September 4, 2026
New York as shitty Vienna?
We have public housing, but it has never been as well designed, built, or maintained. We have limited-equity co-ops built by limited-dividend companies, but we built far fewer of them, and we allowed some to go private. We have inclusionary zoning, but whereas their model requires two-thirds of the development to be social housing, ours only demands that one-third be targeted to tenants under a certain household income.
July 23, 2026
Astoria, this small clot of North Africa in the West, had naturally become the fan zone of choice.
July 20, 2026
I left feeling a pooling, connective happiness. I went home and realized I hadn’t looked at my phone for six hours.
July 2, 2026
Jazz, the law, and Elmo Hope
Read MoreJune 16, 2026
Between the visible heat waves was a blurry mass of orange and blue, a swarm of nearly fifty people chanting “Knicks in Five! Knicks in Five!”
I dropped my new friends off at the arena, a gray structure that blended into the surrounding parking lots. We waved goodbye, and they disappeared into the security line. Police on horseback wearing cowboy hats and actual spurs directed me away from the crowds, which added some Texas flair to the mundane act of sitting in traffic. As I waited to leave the complex, I began to comprehend just how many Knicks fans had made the journey to San Antonio. For every Wembanyama jersey that trudged past, there was a Brunson to counter.
June 11, 2026
“Unreal,” I said. “Unreal,” he said.
May 28, 2026
Please look stylish. Or at least slutty. Don’t give us nothing.
On Frederick Wiseman
As much as we may want their subjects to be actors in the historical sense, there are no individuals; there is only society, plainly laid out for us to see. There are always “characters,” but their significance lies in the way they intersect with and illuminate social structure. They never motivate action — what they do instead is perform (and sometimes declaim) the logics under which they operate.
What achievements, if any, will define Eric Adams’s legacy?
Adams will be remembered for his petty corruption, his self-mythologizing, and his ignominious dealmaking with the Trump White House; but he should also be remembered as the mayor who got New Yorkers to stop tossing giant bags of trash onto city sidewalks as if there were no alternative. You can laugh at a New York mayor who walks into a press conference wheeling out a trash can, beaming as if he invented the contraption, while “Empire State of Mind” blares triumphantly in the background. But truly, Adams’s proclaimed “trash revolution” represented a tremendous advance over abysmal past practice.
November 28, 2025
Housing can make or break New York’s experiment in municipal socialism
Read MoreNovember 12, 2025
Reading Zohran's victory
Read MoreJune 26, 2025
In my seven years of knocking doors for candidates on the left, Zohran’s platform was far and away the easiest to pitch.
