped to reach, through just those means they had hoped to use: grassroots online media. Readers of both articles, in fact, might reasonably pause to wonder whether each referred to the same political organi-zation, as the nattily attired assemblyman from Queens would seem to be everything Democrats could hope for in 2025. Instead, some donors are apparently kicking the tires on every possible general election alterna-tive, up to and including the scandal ridden, MAGA-curious sitting mayor, Eric Adams.

ABSTRACT: In early July, the Department of Homeland Security indulged in a little art appreciation on X, where it posted a thomas Kinkade painting, Morning Pledge, for its 2.6 million followers to admire. Morning Pledge is archetypal Kinkade: an American flag waves proudly next to a quaint schoolhouse across the road from a row of Victorian-style homes. "Protect the homeland," the DHS caption read. Days earlier the account had posted an AI-generated image of alligators wearing ICE hats as they patrolled outside a prison, a reference to the internment camp it recently built in a Florida swamp. the implications are not subtle: DHS must purge our streets so children can walk to school again. the America depicted in Morning Pledge cannot exist without Alligator Alcatraz.

ABSTRACT: Over the summer and fall of 2024, public opinion polls showed that despite low unemployment, falling inflation, and robust GDP growth, a majority of Americans reported that they were worse off than they had been four years prior, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Then in November, despite the fact that Biden administration succeeded in putting together fiscal and monetary policies that led to the U.S. economy growing faster than any of its peers in the wake of the COVID-19 crash, Trump won a large majority of the 68 percent of voters who rated the economy as not good or poor, and an even larger majority of the 47 percent who said they were better off in November 2020.

ABSTRACT: In February the labor reporter Luis Feliz Leon published an essay on the n+1 website on unions' varying responses to Trump. We were intrigued by his mention of a members' meeting organized by Faye Guenther, president of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 3000, to discuss immigration and how the union could prepare for the new administration's deportation plans. We spoke to Faye on February 28 about how she confronts divisions within her membership, and how unions can protect their immigrant members. Since then several union members have been detained—including former UAW member Mahmoud Khalil, Lewelyn Dixon and Rümeysa Öztürk of SEIU, and Alfredo Juárez of Familias Unidas por la Justicia—which only underscores the importance of this discussion.

ABSTRACT: What is the point of our moral ideals in a world where people can endlessly express care and concern for others—those living in zones of everyday poverty or spaces of terror like Gaza and Tigray—but do nothing in practice?

ABSTRACT: When asked in 2023 what “men want in women,” the notorious influencer, professional kickboxer, and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate gave a predictable answer: “No one’s going to respect the man who’s with an ultrapromiscuous woman. No one is going to respect the man who’s with a woman who is back-talking him or horrible to him in public. No one is going to respect the man who’s with a woman who clearly isn’t interested in him sexually.” What a man wants is the respect of others, which a woman can only convey, vacantly and impersonally, the way an electrode carries a current. It is this inflamed, anxious kind of notion that has made tate an inescapable figure of the online right. In his videos and social media posts, Tate has fueled the contemporary anti-feminist backlash by repeating, again and again, its galloping litany of fixations: the defense of male honor and the fear of female sexual freedom and social censure. Andrew Tate knows his script and how to hit its most advantageous beats.