I was a 22-year-old rookie reporter for a local newspaper in the outer boroughs, making a salary that today would not even be New York’s minimum wage. It was January 2012, the second to last year of Michael Bloomberg’s mayoralty, and I tentatively typed out an email to Bloomberg’s hard-charging press secretary.
When Andrew Yang, the peppy UBI evangelist, dropped out of the presidential race last Tuesday, he immediately stoked speculation he was ready to seek another prestigious office: mayor of New York City.
In 2014, New York City quietly agreed to pay an $18 million settlement to the hundreds of people who had been ripped from the streets and locked away for peacefully protesting the Republican National Convention.
With an estimated worth of $3bn, Donald Trump is just barely a member of the billionaires’ club. Michael Bloomberg, on the other hand, boasts a reported net worth of $60bn.
Income inequality was surging, a racist president was ruthlessly deporting immigrants, and the world was struggling to recover from a brutal war. The political scene, like America itself, was a deeply volatile, unpredictable place.
One day after CNN reported that Bernie Sanders allegedly told Elizabeth Warren, in a private meeting in 2018, that a woman could not defeat Donald Trump, a reporter from another TV network trumpeted a different Sanders scoop.
What are the consequences of a second term of Donald Trump? To even consider the question sends the left-leaning mind into a paroxysm. Everything from nuclear war to the utter collapse of American democracy looms large in the imaginations of otherwise sober-minded people.
Last month, Chesa Boudin, a thirty-nine-year-old public defender, narrowly won an election to become the next district attorney of San Francisco. Boudin ran as a progressive outsider, promising to overhaul a criminal justice system that has locked up too many black and brown people.
In the long lost year of 2011, I managed to graduate college without owning a smartphone. Even then, four years after the birth of the iPhone, I was not yet an unreasonable outlier.
On Thursday, Joe Biden, the Democratic frontrunner for president, angrily confronted a voter in Iowa who didn’t like him very much. Biden deemed him a “damn liar” and “too old to vote for me” and maybe, just maybe, “fat”.