Journalism and Essays

Cultural upheavals can be a riddle in real time. Trends that might seem obvious in hindsight are poorly understood in the present or not fathomed at all. We live in turbulent times now, at the tail end of a pandemic that killed millions and, for a period, reordered existence as we knew it.

Bernie Sanders arrived in Ann Arbor in late winter, his future to be decided in two days. Thousands of students thronged the University of Michigan campus, gripping their blue-and-white signs, one so overcome with emotion she battled back tears as Sanders spoke. Above a sea of expectant faces, his name was spelled out in enormous, yellow block letters: B.E.R.N.I.E. The students held them high and wouldn’t let go.

On the last day of February, Lori Lightfoot became the first mayor of Chicago in 34 years to lose an election. The polarizing Democrat was one of the only big-city executives in America to govern through the pandemic and face voters again, coming in third and failing to advance to the next round.

It became quite easy, in the days after the so-called Twitter Files were dumped across the Internet, to dismiss entirely all of their revelations. For many progressives, the whole affair was a right-coded distraction, and therefore worth deriding or ignoring altogether.

Don Bolduc clenched his microphone on a rain-streaked October night in New Hampshire, the rasp in his voice betraying, strangely enough, a sense of hurt. Senator Maggie Hassan, it seemed, had burned deep into him this time. “You know what’s mean? Calling me a monster. You know what’s mean? Portraying me as someone who would allow a mother to die.

It was at a virtual town hall in late 2021, with COVID-19 rates skyrocketing again in Wisconsin, where Ron Johnson made the mouthwash declaration. A longtime vaccine skeptic, the Republican senator had curious advice for anyone battling the disease. “By the way, standard gargle mouthwash has been proven to kill the coronavirus,” he said. “If you get it, you may reduce viral replication. Why not try all these things?”

In San Francisco, the signs are everywhere. Near the famed Lombard Street, one is affixed to a lamppost. Several of them, picturing menacing men in black masks, offer admonishments for anyone strolling in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. “Safety Alert,” the words, bold black against orange, warn. “Leave Nothing Behind.”

The rise of the Squad in Congress has mirrored the explosive growth of Democratic Socialists of America. The leftist lawmakers, all of them national celebrities, have promoted DSA and partnered with the organization on crucial legislation.

What to do with Bill de Blasio? After eight years, plenty of New Yorkers can be found who believe the 109th mayor of the largest city in America thoroughly cheapened and demeaned the office.

When many states and cities implemented shutdown orders to combat the spread of the coronavirus last year, an array of metrics told the public when, or if, the closures would end.

In her first major move as governor since replacing the disgraced Andrew Cuomo in August, Kathy Hochul signed into a law a sweeping extension of a statewide eviction moratorium that had been set to expire.

As Kathy Hochul prepares to become New York’s first female governor, many of the men and women who ran the Andrew Cuomo administration remain in positions of power.

Single-payer health care and a public takeover of utility companies. Money pumped into the public-university system and public-housing stock, harvested from higher taxes on the wealthy.

On Tuesday, State Attorney General Letitia James released her much-anticipated report into the sexual harassment allegations brought against Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York. James, a fellow Democrat, was unequivocal: Cuomo had harassed multiple women, including current and former government workers, breaking state and federal laws.

One of the stranger features of the Dianne Morales mayoral campaign was its Brooklyn headquarters. Situated in Bedford-Stuyvesant, not far from where Morales owned a townhouse, the campaign office was tucked into a bar that had been temporarily shuttered as a result of the pandemic.

New York City mayoral election was bizarre. And it's not over: Eric Adams’s unique blend of supposedly anti-racist law-and-order politics, pro-landlord policy, and appeals to outer borough resentment of liberal Manhattan elites won the first round.

The news, when it arrived, was too stunning to quite believe: New York State had fallen 89 people short, in the U.S. Census count, of keeping all of its congressional seats.

For so long, television was good to Andrew Cuomo. The most famous governor in America charmed millions of viewers with his televised briefings in the earliest months of the coronavirus pandemic, reciting bare facts from his homely PowerPoints.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s failure to contain the virus in the earliest weeks of the outbreak doomed New York to far more suffering than it needed to endure. Now, with a vaccine here, he is again proving his unfitness to lead his state through the worst crisis it has faced in modern history.

What will the big media outlets of America do when Joe Biden is officially sworn in as president? For those on the Right, like Fox and Newsmax, there’s little question. Biden can be every bit the foil Barack Obama was, and right-wingers have new progressives to vilify, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar.

The David Dinkins legacy has always been complex, ripe for revision and misunderstanding. New York City’s first and only black mayor, who died yesterday at the age of ninety-three, served for just a single term, from 1990 through 1993. It was a period of economic and racial tumult for the city, when just about anyone left of center was forced into a defensive crouch.

Chuck Schumer knows how to raise money from rich people. It’s why, in part, he was able to claim a Senate seat in New York, outhustling a generation of rivals who may have possessed more talent, vision, and charisma.

There was a strange moment last month when Donald Trump, briefly departing from his usual conspiracy-mongering and idiocy, stumbled on an argument grounded in actual reality. The leaders of the Pentagon, Trump fumed, “want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

In the middle of September, with State Senate Democrats heavily outspending Republicans in their quest to expand their majority, a billionaire entered the fray to help the beleaguered GOP. Ronald Lauder, the 76-year-old heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, dropped $1.7 million into the operations of the new independent expenditure group called Safe Together New York, taking specific aim at six Senate Democratic candidates—four incumbents and two challengers.

In the sprawling New Yorker profile of Joe Biden that appeared earlier this month, an unnamed Barack Obama administration official dropped an assessment of the presidential campaign that will resonate with liberals everywhere: “This country needs to just chill the fuck out and have a boring President.”

There’s a natural feeling of loss when a person of certain renown dies. We didn’t know the man, but we remembered the era—or we read about it in books, heard of it from parents, peered backwards with the longing of those who can only imagine. The famous embody their time, their images and memories our own, joined to a collective consciousness.

New York City’s liberal mayor, elected on a platform of overhauling a police department accused of deep-seated racism and corruption, had a seemingly obvious idea for reform: instituting civilian oversight of the police.

When Bronx State Senator Alessandra Biaggi endorsed her local congressman, Eliot Engel, for re-election last year, she argued that it wasn’t a good time to primary Democratic incumbents. “I believed the most important thing to do in 2020 was win the White House,” she said. “But the world has changed.”

On May 15, House Democrats passed a far-reaching $3 trillion stimulus bill aimed at rescuing the country from a looming economic depression. Senate Republicans shot the bill down, and Evan Hollander, communications director for the House Appropriations Committee, told me that “while we hope to begin negotiations soon, so far the White House and the Senate have been unwilling to negotiate.” The legislation included Democratic priorities in the age of COVID-19: significant aid to state and local governments, new funds for Medicare and Medicaid, and increased hazard pay for frontline healthcare workers.

In early April, the Andrew Cuomo–Bill de Blasio feud—which most recently focused on the funding of the subways—reemerged in the news. The long-running cold war, ceaselessly psychoanalyzed by New York political insiders, burst into the open when de Blasio, the mayor of New York City, announced that public schools would remain closed through the school year to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

For weeks, bus drivers in New York City begged their bosses for N95 masks to protect themselves against the spread of Covid-19. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, heeding the advice of the Centers for Disease Control, insisted they weren’t necessary, only to change course at the beginning of April.

As the novel coronavirus rages in New York, killing more than a thousand and locking down millions, Governor Andrew Cuomo has emerged as the hero of the moment. On television, he is everything Donald Trump is not: calm, coherent, and blunt, in a strangely reassuring way.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo “has emerged as the executive best suited for the coronavirus crisis,” wrote the New York Times’ Ben Smith, sharing a sentiment that has hardened among close watchers of New York politics.

"The New York Times was a timeless blend of past and present, a medieval modern kingdom within a nation with its own private laws and values and with leaders who felt responsibility for the nation’s welfare but were less likely to lie than the nation’s statesman and generals," Gay Talese writes in The Kingdom and the Power, his 1969 account of the inner workings of the New York Times.

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.

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.

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.

In 2016, not long after Donald Trump’s black swan victory, I wrote a column in the Daily News asking people to stop comparing the reality TV demagogue to Adolf Hitler. My argument was rather simple: Trump is abhorrent, but to liken him to a murderous Nazi minimized the horrors of the Holocaust, World War II, and 20th century fascism.

This interview with Jarett Kobek is happening because of Twitter, which is deeply ironic if you’ve read any of his books. One of the keenest and more acidic writers of our era, Kobek built his reputation on ridiculing our capitulation to internet oligarchs.

On Saturday night, Donald Trump made another rare public foray, attending a UFC match in New York City. He was roundly booed, though not as aggressively or creatively as he was at a World Series game in Washington last month.

On a balmy night in September, Maurice Mitchell, the new national director of the Working Families Party, introduced a leading presidential contender to thousands of her delirious supporters.

The New York City congressional delegation is having a moment. Its newest member, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, became a movement leader before her 30th birthday. Hakeem Jeffries, a high-ranking Brooklyn Democrat, could someday replace Nancy Pelosi if he whips the votes together. Jerry Nadler and Eliot Engel, of Manhattan and the Bronx, chair two of the House’s most powerful committees, judiciary and foreign affairs.

When Andrew Luck jogged off the field at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis for the final time, the Colts fans booed. Through their smartphones the news had arrived that their franchise quarterback, a former number one overall pick, was retiring from the NFL at the age of twenty-nine.

Patrick Lynch, raving from your TV, is a New York institution. The president of Police Benevolent Association, with his slick helmet of hair, believes any attempt to criticize or discipline a police officer, no matter how heinous their actions may be, amounts to treason. No mayor can pass a PBA loyalty test because no mayor has yet found fit to worship Lynch like a god.

On the night of June 25th, the Queens County Democratic Party appeared to suffer not one, but two, grievous blows. Tiffany Cabán, the democratic socialist upstart, led Melinda Katz, the Queens borough president, by more than 1,100 votes in the historic primary for district attorney.

On Monday night, Melinda Katz waded into the same steamy bar in Forest Hills where, just a month ago, her political career appeared to be crashing to an end. “Welcome to election night two,” Katz, the Queens borough president, said from the stage, her blue-and-gold campaign signs pasted behind her. “We were having a difficult time in the papers. We weren’t sure if we won or lost.”

On Tuesday afternoon, a newly emboldened Gregory Meeks stood outside the Queens Board of Elections, a coterie of politicians, activists, and hangers-on flanking him. He was there to rail against Tiffany Cabán’s campaign, to accuse her backers of trafficking in Trumpian falsehoods.

At the climax of the 2019 legislative session, when New York’s rent laws hung in the balance, the two Democratic legislative leaders—the understated Assembly speaker, Carl Heastie, and the Senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart-Cousins—came together to shut Andrew Cuomo entirely out of the room.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the perverse nature of Donald Trump’s administration better than his approach to the regulatory state. In Trump’s America, those most zealously dedicated to unraveling federal oversight are in charge of the government, racing to shred laws as quickly as they can.

here was a time when the Brooklyn Democratic machine hated few people more than it did Margarita López Torres. First elected as a civil court judge in 1992, López Torres clashed with the powerful Brooklyn Democratic Party boss, Clarence Norman Jr., when she refused to hire the politically connected staff Norman demanded she take on.

On a warm day in early May, hundreds of people packed the Reform Temple of Forest Hills to mourn Richard Brown, the man who ran one of the largest district attorney’s offices in America for nearly 30 years.

ne Saturday morning 13 years ago, Darryl Thompson went to brush his teeth. The 15-year-old from the Bronx was with four other boys at Tryon, a notorious juvenile prison in upstate New York. The boys were not allowed to talk during their morning routine, but it was hard not to: For the last two days, they had been on lockdown, cut off from the outside world.

The worst-kept secret in the liberal media ecosystem is that Donald Trump is great for business. Rebranded for the resistance, liberal newspapers gobbled up thousands of new subscribers while local outlets die across America, unable to feast on the Trump manna.

These are thrilling times for New York progressives. Democrats control the state Senate for the first time in a decade and have already passed a raft of bills Republicans bottled up for years. More ambitious proposals, like a state Green New Deal and robust tenant laws that protect working-class residents, are finally on the table.

Lost in the noise of another meaningless State of the Union address, Beto O’Rourke’s Oprah musings and the starting engines of an endless presidential race was the news that David Bernhardt might be getting a promotion.

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared last November that she didn’t have enough cash on hand to afford an apartment in Washington, her critics howled. Her communications director soon revealed that she had less than $7,000 in savings, provoking further scrutiny of the new progressive star.

Today’s aging workforce faces an uncertain future. The announcement this week that General Motors will lay off 15 percent of its salaried workforce and shutter multiple plants in North America was a sobering reminder of how far the American worker has fallen.

I had such a nice time with you last night. That Vietnamese place hit the spot, and I loved how we had so much to talk about. It’s hard to meet good people these days and make a genuine connection, you know?

The three lawyers who run one of the largest Democratic organizations in America have more than one way to get rich.

New York journalists always pine for heroes and villains. A Manichean universe is a convenient one: good guys do good, bad guys do bad, and to the white knight goes the boldest headlines.

When Robert Moses, the notorious New York master builder, wanted to cow the journalists who covered him, he knew he didn’t have to harangue or threaten his way to a favorable story.

Covering a presidential debate can only sound glorious. You’re there, on the precipice of a world-historical moment, one of the chosen few with proximity to power. You get a swag bag and free lasagna and Pepsi from the food tent.

There are still people who want to believe the best about Anthony Weiner. Some of them are in his old congressional district, where I now reside, and they’ll still tell you about the bantamweight fighter for the middle class hustling to get their potholes paved or their beachfronts freed of litter.

Bill Clinton was supposed to be at St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church in Brooklyn to talk about his wife. But in the fashion of a former president who remembers what it’s like to be in a good dogfight, he couldn’t resist taking on her nettlesome rival.

“A large check is a glorious thing, don’t you think?” Mayor Bill de Blasio asked at a recent press conference, standing near one of those Price Is Right–style gag checks. He was visiting a somnolent street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to remind the aggrieved middle-class homeowners here of the good work he’s getting done at City Hall.

Harry Reid's anointed successor, Mr. Schumer has worked tirelessly behind (and in front of) the scenes. The story behind the Empire State's power broker.