There are networks that get people to Canada and beyond.

Liberals constantly say they’ll vote for 99% Hitler as a “lesser evil” yet in a situation where Maduro is a “lesser evil” to the alternative they prefer the 100% Hitler option

It really is that Sliwa likes NYC and, while he is a weirdo who has a demented idea of it, he sees other things through that lens. The 80% in Bouie‘s formulation don’t really like New York, they see it as a luxury resource to be managed for the benefit of certain classes of people.

i do expect the sparke of madness to hit mamdani, but it will hit differently, because he is the first mayor to be constitutionally ineligible to suffer from The Delusion

NY needs whatever a constitutional monarchy on a municipal level is so it can have him continuing to do this in perpetuity while a string of sewer-socialist prime ministers actually govern

any discussion of city transit improvement online ever

Bryce is trying to get out of there man.

This game is a nice encapsulation of the Sherrone Moore era. Come out with a lot of promise and a lot of sloppy mistakes, take advantage of some dumb luck, spend halftime fucking around instead of making adjustments, swing some 5-star shit around, and then finish with a spectacular collapse.

in spite of their best efforts, being a coastal urban elite this year was still a hundred times better than living in the suburbs. scoreboard

Senator Vreenek fan cam

I feel like we've had an actual pro-democracy popular front in this country very recently, and it was Zohran Mamdani, Brad Lander, and their constituencies/political traditions joining forces to defeat Andrew Cuomo, a murderer and abuser openly supported by our pedophile dictator & his billionaires.

The Boston MSA has like 300k children under 5 years old. None of these people have ever been to America.

Greene publicly feuding with Trump looks to them like the damn breaking, so those centrists with their eye on the main chance are already pivoting to disciplining the left.

Removing secular rights from people who have committed no crime is not liberalism, it is not engaging in the work of democracy, it doesn’t advance the project of liberal democracy or accept its outcomes. It is an attempt to erode individual rights and deny liberal procedure.

This is a common misconception. Procedure is not liberalism.

it's genuinely fascinating to me that "you cannot facilitate a genocide against a people and still expect their vote" is too advanced for some analysts to understand.

I literally ran into Spike Lee on 5th Avenue in the 30s. Neither of us were paying attention, we ran into each other, and both apologized to each other as you do and went on our way. It only lasted a second. It’s just that the whole time I was thinking “fuck that’s Spike Lee.”

The Trump Admin is wantonly abusing executive power & conducting warrantless spying. But Congressmembers including Dan Goldman handed him the ability to do it by voting against a warrant requirement for using NSA surveillance of U.S. citizens last year. theintercept.com/2025/12/28/f...

The funniest part is that the whole point of funding the crusades was to send your potential sources of domestic political instability (loud, violent lunatics) off on a mission where, worst case scenario, they were out of your hair for several years or, best case scenario, they died.

I’m thinking national VAT, uncapping FICA, national residential property tax, national wealth tax, maybe 50 bps each on the latter two and 5-10% on the first. That should be good for a couple trillion year to tide us over until the boomers all die.

One of my more controversial opinions is that the US needs to significantly raise taxes to the tune of a couple % of GDP right now, even before any expansive social democratic reforms, and that means you—yes you, dear highly educated professional—will need to pay up, not just nebulous billionaires.

There was a time in America when this would have been in Esquire and called “Coffee With Murderers”

some of the more insidious consent manufacturing i've ever encountered. subtle enough that you might ingest a few ideas before realizing the whole point of the piece is to tell you that being raped and killed by heartless, soulless thugs is fine, actually, and you like it.

The equity case for infrequent buses at low fares only makes sense if you believe low income people’s time has no value or that they don’t value their time.

There are tons of movies about how emotionally painful it was for US troops to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan and commit assorted atrocities while there.

I remember talking to someone in Connecticut about congestion pricing. “You know,” they said, “if they implement that new toll, then lots of people like me who drive into the city 4 or 5 times a year won’t come anymore.” Yes. That’s the idea. We do not want you to.

Always interesting to hear someone describe “American” culture (or a particular state or region) and it becomes clear that their friends and family just have bad taste.

I have an upcoming episode of my podcast all about Prohibition, and something I did not realize about the amendment banning alcohol (which was a nativist Protestant fundamentalist project its core) was it was instrumental in disgusting most of the country into creating the New Deal coalition.

His guard is down. It’s time to drag the Grinch out of his den and finish this

So many bad takes

Please enjoy once again the college football comment of the year 🏆

“The grandma was RUNNING! In the street!”

that the Whos celebrate Christmas suggests some knowledge of Christ, but whether this is our anthropic Christ or a distinctive Who-Christ remains obscure; some have argued Christianity was introduced to them during their refuge with Horton, which of course turns us to the matter of Elephant Religion

i was sitting around despairing about all the shit i Endured this year until i listed all the stuff i did that i liked and i'm feeling a lot better. you guys ever hear about the power of positive thinking. pretty crazy. i think i'm the first one to ever do this

The maga divide summarized: does the gutter racism that is the mortar of our coalition apply to Jews or not? And if it doesn’t do we mean that or are we just pretending for the moment?

Correct. It is about labor power within white collar professions. Can the associates tell the partners they don’t want to be hit on at the holiday drinks party? Everything flows from that.

The way people are being vile and rude to me is actually unacceptable and is disproportionate to what is in reality a very mild critique: that symbols outlive their usefulness which is why different political factions want to alter them. One of those factions is successful while the other isn’t.

It is also unambiguously true that the White House is a symbol of oppression and suffering for a massive percentage of the world

I could see myself voting for someone who campaigns on “I will burn the current White House to the ground and salt the earth where it stood”

I think most people making fun of the provocative essay about public architecture are doing so because they are yokels and a provocative essay in a small publication frightens and confuses them. The sort impressed by the Sokal hoax, who volubly prefer figurative paintings, that sort of thing.

Yeah, the problem with what I guess I'll call Ezra Klein-style liberalism is that it holds that ideas work like tokens that do not have any inherent moral valence, you can trade them and exchange them and they do not actually say anything about the person holding them

Bear Down

Going to the Lego store with my heaviest credit card. It’s a celebration. Everyone in the store gets a Star Wars set on me.

This sort of thing is the reason I no longer write for Jacobin.

I understand that Hanukkah is not actually an important religious holiday, but it is a really cool historical event! I accidentally know about it because of our popular culture and I want there to be movies and video games and stuff about it.

Happy Hanukkah, the holiday where we celebrate the defeat of a large cosmpolitan empire by a small determined group of militant religious fanatics

also there's the whole angle that the inciting incident was a vaguely comical act of hellenized-jew-on-hellenized-jew violence!