#22: Future Mayor Mamdani, Progressive Economics, and the Success of the Lander Cross Endorsement

Also this week in culture/progressive politics/media: Kids and technology, Canada's MAID assissted dying program, and more random misconceptions.

From EuroNews: Mamdani and Lander at his victory speech.

Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral primary. The success of his personable, down-to-earth campaign style, his focus on economic issues, and his alliance with city comptroller Brad Lander — the first true cross-endorsement in NYC mayoral history — all serve as genuinely great lessons for progressives throughout the country, particularly in blue-leaning urban areas.

Mamdani’s focus on cost-of-living issues helped him win. Democrats are considered bad on the economy because we’re bad at talking about it, but we shouldn’t be. Mamdani was extremely successful at speaking to the issues ordinary people truly cared about, focusing on issues that resonate with all voters rather than niche groups (without giving up his progressive stances on minority issues!), and making progressive policy feel like the solution for everyday people — which it is. Rebecca Katz wrote for the New York Times that his messaging success was grounded in concrete plans to build affordability:

Ask an Andrew Cuomo voter for some of his top policy ideas, and he or she will probably struggle to name one. Ask a Mamdani voter, and I bet he or she could name a few: “Freeze the rent,” “free buses,” “a city you can afford.”

From WaPo: Street campaigning, along with an incredible social media strategy, was Mamdani’s area of success.

Mamdani was also truly incredible at campaigning. From his strong social media presence to his famous walk across New York City (worth watching!), he shined in his interactions with ordinary people. He came across as incredibly smart on policy, but was good at making that policy digestible. His down to earth nature was one of his main strengths.

The union between Mamdani and Lander was also a huge coup for each of their campaigns. In the general election’s first round, Mamdani gained 43% of votes and Lander gained 11%, each higher than their predicted first-round counts ahead of the election. According to preliminary results, Mamdani was a far more popular second choice than Cuomo, almost certainly as a result of him being the primary second choice for Lander voters. Their unity truly did serve to boost each of their campaigns; rather than an Elizabeth-Warren-vs-Bernie-Sanders style progressive-on-progressive battle, the two candidates could focus on making the case that either of them could be an answer. Ranked choice voting enables this kind of politics: a politics of optimism and unity in progressive belief.

And the fact that, particularly at this current political moment, the alliance came between a Muslim and a Jewish candidate — each of whom have been critical of Netanyahu and the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism — is wonderful. As Mamdani has faced allegations of antisemitism for his opposition to the structure of the Israeli state, Lander has repeatedly defended him; meanwhile, Mamdani has smartly turned the focus from Israel to raising funding for anti-hate-crime legislation to protect Jewish New Yorkers. Each have been smart in their speech about Israel, even as they’re speaking to different crowds (with Mamdani more focused on the anti-Zionist demographic, and Lander more focused on the firmly-anti-Netanyahu, liberal Zionist demographic); they’ve also each refused to make a foreign country a primary campaign issue, even as Cuomo repeatedly attempted to weaponize the issue. I find myself continually returning to Lander’s speech at Mamdani’s victory party, which he left for as votes started pouring in:

We are not going to let anyone divide Muslim New Yorkers and Jewish New Yorkers.

From the NYT: Lander and Mamdani at their cross-endorsement.

Congratulations, Zohran Mamdani, NYC’s next mayor; I’m excited for you. And Brad Lander, I’m so excited to see where you go next. Next up: To defeat Eric Adams, running as an independent, and potentially an also-independently-running Andrew Cuomo. Two corrupt moderates vs. one excellent progressive; what a tough call.

Here’s a block by block economic analysis that, hilariously, refers to one neighborhood as “commie corridor”; interestingly, it notes Mamdani’s base was concentrated around the “middle” between a high-income and a low-income class. Here are some hot takes from the Democratic establishment; I do agree with this point from David Axelrod:

What plays in NYC won’t necessarily play everywhere, so the idea that he has offered a template for Democratic victories in the future is overblown. BUT there is much to learn from him about the appeal of generational change, the value of authenticity, the focus on economic issues and the use of new media techniques to reach voters who have checked out of politics.

And as we continue to celebrate, I want to highlight one more excellent line from Mamdani’s acceptance speech:

Whether you voted for me, for Governor Cuomo, or felt too disillusioned by a long-broken political system to vote at all, I will fight for a city that works for you, that is affordable for you… I can’t promise that you will always agree with me, but I will never hide from you.

(On a pettier level, I did enjoy this thread of epic anti-Mamdani crashouts, and the joy on Bill DeBlasio’s face upon hearing Cuomo lost.)

This post is as usual edited by my good friend Cricket Bradford.

While I endorse supporting as much journalism as you’re able to, if you’re unable to read a specific link, try using 12ft.io.

Kids and Technology: A recent study in the medical journal JAMA found that the issue is screen addiction, not screen time. Longer screen time at age 10 was not correlated with higher rates of suicidal behavior four years later. The kids at higher risk were those that specifically identified their internet usage as what the researchers called addictive — “that they had trouble putting it down, or felt the need to use it more and more” — regardless of the actual length of screen time. This tells us something important: Interventions should focus not on limiting screen access, but on treating addictions to screen usage.

Sex and Society: Writing for her Substack Cafe Hysteria, Madison Huizinga argued that objections to sex as degradation have turned to objections about sex, generally — in other words, a new era of puritanism. She points to an excellent Mina Le video essay on Hollywood and sex wherein Le suggests that young people associate sex with degradation because historically, sex in film has gone hand in hand with objectification of women. Huizinga summarizes:

For decades, women who were sexual onscreen weren’t women who were confident and secure in their personhood. Their personalities and physical compositions were written and performed for the pleasure of male characters and male viewers alike.

On a related note, Sunny Lu wrote for The Lavender Menace about how some of the critique of Chappell Roan for her (allegedly) hypersexual image is in fact just punishing her for her sexuality. While I’ve obviously been critical of expressions of female sexuality that just roll over for white men in the past, I generally think our critiques of real-life celebrities should be more careful than our critiques of media — and we must realize that when our progressive politics are fighting for women, they must value real-life women above anything else.

Part of what makes discussions of pop stars like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter’s engagement with sexual politics so fraught is this overbearing configuration of a “feminist sexuality” that actually doesn’t really exist. If Chappell or Sabrina, or any other woman in the public media spectacle of pop culture, do not positively embody a liberated female sexuality, then who does? What determines the “right” and ethically feminist and morally pure way of having sex or embodying sexuality?

AI Watch: An admittedly small-scale study by MIT’s Media Lab found that subjects asked to use ChatGPT to write SAT essays had lower brain engagement than those who did not use ChatGPT. At only 54 participants, this study is way too small to be generalizable, but… well, this seems a bit obvious, doesn’t it? Analyzing the results, tech writer Alex Vacca highlighted the study’s damning conclusion that 83.3% of the ChatGPT-using group couldn’t quote from the essays they’d written minutes earlier.

Also, here’s a very interesting article documenting where those AI-generated search results come from. ChatGPT is a huge fan of Wikipedia (me too, girl), with 48% of search results citing the website; Google AI is more balanced, but prioritizes social platforms, favoring Reddit (21%), YouTube (19%), Quora (14%), and LinkedIn (13%).

The Death of Social Media: Last week, John Herrman wrote for Intelligencer that social media is no longer as advantageous to protests as it once was. This article has a lot of prescient points about the transformation of the social media landscape generally — as coherent public conversations have died and been replaced by algorithms, the social aspect of social media has been replaced by something distinctly antisocial.

What Has Gen Z Fucked Up This Time?: The club. Or maybe we’re doing the club better, in a new phenomenon The Cut calls Soft Clubbing. Day and evening events are taking over from the chaotic vibe of the til-2AM rave, at least in America. Related: Katie Way wrote her own piece for The Cut on how to act normal at the club.

Evolving Wedding Culture: Elizabeth Gulino wrote for The Cut about the new phenomenon of half-crowdfunded Bachelorette weekends. Am I the only one who doesn’t think this is that cringe? Sure, the dollar amounts listed here are crazy, but the trend is sort of sweet. God forbid a woman want to fund her friend’s wedding trips.

Assisted Dying: The New York Times published an excellent piece about Canada’s MAID assisted dying program. The question of where assisted dying falls in the scope of compassionate care is one I’ve read a lot about, but not one with a very easy answer. Fundamentally — as someone with a chronic illness! — one of my big concerns is that in some cases, allowing a patient to die could essentially serve as an easy way out of actually curing what ails. Of course the healthcare system is working quickly to cure as many illnesses as possible. But in a system where nearly one in ten Canadians who need a specialist wait more than a year to see one, many may choose dying over waiting years for a not-even-guaranteed cure. And of course, a societal lack of support for the disabled can easily make a choice to die more appealing:

Often, Track 2 patients had suffering that was caused by social forces — and often, clinicians had to disentangle how much that kind of suffering was contributing to a MAID request. Many would-be Track 2 patients had been sick for years or decades and had, in that time, slipped out of the work force and into poverty. About half reported that they were lonely. About half perceived themselves to be a burden on loved ones. Stefanie Green, the co-founder of the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, told me about assessing a sick patient who had been homeless, on and off, for years. “And obviously his fluctuating housing status could not be ignored,” Green said. “Why are you coming to see me? Because you’ve lost your room, you have nowhere to go? What is really driving this?”…

The first casualties would be the poor and the marginalized and the disabled and the mentally ill. These people, whose medical problems were so obviously made worse by their material conditions, would end up applying for MAID because of suffering that was, effectively, imposed on them by the system. They would be judged “incurable” and “irremediable” because they had not been provided with the means to become well. MAID, a procedure initially meant to help dying patients avoid painful deaths, would now be used to help nondying patients shortcut their painful lives. For the system, this would be less expensive too. A report released by the Parliamentary budget officer estimated that Bill C-7 would save the provincial governments an estimated $149 million annually in net health care costs.

Trans Beauty: A cover photoshoot for Atmos, styled by Lorena Maz with photography by Camila Falquez and writing by Raquel Willis, showcased nineteen trans people embracing beauty and defiance. This shoot is gorgeous, but the writing attached to the piece may be even better.

Finding a Path Forward: I was unsure what to name this section, but philosophy Substacker Museguided wrote an excellent piece a few weeks back on what they called “erotic decisions,” a piece that of course speaks back to Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic.” The piece argues that to embrace the erotic is not about sex, but about embracing the decisions that help you find your sense of aliveness.

Eros, in its ancient, Platonic sense, is the force that binds the soul to the world, that moves us toward beauty, mystery, and becoming. It is not reducible to sex, though it may include it. It is a metaphysical orientation: the decision, over and over again, to seek intensity over numbness, expansion over contraction, intimacy over control… Therefore, the erotic, in its original conception, is not confined to bodies. It is the fire that propels the soul out of dormancy. It is the throb of longing for something more.

True Crime: Journalist Michael Solomon wrote for Truly Adventurous about the still-unsolved tylenol poisoning murders, and his explanation seems fairly convincing.

Random Writing of the Week: Rayne Fisher-Quann’s reader survey over on her Substack Internet Princess was a randomly fascinating read.

Good News in New York, Part Two: Activist and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil was released after three months in detention, and is now home with his wife, Noor Abdalla, and baby, Deen, whose birth he was kept from attending at the hands of the US government. Speaking to reporters from outside the detention center where he has been held since March 8th, 2025, he had the following to say:

Trump and his administration, they chose the wrong person for this. That doesn’t mean there is a right person for this. There is no right person who should be detained for actually protesting a genocide… No one is illegal — no human is illegal. Justice will prevail no matter what this administration may try.

Wishing his family hope and healing.

From The Guardian.

Iran-Israel-Palestine-America: Patrick Wintour wrote for The Guardian about the unclear future of Iran if regime change takes place; meanwhile, Julian Borger wrote about Netanyahu’s attempts to get Trump to join the war. Democratic activists in Iran, including Iranian Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi, despite their opposition to the Iranian regime, condemned the war, noting it has forced millions of Iranians from their homes. AI-generated videos and pictures claiming to show the destruction of Iran and Israel are increasingly going viral. Last week, Ro Khanna (CA-17) called Chuck Schumer’s leadership on this “gobbledegook,” which I agree with.

MaxRead wrote about the absolute madness of the whether-we-should-go-to-war-with-Iran debate, arguing that it is less stupid than the Iraq war debate… but not by a lot. Ominous! My favorite discovery from this post was this The Onion article from 2003:

This article is perhaps even funnier than the title suggests.

In compliance with a Trump executive order, Microsoft helped suspend an International Criminal Court prosecutor’s email account after he participated in an investigation of Israeli war crimes. The incident has set off concerns across Europe that Trump will leverage American tech companies to target European governments and NGOs.

Across the Globe: Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are potentially nearing a peace settlement. Meanwhile, the Rwandan opposition leader, Victoire Ingabire, was arrested for “plotting to sow public disorder.” In Kenya, a terrifying set of photos from protests over the death of teacher Albert Ojwang.

Medical: In the Appalachias, black lung disease and silicosis rates are rising. Years after the disease was almost eliminated, changes to mining technology, including the invention of machines that create even finer silica dust and a new need to drill through stone to get to coal, are causing miners to develop a dangerous black lung-silicosis hybrid.

Education and MAGA: At the University of Florida, a law professor granted a student a best-in-class award for a paper in which he argued that the phrase “we the people” was intended to refer only to white people, and thus that people of color should have their voting rights removed. The student, Damsky, is a proud white supremacist. Meanwhile, professors at the school have had their courses revolving around racism removed from the course catalog.

Is Gen Z Really Conservative?: Jean M. Twenge argued for The Atlantic that the historic younger-generation shift to Trump may be a one-off; the actual political beliefs of Gen Z are significantly more liberal than in previous generations. According to a 2024 study by the Cooperative Election Study:

…69 percent of young adults supported granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who have not been convicted of felony crimes and who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years, up from 58 percent in 2012, the last year all 18-to-29-year-olds were Millennials. Also in the 2024 survey, 63 percent agreed that “generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class,” up from 42 percent in 2012. Support for legal abortion among young adults rose from 46 percent in 2012 to 69 percent in 2024, though the question was worded somewhat differently in those two years. Only one belief shifted in the conservative direction: 62 percent of young adults in 2024 supported increasing border patrols at the U.S.-Mexico border, up from 45 percent in 2012.

One other note: According to some of the data, Gen Z is a significantly more pessimistic generation about politics than some previous generations. It’s possible that their hatred for the incumbent party, whichever party it may be, may mean Gen Z continues to vote against the grain.

Domestic Politics: Speaking of which, Representative Ro Khanna (CA-17; mentioned above) did an interesting interview this week with Politico that I watched some of, because I generally find him a solid politician. He discussed the economic stratification of the tech world as opposed to deindustrialized America, which I appreciated, and I particularly liked one of his points about finding appeal among young people:

Instead of doing $20 million studies to understand how to win young men — with no substance — and hiring more consultants, what we ought to learn is that we should have substantive positions that speak to people. One of the things young men don’t want is another war overseas. … One of the things we can do is to take on the foreign policy establishment in this country that got us into an Iraq War, that kept us in Afghanistan for 20 years.

Khanna also went on political podcaster’s Stephen A. Smith’s podcast.

The Aftermath of #MeToo: Alexis Okeowo wrote for the New Yorker about the aftermath of #MeToo for the women who spoke up against Roy Moore: They have not been rewarded, they have been hurt.

The Republican Party in Decline: Robert P. Beschel Jr. writes for The Atlantic that the Republican party has lost its love for a balanced budget — and instead only is focused on tax cuts for the upper class. This is a huge problem for the party, considering that Pew Research Center recently found that 43% of Republicans favor raising taxes on houses with incomes greater than $400,000. The easiest solution to this, by the way, is actually to fund the IRS better. The IRS estimates that in 2022, about 13% of taxes owed to the federal government were not paid — a total of $606 billion. Studies show that IRS audits on upper-income filers yield a high rate of return. To begin to address this issue, Beschel also proposes a few changes to our Big Beautiful Bill:

Sunsetting the 2017 bill’s higher estate-tax deductions, which now stand at $14 million for individuals and $28 million for married couples, would bring in an estimated $201 billion over the next 10 years. The state and local tax (better known as SALT) deduction changes in the proposed bill are extremely regressive, with much of the benefit flowing to upper-income households; they are another loophole that could be closed. Republicans could also raise revenue specifically for transportation infrastructure by increasing road-user fees and gas or mileage taxes. (The gasoline tax has been frozen at 18.4 cents a gallon for more than 30 years.)

The Death Penalty: Another excellent piece from The Atlantic, written by Elizabeth Bruenig, looks at the death penalty in harsh reality — and that reality isn’t pretty. The botched execution of a man in Alabama in 2022, wherein his body was slashed open to find a usable vein, is particularly horrific; the story of a granddaughter who forgave her grandmother’s murderer, twenty years of good behavior later, poignant. While there is sympathy to be felt with those who advocate for the death penalty, in my experience, to read about its reality is to become opposed to it.

But the death penalty is also morally indiscriminate in an additional way, in that it kills guilty people who may have become good people. By the time execution arrives, the offender may be a completely different person from the one who took a life. We can’t know the nature or potential of another’s soul.

Short Fiction Worth Your Time: My friend Max GooseMixtapes wrote a really fascinating play about Cleopatra and Dido. “Sure, you were a tragic hero, but I was the fucking director” is a fantastic line.

Book News: BookCon was announced for next year; it will once more run in New York’s Javits Center from April 18-19, 2026. In July, we’re getting Megan Abbott’s “El Dorado Drive,” which I’m very excited about; Abbott is one of my favorite mystery authors.

The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century: The New York Times has released a meticulously peer-reviewed 100 Best Movies list, along with the celebrity ballots that helped to create it. I will be making a significantly longer post about this in the next week, but for the curious, here is my personal Top 24 Films for My 24 Years of Life.

Movie News: Rumsey Taylor and Eve Washington wrote for The New York Times about what they’re calling the Jaws Blueprint, a creature feature formula with the following composition:

The creature stalks the remote location and attacks the first victim. Next, the reluctant hero challenges the local authority and enlists the experts. Finally, the sacrifice leads to the confrontation and the creature’s death.

Television News: Netflix released a trailer for the second season of the excellent adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (releasing July 3rd). The excitement that many fans would’ve felt about this two years ago, though, is frankly pretty flat given the multiple detailed allegations of sexual coercion recently lodged against Gaiman. Also: It’s unclear whether Doctor Who season 15 will be the last.

A Responsible Tale: As the Handmaid’s Tale TV series finally comes to an end, Discordia Review wrote a scathing takedown of Margaret Atwood and the odd faux-feminist twist of having Offred/June have a name in the TV series.

Best of the Year: New York Times listed its ten best TV shows of the year so far, including Andor, The Pitt, Murderbot, and Severance.

New Knowledge for You: I spent a long time a few weeks ago on Wikipedia’s List of Common Misconceptions, and have been staggering my favorite fun facts ever since. Here are this week’s five facts I learned on the page that I wanted to share:

• Medieval European scholars did not believe the Earth was flat; scholars have known the Earth was round since at least the sixth century BCE.

• Most historians believe chastity belts, devices designed to prevent women from having sexual intercourse, were not invented in medieval times — most existing chastity belts are now thought to be deliberate fakes from the 19th century.

• July 4, 1776 was actually not the date of the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence; the final language of the document was approved on July 4, and the signing occurred on August 2, 1776.

• Betsy Ross did not design or make the first US flag adopted by the Continental Congress in 1777, despite it being widely known as the Betsy Ross flag; the claim was first made by her grandson a century later.

• The murder of Kitty Genovese, a case that has frequently been cited as an example of the ‘bystander effect’, was not witnessed by 37 people standing by idly; only a few neighbors witnessed anything, two of whom called the police and one of whom cradled Genovese as she died.

This week saw an unbelievably heat wave across the Northeast. Everyone please continue to stay cool, and keep our unhoused neighbors in mind. For the DCers, here’s some information on DC’s cooling centers.

Our Housing Crisis: …Maybe we’re actually doing well! According to Jess Remington for Agglomerations, Washington, DC is building a lot of homes per capita — the fifteenth best of the 168 largest counties in the United States. This is especially impressive considering our county is just 61 square miles, a third of which is owned by the federal government. With a particular focus on the success in DC’s NoMa district, Remington lists the following as reasons for our success:

Housing growth in DC has stemmed from three key approaches: 1) building eight-to-13 story apartments along major corridors, 2) converting single-family attached rowhomes into multi-unit dwellings like triplexes or condos, and 3) developing compact, dense mixed-use communities on parcels that previously housed parking lots or low-rise commercial buildings.

We’re joined by Seattle and Atlanta in the lists of cities succeeding at building housing; the most successful growth in suburbia is in the suburbs of Arizona and Texas.

One bit of bad news: DC’s Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA), which gives some renters a chance to buy their homes when owners sell, may be further weakened by a new bill before the council.

Nonprofit Suit: Ward 8 nonprofit Women in H.E.E.L.S. stands accused of misappropriating more than $57,000 in public funds it was granted through the city’s Cure the Streets initiative against gun violence. Yikes.

Legislative Update: The DC Council voted down Mayor Muriel Bowser’s attempted repeal of DC’s sanctuary-city law. For more relevant changes to the DC budget, check out The 51st.

Culture: As per Axios, crime is down 13% this year so far. Epic. Also, long shot, but was anyone else at this week’s Blondshell concert?