ABSTRACT: The Silver Meteor pulls out of Miami’s Amtrak station on time at 8:10 a.m. It rumbles past the sun-bleached industrial landscape, and the large car window is lit up by the low-lying autumn rays. “Have a Safe and Productive Day” reads a squat white wall, directed at the train cars and framed by palm fronds and power lines. I do the opposite: close my laptop, close my book, and remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s words—“And ever again, in the wink of an eye, / Painted stations whistle by”—as my co-passengers and I zip past Hollywood, then Fort Lauderdale, then Deerfield Beach. The fluorescent lights illuminate an interior of scuffed vinyl and tired textiles, but extrawide seats and expansive windows make up for these deficiencies. I take out wool and needles and start to knit a vest, measuring the journey in centimeters of fabric; stations tick by in tidy rows of stitches.

ABSTRACT: When was the last time being on the left was fun? Even in the best of times, supporting socialism in America can feel like performing a grim duty in the face of almost certain disappointment. The chapter titles in Burnout, Hannah Proctor’s investigation of the emotional landscapes of leftist militancy, are revealing: Melancholia, Nostalgia, Depression, Burnout, Exhaustion, Bitterness, Trauma, Mourning. One of the many virtues of Zohran Mamdani’s remarkable campaign for New York City mayor was that it never felt this way, not even when he was sitting near the bottom of the polls. It was a year-long act of collective joy. Real joy—not the brief sugar high that surged when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democrats’ 2024 ticket. Volunteering for Mamdani never felt like a chore, even when the weather was bad and fewer canvassers showed up for their shift than expected. It was a blast from start to finish, and we didn’t even have to console ourselves with a moral victory. This time, we actually won.

ABSTRACT: Last May, California governor Gavin Newsom called on local governments across the state to bar tent encampments on public land, offering a model ordinance that would allow cities and counties to “resolve” encampments “with urgency and with humanity.” This push came a year after a U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a local law in Grants Pass, Oregon, that barred camping on public land, which effectively criminalizes homelessness. Numerous mainstream Democratic leaders supported the move, arguing that they needed camping bans to keep public spaces safe and to better serve homeless people who refuse services like shelter beds. In the year and a half since the Supreme Court decision, cities in red states and blue states alike have cracked down on encampments, falling into alignment with the Trump administration’s call to “get tough” on homelessness

ABSTRACT: In 2018, Garfield Hylton became a picker at Amazon’s BHX4 warehouse in Coventry, a city in the English Midlands. BHX4 is the first stop in a product’s journey through Amazon’s distribution network. It’s a holding facility close to ports and railyards; workers there break down bulk shipments to be distributed to fulfillment centers, where orders are stored, picked, packed, and shipped. Hylton was one of about 2,000 workers at the warehouse, supplying tens of millions of items each year to the United Kingdom and Europe.

ABSTRACT: Ethiopia’s Tigray, Sudan, Gaza. In the 2020s, civil wars and counterinsurgencies have caused death and displacement on a scale not seen since the Cold War. Yet the academic field dedicated to studying such wars has never been less relevant to their resolution. Conflict studies is the child of a bygone era: a world in which Western scholars studied wars in faraway places, and Western states intervened in those same wars.

ABSTRACT: Americans learn about public lands in history class, but if you live east of the Mississippi, you probably haven’t thought about them much since. You might know about the Homestead Act, which encouraged westward expansion by allowing settlers to make claims on land and take ownership after five years of residence. You could possibly recall the Taylor Grazing Act or the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act, which together changed the government’s approach from disposal and privatization to holding and management. But unless you’ve recently gone on a Western road trip, you’re unlikely to have noticed that the federal government still owns more than a quarter of the land in this country and that the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is the nation’s largest landlord, managing 10 percent of the land in the United States. You likely don’t know that drilling on public lands is responsible for about a quarter of U.S. carbon emissions.

ABSTRACT: Like playgrounds, changing tables, and choking hazards, day cares are easy to ignore until a baby shows up. Then, as the cliché goes, everything changes: when you’re a parent, child care becomes the organizing principle of your life, along with playgrounds, changing tables, and choking hazards. Unlike these other things, child care is not simple. In New York City in particular, the way we take care of kids is less a system than a patchwork of very expensive solutions glued together with Band-Aids, popsicle sticks, and prayers.

Abstract: Zohran Mamdani first became visible to me and many others just over a year ago, when he posted a video where he spoke to working-class New Yorkers in the Bronx and Queens about why some of them voted for Donald Trump. In that video, which subsequently went viral, Mamdani swept aside the superficial argument about whether support for Trump was motivated by racial and xenophobic animus or economic anxiety. He simply asked people and listened to what they said. Mamdani advanced his mayoral candidacy on a few clear propositions demonstrated that day. Ordinary people are worried about their material and social standing as they try to build their lives in one of the most unequal and expensive cities in the world. “Affordability” has been Mamdani’s watchword ever since; he used it to ground a winning campaign. The essence of that campaign, however, grew from a more fundamental democratic insight: that politics begins by meeting people where they are, convincing them that you will listen to them, and building trust that you will stand for them and lead them to a better future.

ABSTRACT: Americans tend to imagine that aversion to taxation is deeply rooted in our national political culture. Didn’t the founders rally behind the slogan “no taxation without representation”? Don’t all Americans—even those favoring regulation and a strong social safety net—always prefer lower taxes? Isn’t this why we can’t afford to have nice things?

Abstract: Nearly three decades have passed since the historian Mike Wallace published Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, cowritten with the late Edwin G. Burrows, to much renown. A second volume, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919 (written by Wallace alone), followed in 2017. With the publication of the third and final installment in this panoramic history, Gotham at War: A History of New York City from 1933 to 1945, it is possible both to view the project as a whole and to look afresh at one of the most transformative eras in the history of New York, the United States, and the world.