Zohran Mamdani rode in a taxi motorcade to City Hall. @brianmrosenthal.bsky.social delicately told the story of Richard Chow and his brother Kenny who died in 2018. The campaign for debt relief including a 15-day hunger strike didn't achieve success until Nov. 2021, 3 years after Kenny was gone.

@anniemcdonough.bsky.social: "Yellow cab driver Richard Chow was on hunger strike for medallion debt relief with Zohran Mamdani a little over four years ago. Today, he drove now Mayor Zohran Mamdani to City Hall for his inauguration in his taxi." Chow's brother killed himself over his debt.

Bystander effect. Everyone expects someone else to step up and stop him. Like Rubio or Vance will walk in and tell him no, push back. But they won’t. The whole GOP machine is now geared to humoring whatever weird dementia fantasy he has next.

Hitler accomplished a great deal in exactly the same way Trump did: by behaving like a madman lacking even the most rudimentary notion of civilized behavior or basic human decency. Most people just can't believe what they're seeing and so just stand there and get steamrolled.

If you read any detailed history of World War II, it will quickly dispel the notion that Hitler was a genius. His main advantage was being insanely aggressive at a time when every other country was cautious. It worked ... until it didn't. And tens of millions of people died because of it.

Corrupt tech billionaires are buying power to tilt the world in their favor. Even the co-founder of Y Combinator is saying it. ⬇️ The radical death cult rising from Silicon Valley venture capital is metastasizing rapidly. It's an existential threat to democracy and humanity.

Do not get me wrong, all book bans are bad, but it makes me extra sad and upset to know that a book as wonderful and important as @malindalo.bsky.social's Last Night at the Telegraph Club was the fourth most-banned book in America in 2025.

You mistyped “prompt generator generates requested prompt.” My god, you’re supposed to be journalists. Please act like it.

WTAF, folks?! "software says"? Really? Would you quote your toaster as a person? Your washing machine? Talk to people!

Grok says safeguard lapses led to images of 'minors in minimal clothing' on X reut.rs/498SoUk

In "Breaking the World," Justin Mann analyzes the work of Octavia E. Butler, Colson Whitehead, and Janelle Monáe to show how their practices of speculation are tools to break apart the antiblack world of the security state. Read the intro for free now: buff.ly/wsdmSyo

Happy 2026! If you will be in Chicago for #AHA26, our roundtable on Teaching Migration History Under Authoritarianism will be an opportunity at community for faculty of contested topics in a moment that makes boldness ever more necessary. Gratefully sponsored by HPAD and the Radical History Review!

Friday’s inauguration launches the first term for Kaohly Her, who makes history as the capital city’s first Asian American mayor.

There is a lovely community of real people On Here because people can actually see posts from other humans they follow. This is not the case on other platforms where algorithms throttle links and feeds are flooded with bots and ragebait Bluesky is way way better for business than Twitter ever was.

This is crazy man. Bluesky is the only place I “promote” my newsletter or post my stories. I’ve also never done a public sale before because I hate promo. As a woman in sports I also have to fight the understandable survival instinct to make myself small every day. this is v v humbling!

I do agree with the core thesis here - Mamdani doesn’t really have some other ambition he is known to be beholden to and it opens up a lot more space to actually accomplish something which probably triggers both the oligarchs & the strivers

Cannot wait for this to be out!

I revived my dead substack and did a roundup of everything i wrote last year: all my essays and investigations and magazine pieces on immigration, the topic I've covered for a decade at this point. PLS READ & SUBSCRIBE substack.com/home/post/p-...

New year, new mayor, new essay in @nybooks.com about what the Mamdani mayoral era might mean for the city's immigrant communities: www.nybooks.com/online/2026/...

Participated in this fun year-end exercise with some other journalist names you may recognize. AI and fascism tended to be the most important of 2025 — but the least important were fun to peruse too. And @mattielubchansky.com did beautiful art! themorningnews.org/2025-the-yea...

without African American and Native American history. Most of the historiography silos these literatures into subfields. But SCOTUS opinions talked about slavery in voluntary migration cases. Also, federal Indian law cases are cited as precedent for Chinese exclusion. It was too good to be true. 2/

Cover reveal. It's about how & why colonies/states controlled international & domestic migration until 1888, why in the late 19th c the feds took over, & what it was like for politically disfavored groups to live under that arrangement of power. You can't understand voluntary migration history 1/

When the Times wants to keep a narrative alive, there's no holding it back. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/01/n...

On this day in 1896, Sadie Alexander was born. She was the first black woman to graduate from U. Penn Law School and triumphed over a dean who tried to block her from the law review. She went on to become a civil rights champion who served on Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights. #WeTheMen

I think I should have said walk off, not walk out. He used it leaving the stage once he was in!

how are we not talking about mamdani’s walk out song being “this is what dreams are made of” by hilary duff 😭

Houston's police force and Texas Senate Bill 8 resulted in the most anti-immigrant implementation of ICE enforcement in all of the U.S. in 2025. ~5,200 community arrests and ~9,300 jail-based detentions in about 9 months is simply devastating.

The tension is showing up in local politics: Harris County Democratic precinct chairs voted not to endorse Mayor Whitmire this month, citing concerns over his approach to ICE cooperation and his public comments about enforcement in Houston.

City officials say HPD doesn't enforce immigration law. But Houston Chronicle reporting found HPD calls to ICE are up more than 1,000% compared to last year. The mayor says this is "standard law enforcement cooperation," not immigration enforcement.

Houston leads all U.S. cities in ICE arrests in 2025: ~5,200 community arrests and ~9,300 jail-based detentions from Jan 20 to Oct 15. That's more than NYC, LA, or Chicago in both categories. 🧵

Back in Sept., both DHS and Louisiana's governor used a cruel alliterative name for Angola when announcing that the penitentiary would start detaining immigrants. Maybe it's just me, but I haven't seen them persist much with this macabre branding exercise. www.dhs.gov/news/2025/09...

My productivity blocker has these different messages when it turns on but "you are free from this site" always makes me laugh YOU ARE FREE FROM THIS SITE BEGONE BE FREE THE CURSE HAS LIFTED

What is also important—maybe, not Mamdani’s entire point, but we will see—is that executive orders are weak ways of asserting power in a democracy. You want to create something permanent: write a statute and build a democratic coalition to pass it.

The man wants a war, any war will do

I FEEL LIKE I AM LOSING MY MIND Trump has been deporting dissidents to Iran for months! One of them was so afraid to go back he tried to slit his wrists on the tarmac in Louisiana! But now Trump is their protector?!?! On the scale of global cop to ethnostate, HOW DID HE PICK BOTH BAD EXTREMES?!

Yeah, Lucy Dacus' performance was good, but Sarah Goldstone isn't getting nearly enough love for playing the omnichord in sub-freezing weather without gloves. Signed, a former woodwind player in a marching band in Alaska.

Unpopular opinion Telling women to ‘save more’ while childcare eats a mortgage payment is just austerity cosplay.

are you looking for things to put on that shiny new calendar? maybe a free virtual workshop on leading in times of crisis on 1/24? rachelhands.com#workshops

NYU law professor Ryan Goodman and his nonpartisan team compiled a review that found more than 35 federal judges had explicitly stated that the Trump’s Justice Department lawyers were providing false, highly misleading, or intentionally inaccurate information in cases.

Proving the adage that even a broken clock is right twice a day, it turns out that X's Grok AI knows exactly what you should do if you want to sue X over Grok...

The Grok reddit is just dudes giving each other advice and encouragement on how to commit digital rape. There needs to be accountability for this. I don’t want to hear “the genie is already out the bag.” This shit needs to be destroyed.

Unmentioned, the woman to the left of the picture is Iris Weinshall. She has run a lot of NYC agencies and is currently COO of NY Public Library. She's also married to Sen. Chuck Schumer, seated to her right (out of frame.) The Daily Mail says Weinshall "appeared unable to hide her disdain" today.

@shayan86.bsky.social and his team are verifying video. When they post it, they *always* offer explicitly spelled-out locations, names of groups depicted, dates the events occurred and source. It's how we should all post video. Never overstate. Offer context and facts. Give Date | Location | Source

Folks, we're seeing news of protest and state violence in Iran. Most of us need expert guidance to follow events there. Don't be a sucker and share what you don't understand. My touchstone for verification is BBC expert Shayan Sardarizadeh. He speaks Persian too. Follow: @shayan86.bsky.social

The Trump admin’s censorship agenda is chilling & relentless. I counted 200+ attempts in 2025 to muzzle press, protesters, public servants, judges, law firms, universities, corporations. But resistance has blunted this campaign & we must fiercely defend free speech: www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/o...

Not sure BlueSky is the right place for hip-hop, but I wrote an anti-war poem that a reader dared me to put on a beat. Don’t threaten me with a good time

moots with the new mayor of nyc

The day of the Uvalde shooting I rushed to my son's daycare, a small, in-home business like this one run by a wonderful Pakistani woman. I told her what happened & we wept while we reviewed her safety protocols. We weren't afraid of immigrants, we were afraid of young American men like these idiots.

Folks, we're seeing news of protest and state violence in Iran. Most of us need expert guidance to follow events there. Don't be a sucker and share what you don't understand. My touchstone for verification is BBC expert Shayan Sardarizadeh. He speaks Persian too. Follow: @shayan86.bsky.social