Chatting with New York’s Rebecca Traister about Graham Platner’s victory in the Maine Democratic primary, and the next phase in this blockbuster senate race.

That’s quite a chart www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

I keep thinking about the ease with which they cancelled elections over the last 24 hours

She definitely is. Plenty of people have been direct with her about it.

I talked to my colleague Ben Hart about Mills dropping out. I've been away on book leave so I had a lot to get off my chest, enough that stuff got cut (Mills' data bad center veto; her also bad sealed criminal records veto; the impact of the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation on 2020) But nevertheless..

Annnnnd this goes well beyond what was written down in Project 2025!

“it’s fair to say that 80 percent of the world’s problems involve old men hanging on who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won’t let go" nymag.com/intelligence... (still relevant Nov piece by @rtraister.bsky.social )

The TikTok girlies (gender neutral) are hatching a plan to all buy copies of communion by hooks on Vance's release date. I will be participating.

I revisited a Q&A I did with @rtraister.bsky.social on writing public history as a journalist in 2021—and it struck me as too good not to resend! alexiscoe.substack.com/p/wordy-wedn...

"All of this is to say that by most standards, I have developed a pretty hard shell when it comes to stories of sexualized power abuse. So I was surprised when the air left my lungs today. When I felt like I was going to vomit." @rtraister.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/rebeccat...

So much love and solidarity to Ana Murguia, Debra Rojas, Dolores Huerta, and every other survivor. Chavez was just a man; women like them, then and now, are the true heroes of the farmworkers’ movement.

Elizabeth Warren was originally a Republican from Oklahoma and this normie, practical, "why should we pay for this useless, profligate, non-Congressionally approved war" perspective sounds like exactly what you would once have heard from such a person

Very coherent, and very, dare I say it, small-c conservative in the best sense??

This is amazing. When the government kills a crucial report, independent scientists decide to write it anyway and release it outside of government channels. That’s science serving society, even when our political leaders don’t.

I’ve been talking to @amylittlefield.bsky.social about this book for years and today it’s out. Killers of Roe, available here (or your local bookstore): bookshop.org/p/books/kill...

The “optimizing” trend is all about shifting responsibility for health onto the individual and profiting from it. You can do everything “right” and still get cancer. Ask me how I know.

When @rtraister.bsky.social and @chrislhayes.bsky.social got going I had to check my settings up see if I had the speed turned up. I needed this

This interview with @rtraister.bsky.social is a serious must listen. Imagine what we're continuing to lose because women aren't taken seriously and because many men get away with so much podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i...

This is v worth your time:

Really terrific conversation between @rtraister.bsky.social and @chrislhayes.bsky.social on Epstein and the legacy of Me Too - give a listen.

Today is pub day for Angry Girls Will Get Us Through, a young readers edition of Good & Mad, drawing on material from all three of my previous books (plus new material). It was brilliantly adapted by Ruby Shamir. Here is a (starred!) review from Kirkus: www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews...

Thread. I sent the link to IRL artist friend & they wound up subscribing to the magazine & wowed by this week's fashion photos of @mayor.nyc.gov's wife. Penn-worthy.

I often think about the fact that if the FBI et al had not killed Fred Hampton, he would be 78 today. Younger than Jesse Jackson was. Must have felt strange to outlive many of your contemporaries by decades.

This is AWFUL. Univ of Texas is consolidating 4 depts into 1: African and African Diaspora Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Mexican American and Latino Studies will become "a Social and Cultural Analysis department." www.texastribune.org/2026/02/12/t...

But for the cost of childcare, Mamdani would have been born in the US and could have run for president. Read @rtraister.bsky.social’s excellent piece on filmmaker Mira Nair. www.vulture.com/article/what...

More than 400 people, including hundreds of citizens, were “sorted” at gun point into racial and ethnic groups by 200 ICE agents who fired flash-bang grenades into cars with people inside, pointed guns at children & demanded their zip tied parents not comfort them. apple.news/Ausdx6kWtT0e...

“There was no woman auteur from India having films distributed in the U.S. to a general audience. There was no Mira before Mira, no precedent for her; she blazed her path with talent, charm, and will in superabundance. Sound familiar?” www.vulture.com/article/what...

Friends from Minneapolis reporting to me that things are at the point where folks are being hidden in other people's houses and we are in the "again" part of "never again" which the "never" was supposed to preclude

“I’ve thought a lot of them not just as parents individually or as aspirations professionally,” Mamdani told me, “but in terms of what a marriage can look like, pursuing your professional dreams and being able to raise a family all at once.”"

So many quotes in here to pull out and share, but this is a such a incisive, startling profile of Mira Nair, one of my favourite ever filmmakers who also just happens to be Zohran Mamdani's mum.

She has stayed in my head as a young filmmaker from the '90s, so when I first heard that her son was running for Mayor, my initial reaction was "Mira Nair isn't old enough to have a son who is a mayoral candidate!" And then I remembered that I'm 50 and it isn't 1992 anymore.

Cannot believe that I got to profile an extraordinary filmmaker, who happens to be the mother of NYC’s new mayor, and think about intersections of art and politics, and how familial love might produce a buffer against the corrosive politics and cynicism of our time. My story about Mira Nair:

so freaking proud of my girl @ejdickson.bsky.social on her new book ONE BAD MOTHER (out tomorrow!!!!) and a sold out event tonight with @rtraister.bsky.social

I've thought about this piece, and that line from @rtraister.bsky.social so much while watching the lightbulbs turn on for folks, except it's the Epstein files this time. I hope enough people understand these are systems problems and that for the abuse to stop you have to eradicate rotten systems

Traister, 2017: "We’re not only learning about individual trespasses but for the first time getting a view of the matrix in which we’ve all been living: We see that the men who have had the power to abuse women’s bodies and psyches throughout their careers are in many cases also the ones in charge."

Incredible. They destroyed a great newspaper because they hated the people who actually paid for it and read it so much that they'd rather scrap the paper if they couldn't get Tucker Carlson's audience bsky.app/profile/maxt...

I expected the cuts would be bad but I'm honestly stunned and sickened seeing how many great journalists the Washington Post just lost. People who nailed huge investigations, documented war zones, exposed horrific crimes, dropped all at once for failures they did not cause.

REP. OMAR after being attacked with liquid: “We will continue! These fucking assholes are not gonna get away with this! Here is the reality people like this ugly man don’t understand — we are Minnesota Strong. We’ll stay resilient in the face of whatever they might throw at us.”

One thing I found deeply moving about resistance in the Twin Cities was the universalism of loving your neighbor, the philosophy driving the opposition to the ICE/BP invasion. I couldn't help but notice the contrast with the blood and soil-ism of Miller and Vance. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

The montage towards the end hits especially hard. www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_71...

A-fucking-men.

This is important. And partly why the entire rightwing infrastructure from GOP to Heritage to Manhattan to ALEC were so terrified of 2020. Millions of the folks marching for racial justice and demanding a racial reckoning were *white*

Our initial analysis is up. The video footage appears to show that the gun was taken away from the man before he was shot. He was UNARMED before any of the shots were fired.

But why does the chyron refer to a “violent scene” *after* the killing? This guy shouting?

Protester in Minneapolis just before disappearing in gas: "Fuck you! Stop. Damn! I'm 70 years old and I'm fuckin' angry!"

Holy shit. Renee Good was alive when the bystander physician asked to check her pulse. She was alive when ICE refused to let him help. She was alive when they told him “I don’t care.” www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01...

We are dealing with an institution modeled on slave catching and the great news is that we also have resistance models This is a great book about the Underground Railroad in an urban environment, New York City: wwnorton.com/books/gatewa...

Part of what's great about Eric Foner's scholarship on this, for our purposes, is that it's about responding to kidnappings in an urban environment!

Oh shit, is this it? The one and only time I've really got to hand it to him?

Someone sent me this video of Trump’s goons in action today in the Twin Cities. The audio is disturbing.