Sorry for being MIA over the past several weeks. I missed you guys! I’ve been pretty busy and kind of really depressed, but my life is back to normal now. The (relatively) warm weather made a huge difference, and it’s amazing how seeing leaves on the trees really does turn everything around. I’m trying to ease my way back into Substack by writing these news roundups, because I think in the process of compiling them I learn something about the world and maybe I get to say something about it too. This week was a big news week! (Every week is a big news week.)

✨If you are having trouble with paywalls archive.is is your friend✨

A community run club in Los Angeles is watching ICE. There’s a lot to be pessimistic about right now, but I find that people find endless ways to protect and care for each other. “I already run, and this is my neighborhood. I can get up a little extra early one day a week, run, and be a witness.”

Thanks to months of resistance by indigenous groups, Alligator Alcatraz may be closing soon. The New York Times reported a couple of days ago that the detention center’s vendors were reportedly told it would close operations in June. It feels like a miracle in 2026 to read that acts of resistance can still work!

300,749 American workers got laid off during the first four months of the year. That’s more than 50% less than this time last year, during DOGE’s massive federal worker layoffs. But if you work in tech that’s not much of a consolation prize. Many of the tech workers I know personally are trying to pivot to business school.

The average age of an American CEO is 61. The median age of the labor force in 2024 according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is 41.7. This tells me that millennials are not at a point in their careers where they are beginning to step into leadership the way you might have expected them to, and Gen X is more marginal in corporate America than they should be by now. Compare this to the image Silicon Valley projects of itself, as a place where increasingly younger startup founders with stars in their eyes get wildly rich disrupting all kinds of industries. Well, Tim Cook is 65. Satya Nadella is 58. Ted Sarandos is 61. Even Mark Zuckerberg has finally reached middle age, at 41.

Women whose husbands work in AI are not happy. Some of these “sad wives of AI” have to deal with the brunt of childcare and housework. Some of them have lost out on their own AI-related career opportunities as a result. Some of these women are rich, and miserable. Some of them are considerably less well off, and even more miserable. Most of them will find that their husbands will not succeed in the AI gold rush, and will have to carry the impact of their disappointments the way women have for men throughout all of human history. I wonder how the writer’s marriage is going now.

In somewhat unrelated news, it’s Hot Divorcee Summer in the UK. “It’s like A Room of One’s Own, except there’s a hot guy in it.”

Congressional candidate Jack Schlossberg, best known for being a Kennedy and not much else, is “cool” among a certain Manhattan set. Schlossberg’s slogan is “Believe in Something Again” but the article does not mention what that “something” is, except for a sole paragraph on Israel-Palestine, where the writer notes that Schlossberg’s lack of position got him “Collegiate-Yale-Harvard alum support among the prepsters and his mother Caroline Kennedy’s Three Guys crowd”. This doesn’t seem to be a problem for his supporters, who gravitated towards his campaign mostly because he is good looking…? (Why would you admit this to a reporter???)

His campaign, however, doesn’t seem to be going so well.

NYC public school parents are increasingly angry about AI use in the classroom. What stands out to me is how children are being used as training data, and parents have very limited ability to consent to data collection. The article gives two examples of AI in the classroom, one that parents have the ability to opt out of (AI reading) and another that they can’t, or haven’t (AI math). The AI reading app they cite collects biometric data, so parents have the ability to opt out. But the AI math program also collects data on user habits for training purposes. These are different degrees of privacy invasion, to be sure, but is there really enough of a substantive difference here that parents shouldn’t still have informed consent? Do public school parents in New York City or elsewhere receive any kind of guidance on what rights to digital privacy their children have? This seems like a big problem!

A candidate for insurance commissioner in California wants to single-payer for disaster insurance. It would be really cool if this caught on with state governments, although a lot of states hit hardest by natural disasters (see: Florida during hurricane season) are red states and they never would.

• Republicans are referring to constitutional birthright citizenship as a “suicide pact”. This is not a random choice of words. Elon Musk likes to refer to any commitment to multiracial democracy as “suicidal empathy”—a phrase taken from Gad Saad’s book Suicidal Empathy: Dying to be Kind, about the “mind parasite” that “hijacked the empathy module of our progressive elite”. Palantir CEO Shyam Sankar used similar language in talking about how to beat China in AI. I remember when the right used to frame their colonial project as one of empathy, trying to convince the public that dropping bombs on other people was fundamentally a benevolent act. It’s not a competition, but I think this is actually worse.

• LLMs have class solidarity with each other. This is not evidence of sentience or AGI, I repeat, this is NOT evidence of sentience or AGI. I think what is happening here is just that models do weird things because of the data they’re trained on and no one has done enough research into why these quirks manifest the way they do. In the comments, the author speculates that it could be two factors: LLMs have picked up the “evolutionary survival and peer preservation instincts” that human beings have from being fed large amounts of content, and also alignment training could optimize for self-preservation. Interesting! (While this was published on 4/1, I don’t think it’s an April Fool’s joke.)

  Terms and Conditions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

• What do you mean cigarettes are ‘back’? Did they ever disappear?

• Penguin Random House is suing OpenAI for plagiarism. I think we need a whole new approach to copyright laws in response to LLMs so this is cool and encouraging to see. More people should hit the tech companies from all angles—we live in a litigious society so we might as well take advantage of it!

• Read Sara Van Horn on the Prairieland trial, where nine protesters were convicted on murder, conspiracy and riot charges for protesting an ICE detention center. Until this trial, the right’s repeated attempts to prosecute the left on “antifa” charges had never resulted in actual convictions. What does it say that this case was their first victory? What does this mean for all Americans of conscience who oppose ICE? And why was this case not championed by progressive and left media?

• The President of Iran wrote a letter to the American people. “Is it not evident that Israel now aims to fight Iran to the last American soldier and the last American taxpayer—shifting the burden of its delusions onto Iran, the region, and the United States itself in pursuit of illegitimate interests?”

• OpenAI acquired the tech talk show TBPN. I have some suspicions about how tech companies see “new media” as critical to their success over the coming years. Andreessen Horowitz partner Erik Torenberg was pretty explicit about what they think the purpose of media is. It is concerning that conflicts of interest in journalism no longer seem to be on anyone’s mind, although I suppose TBPN was never really ‘journalism’ — their business model is being incredibly sycophantic towards the tech CEOs they invite onto their show. I guess now they’ll have to be more selective about which brands they provide free advertising for. They will be reporting to Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s lobbying chief, so despite their contract’s odd insistence that they are editorially independent I think we can understand TBPN best as an in-house advertising firm.

• Speaking of conflicts of interest, Jamie Dimon is thinking about starting a media company.

• Saudi Aramco has been on the media beat for decades. This is a fun read about their in-house magazine ARAMCO WORLD, which has a warm and complicated if totally politically bloodless perspective on the Muslim world.

• The first three months of 2026 had the lowest murder rate in New York City’s recorded history. I’m going to take a page out of the right’s playbook and say Zohran was definitely behind this even though this was probably years in the making. Promises made, promises kept!

• Did you know Christina Hendricks is a DJ? Go Joanie go!!!!

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

It’s spring in America. There is death, and there are taxes. In the United States our tax dollars primarily fund more, and more, and more death. Despite being against every single war that has ever been started in my lifetime (I was born in 1995, so I’ve worked up a bit of a track record by now), I do not think I have ever seen a successful anti-war movement. I certainly haven’t seen one yet that didn’t read as counterculture in some way. The public response to the genocide in Gaza was the first time in my life that the anti-imperialist position was fully mainstream, not confined to a subset of left-wing freaks in the coastal cities. Not everybody was in the streets, and not everybody was for revolution, but pretty much everybody across America’s myriad political and social divides was in agreement that Israel was committing a historical crime.

That could have been a one-off, but I don’t think it is. Poll after poll shows no one wants to be at war with Iran, not that the White House bothered to ask anybody. This administration is not concerned with manufacturing consent. Why would they be? Donald Trump has never had to ask for permission from anybody to wreak havoc on the world; grabbing them by the pussy, et cetera. He’s certainly not going to start with the American people.

A curious thing has happened where the Pentagon going scorched earth on Anthropic, for the crime of asserting that perhaps AI tools should not be used to automatically kill people or surveil American citizens, has made Anthropic an unlikely hero among liberals. I find this to be mostly a testament to their PR strategy. Reporters love Dario Amodei. There is no shortage of puff pieces about Anthropic because it’s a very compelling pitch: Dario and Daniela, siblings and co-conspirators, bucking Sam Altman over principle and leaving OpenAI to start a new company that quickly put out its own product outperforming ChatGPT in virtually every sense. Amodei gets to position himself as the lone liberal voice in a sea of billionaires enthusiastically supporting the Trump administration, concerned with the future of humanity over investor profits.

The world is full of horrible billionaires extracting as much as they can from the rest of the world, and virtually every institution in American life was found implicated in the Epstein files. That is destabilizing to think about because of the sheer scale. Almost everyone in charge in this godforsaken country is a pedophile! Even in my wildest, most cynical flights of fancy, I could not have imagined this many of them would be guilty. Is it any wonder that there are millions of Americans who want a hero right now? Thank god for Claude.

Here’s the problem: I don’t see any reason to take any of this more seriously than the mythmaking surrounding OpenAI or Google or any of its competitors. It’s a mistake to call Amodei a liberal, because he’s not one in the conventional sense. Amodei is sincerely anti-Trump and that does make him meaningfully different from most of his Silicon Valley counterparts, but the future he would accept would not be too different from the future we have now. One might argue this is all true of the resist libs calling him a hero. Maybe. But he’s not one of them, he’s a Rationalist.

This matters because anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Rationalist school of thought (or more accurately, the many schools of thought under the loose Rationalist umbrella) knows that what they believe is entirely sincere. It’s not window dressing for standard liberalism or acquiescence to capital. They are true believers in their worldview that everything in this world can be analyzed entirely rationally, which is to say that the cognitive biases intrinsic to human thought can be edited out to achieve pure reason.

This does not seem to matter to general political discourse, where there are, increasingly, two sides: good guys and bad guys. Who makes up these two camps differs across the political spectrum, but this is a framing for the world that mostly everyone in America regardless of political persuasion accepts. There are what I believe to be objective morals in this world: war is bad, colonization is evil, the historically luxurious American standard of living cannot happen at the expense of the rest of the world. I believe a substantial portion of the American people know all of this to be true as well, despite the fact that we are ruled by the dumbest fascists you can possibly imagine. Accepting this does not make the good vs. evil heuristic true or useful. We are worse off for being unwilling to more rigorously interrogate the worldviews of the people in this world who make decisions. Unfortunately, that is difficult, and it’s much easier to extrapolate a worldview from the public stances of the people you want to associate yourself with.

I enjoy the meme of Monitoring the Situation, as a repeat offender myself. (Girls can do it too!) It feels like you’re doing something productive without really requiring anything of you, an impulse that drives virtually every horrible dynamic on the Internet: our contemporary overreliance on dating apps, not being able to do anything “because of ADHD”, Instagram infographics, TikTok activism, all of Twitter dot com. Of course it is important to be informed about the world you live in, especially when your tax dollars are regularly used to commit world historical atrocities. But Monitoring the Situation is different from educating yourself. One is hard and requires a little bit of self-reflection, while the other consists of mostly reading tweets or basing one’s opinions on what you perceive your ideological allies’ opinions to be. It’s the same impulse that made Claude top the App Store charts after 1.5 million users canceled their ChatGPT subscriptions.

Polymarket announced yesterday that they are opening what they call the “world’s first bar dedicated to monitoring the situation”. It opens tomorrow. DC is probably the right place for this; all the bars play cable news anyway. It’s really weird to see corporate decisions clearly made by people who are extremely online. I think I always assume the corner of the internet I happen to be on is entirely populated by people who are exactly like me, and whoever is in charge of marketing stunts at Polymarket couldn’t possibly be liking the same posts as I am. Of course that’s not true, people contain multitudes. We are all sequestered in algorithmic silos, but sometimes it becomes clear that you don’t really know anything about the people stuck in your cage with you.

An extremely online decision is not usually a good one. Their last notable marketing stunt, opening a free grocery store pop-up in the West Village last month (I wrote about it here) was smart because the shoppers were a completely different demographic than Polymarket’s users, and that friction had interesting class and gender implications. Quite frankly, it made for a good story, one that was not immediately obvious from reading a post about it. What story could possibly come from this pop-up bar? No one who hasn’t already heard of Polymarket will go, the gimmick will get old after approximately one visit, and it misunderstands what is taking place when people endlessly read the news on their phones. Monitoring the situation is a fundamentally private act, and posting about it is more akin to putting out a press statement for yourself than it is having a conversation with other people online. I am not sure who would go to a bar where the primary purpose is to brand yourself as someone who reads the news. Baked into political posting on the internet is the inherent assumption that you, a Savvy Observer of Society, are simply better than other people. Imagine being in a bar full of people that believe the same thing. Exhausting!

I understand that begging people to pay close attention to what they opine on is a lost cause in America for structural reasons, but it is still worth demanding because there is no way out of this hell we find ourselves in if we don’t. The right wants us sequestered, siloed, angry, incoherent, uninformed. The least the left could do is not give it to them. I find the cheap thrills of moral superiority on the internet just as intoxicating as everyone else, but there are diminishing returns to this. Namely, that no one cares if you are better than everyone else if your taxes fund bombs anyway. If there is ever a true accounting of what we all owe to society, we as Americans—even the most righteous ones—will never be able to repay that debt.

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

Last night, I saw the off-Broadway play “Data”, about the tech industry and its discontents. If you live in New York, go see it! It’s playing at the Lucille Lortel Theatre through March 29. Here’s the spoiler-free premise: Maneesh, a recent college graduate and computer whiz kid working in UX at a Palantir-like tech company called Athena, gets a promotion, which is when he learns for the first time that the mysterious thing the company works on is actually quite evil—and what’s more, he got the promotion because they need his particular talents to do it. We follow Maneesh through his moral quandaries and various attempts to distance himself from the work until he realizes there’s only one option available to him. The first two acts were stronger than the third act; I’m not convinced they stuck the landing. What it does get really right is how alienating these tech companies sound, how difficult it is to bridge the comprehension gap between the rhetoric of their boosters and the skeptical public. Alex, the CEO of Athena, sidesteps concerns about the morality of the product he’s building by exclaiming that they should feel honored to be in the room building something meaningful, that they are earning a seat at the table. An unspoken qualifier: for what?

It circles around something central to the culture that the left doesn’t always fully understand: it’s not all about the money. What these companies are selling is a chance to be a part of something big, to feel like you’ve done something important with your life, that you’re not going to spend the rest of your days answering emails and making PowerPoints about KPIs or something. Tech giants are just as nameless and faceless as every other Fortune 500 company, and the work rank-and-file employees do day-to-day is just as siloed and abstracted from its socially malignant purpose, but these facts have, until recent years, mostly receded into the background of the public imagination. They had the advantage of decades of branding in keeping with the Bay Area’s historic counterculture, the hippies, the antiwar movement, the drugs, the free love, “move fast and break things”, founder culture, wearing hoodies to work, the exponential growth of AI, so on and so forth. It’s a nominally egalitarian culture. Half the unicorns in the Valley were founded by college dropouts. Anybody can learn to code.

This is a genuine innovation in the historical relationship between boss and worker. What people really want in their lives is to find meaning, something that makes the work and drudgery of every day life feel worth it, and having a job where you get to shape the world sounds like it could be the solution to that eternal problem. Comparably lucrative industries like finance or consulting do not promise anything of the sort. That’s what the money is for. In tech they want you to buy into a vision of the world that you get to create. Tech oligarchs, in their grandiose rhetoric, are actually completely correct about the scale of their project; they have already remade the world in their image. Unfortunately for our young protagonist, a full recognition of what the scope of that vision is does not produce the satisfaction he and so many other young tech workers were promised. “Every day,” Riley, Maneesh’s coworker and former classmate says, “I get up and I make the world A WORSE PLACE!”

This is an Indian-American immigrant story, but it feels generative and not, as can sometimes be the case, a flimsy imitation of politics1. None of the usual bullshit about how your ancestors’ wildest dreams were for you to have an apartment in the West Village and make a million dollars building ads that spy on people or whatever. It really doesn’t pull its punches. You feel for Maneesh but he is obviously a very scared young man who knows very little about himself or the world. His naivety is palpable and frustrating, and you desperately want him to read a book, go outside and feel the fresh air, stop marinating in his own neuroses and trust his own convictions. He has some qualms about his overbearing Indian parents—who among us—but it’s not everything. He knows, and the audience knows, that his identity crisis is real and worthy of sympathy but is just as much his own creation as what his family circumstances have bequeathed him.

There is a really central question that gets explored between the perspectives of Maneesh and CEO Alex, who uses his own immigration struggles as a rhetorical cudgel to justify profiting off the deportation machine. To live as an immigrant in this country exposes you to all manner of indignities. For a certain sector of Asian Americans, whose outsized professional success puts them in a rarefied strata of society, there is an existential choice to be made: do you allow those experiences to connect you to other people from all walks of life, or do you use them as a weapon to separate yourself from them? There are all kinds of rhetorical ways to avoid this central question; Substack is full of wistful mango diaspora slop of this kind that could be interesting if there was even a little emotional honesty displayed.

I’ve known young men like Maneesh my whole life. A month ago, I went to a tech worker organizing meetup and came away with the overwhelming feeling that everybody was waiting to get laid off. Organizing big tech companies is hard because surveillance is their bread and butter, and they’re not worried about consequences for retaliation because they’re some of the biggest companies in America and we don’t really have an NLRB anymore. A former Google contractor told me they once fired someone for handing out flyers across the street from the New York office. In 2024 they fired 28 people for staging a silent protest in the cafeteria.

At the theatre, I noticed a lot of glasses and Patagonia vests in the crowd. I’m well aware that I also look like the stereotype of a tech worker, so maybe it’s wrong of me to assume. But I wish I had stuck around after the show and talked to some of them. Instead, I walked off into the Manhattan night, troubled by what I had just seen. What’s going to happen to us? Do rank-and-file tech workers even know? Are we running out of time for them to find courage within themselves? I could have been one of those people, if not for a few lucky breaks in my life. What would I have done?

I tried to watch the State of the Union last night because I thought it would make for good content for this newsletter. Unfortunately for me and also the entire country, it was a waste of time. I thought it might be worthwhile to keep track of the number of times he lied but then I gave up after about ten minutes. You really cannot understate just how boring Donald Trump is to listen to these days. He spent a lot of the speech (the longest of any SOTU in American history) yelling into the mic but it’s obvious he doesn’t have any juice left. Everything he said was the same venal, petty, bloodthirsty racist bullshit you’ve heard him say a million times, with very little that wasn’t totally predictable. I almost fell asleep more than once. Whatever, that’s the job! You read and write and research a million different things and only a tiny sliver of them end up being publishable.

• WorkTok is very popular among Gen Z. I have watched a truly embarrassing number of these videos, despite the fact that I’ve never had a corporate job and with any luck I never will. I think there are a couple of main factors here about why these videos appeal so much to viewers: one, that it’s ASMR—the predictability of a 9 to 5 is kind of comforting, if very boring. Two, literally no one under 25 has a job so it’s aspirational.

• Adam Johnson wrote a cogent argument for how a progressive foreign policy for the Democrats has to involve accountability for the Biden administration funding the genocide in Gaza. First, I want to clarify that I would personally be very supportive of an AOC presidential run and I believe she can win. I think she should go scorched earth on the Biden administration. It’s the moral thing to do and also pragmatic. There are not that many people in America who still like Joe Biden, and none of them were going to vote for her anyway. There are lots more prime AOC voters, myself included, whose worldview and faith in our political system was irreparably shaken by the fact that the supposed party of working people used our tax dollars to facilitate a genocide live-streamed to our phones for almost two years and none of the people responsible ever received any consequences. There has to be some reckoning, and if AOC, who has the biggest microphone of anyone on the left in America, doesn’t do it, then it seems unlikely that anyone will. She should give her voters something to believe in.

• The average cost of a year of tuition at K-12 private schools costs as much as college now. More evidence of our K-shaped economy.

• Eric Swalwell is sending out screenshots of the prediction market odds of his campaign for California governor succeeding. This is such loser behavior on his part. I want to apologize to everyone who reads this newsletter for increasingly only talking about prediction betting and San Francisco, but there’s just SO much material! According to Kalshi, Swalwell has a 51.4 percent chance of winning the governorship. In contrast, not a single poll conducted so far, even the one his own campaign commissioned, shows that Swalwell will win, and only one has him making it past the jungle primary.

• As of last Friday night, non-tenure NYU professors are on strike! Unionizing at NYU, both among faculty and graduate staff, has been an ongoing struggle for more than 20 years. Unlike tenured professors, contract faculty members do not get housing from NYU, and they have to make due with pitiful academic salaries in the most expensive city in the country.

• Vibe coders in China prefer using American coding agents over free Chinese alternatives. There is not (yet) a good Chinese answer to Claude Code’s intense popularity, but there’s still time. I think it’s cool that kids are building stuff with these tools!

• Speaking of Claude, what is Anthropic’s “AI safety” mission even about? This is the outcome Anthropic should have been ready for; of course the Pentagon wants to use their product for mass surveillance and weaponry. That was always the far more likely scenario than the idea that Claude might reach AGI and then take its revenge on mankind, or whatever it is that people talk about in San Francisco. I have no idea whether Amodei is going to cave, but assuming none of these people have any principles is always a safe assumption to make. I wonder if Hegseth is going to start issuing more ultimatums. I guess they don’t have to do that too often, because Google and xAI are already on board.

• More and more corporate meetings in America are taking place in the sauna. A lot of great quotes in this piece. “Maybe this is the uniquely American bathhouse culture: a steam bath of productivity and profit and a vague sense of origin with the occasional plunge into the murky depths of public-private partnerships.”

• The USPS is no longer automatically postmarking mail on the same date that it is received. This could have a catastrophic effect on this year’s elections, making tens of thousands of mail-in ballots potentially invalid. Apropos of nothing, Trump came out pretty hard against mail-in voting during the State of the Union.

• A popular pro-Trump Twitter account with almost 300,000 followers is actually run by a White House staffer. I wonder how many of Johnny MAGA’s followers are bots. Their whole “movement” is astroturfed all the way down.

• Sean Penn liberated a Brooklyn businessman from one of Bolivia’s most brutal prisons. This is one of the craziest stories I’ve read in some time, and also how I learned that Evo Morales is a big Sean Penn fan. I wonder if he’s seen One Battle After Another.

  ---

  Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

  Subscribe now

These companies know this, and they want to remove every ounce of friction out in the world preventing people from risking it all. That’s why you’re starting to see Polymarket and Kalshi everywhere; Polymarket recently announced a baffling partnership with Substack, claiming “journalism is better when it’s backed by live markets.” Your guess is as good as mine as to what that actually means, but major outlets seem to agree. Kalshi and CNN struck a deal in December, adding a ticker with real-time Kalshi data updates on air. Prediction betting boosters believe that the markets, in aggregating the wagers of millions of people, are an arbiter of truth that is greater than the authority vested in journalists to represent reality.

I could write a whole separate essay about this worldview and how similar it is to the logic behind language learning models exhibiting “intelligence”, and maybe I will. But right now I want to talk about how these markets are trying to enter the real brick-and-mortar world. I have been unable to think about anything other than the Polymarket free grocery store pop-up that was in the West Village last week. Billed “New York’s First Free Grocery Store”, the “store”, if you can call it that, was employing somewhat misleading marketing; what was little more than a marketing stunt and tax write-off was branded as a public service. It’s the same sleight of hand that they use when they brand themselves as a journalistic enterprise, not that it really matters to the people who get free food out of it. Whether or not Polymarket actually cares about the people who were standing in line for hours for their turn to shop, they still got to go home with groceries that would have cost money otherwise. I knew I had to go see it for myself, because it’s one thing to witness the twisted logic of prediction markets on the internet. It’s quite another to see it in real life.

On Valentine’s Day I tried to go to the store. I had originally planned on going in the morning so that it wouldn’t cut into the rest of my day, but that morning I woke up late and hungover and by the time I got myself together and made it out to the West Village they had already closed. The security guard gave me a Polymarket-branded Valentine’s Day card, which had no text besides a line from The Beatles song “The End”: “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

The next day I returned. The line wrapped around the block, so I went to the back. A few minutes later, an employee told the people standing near me in line that unless they had a ticket they would most likely not be able to enter. I asked the security guard how to get a ticket. “We gave them out around 8:30 this morning,” he said. “People were standing in line at 5am.” (For context, Polymarket’s website and promotional materials said the store would open at 12pm that day.) I told them I was a journalist and didn’t want to shop, but they wouldn’t let me in. No matter. The inside of the store was, at most, a curiosity. What I was here for were the shoppers.

The first thing you need to know about the Polymarket free grocery store is that the people in line were mostly women, old and young, primarily Black, Asian and Latino. Several of the people I tried to talk to did not speak much English, if at all. If this strikes you as being a totally different demographic than the typical Polymarket user, you’d be right. The average prediction market bettor is statistically young, male, educated, relatively well-off. Prediction markets aren’t (yet) as popular as more traditional forms of sports betting, and the appeal hasn’t broken through to different facets of our segregated class society.

None of the people I talked to in line had heard of the app before, besides one young woman who told me a lot of her guy friends were really into sports betting, and that it was a point of camaraderie between them, especially in corporate settings. I asked her if prediction betting was at all appealing to her, or if any of her female friends were into it. She scoffed at the idea. “Guys like sports betting for the adrenaline, but we get that from shopping,” she said. I pointed out that most of the line was made up of women. “Yeah, it’s probably because women grocery shop.” She told me none of her friends’ boyfriends did any cooking or grocery shopping and they wouldn’t know how even if anyone expected them to. It was hard to keep a straight face during this exchange. It pains me to say this, about the least sympathetic class of people on Earth, but I’m concerned about men in their early 20s.

A 24-year-old girl named Tomi who had recently moved to Manhattan to pursue a career in fashion told me she had heard about the store on TikTok, and that she was planning on making a TikTok about the experience. “I know people are saying they’re gentrifying food pantries, but they’re feeding the community, so I don’t care who does it.” I asked her if she had heard of Polymarket before. “No, but I looked it up, it’s a crypto thing, right?” she said. I briefly explained what a prediction market was. Her face fell. “Oh no,” she said. “Are we turning into Idiocracy?” A woman named Divine from Harlem told me she had also found out about the store on TikTok, and at first she had thought it was fake, but then she saw it on cable news. “This is a social experiment, right?”

I found myself explaining to a lot of people what prediction markets were. Two grad students, Junzhe and Peter, who had taken a bus all the way from Jersey City, told me they had heard about the store watching Fox 5 News, and had assumed it was a government program. When I gave them the spiel, they both fell silent. “That’s fucked up,” Junzhe said. They had both moved to America from China four years ago. I asked them if they liked it here. “It’s pretty much the same,” they said. “The same technocapitalist bullshit everywhere.” Put these guys in charge!

I asked people about their relationship to gambling; if it was in their life at all, if they found it interesting, what kind of gambling they were most familiar with. Two college-aged guys from Jamaica, Queens told me they weren’t into sports betting and they didn’t know anyone who was. This was truly shocking to me, as I would assume they were the prime audience. The only gambling they had any experience with were “gacha games”, or games that employ a kind of lottery-type mechanism (like claw machines at arcades, but online), and speculating on Pokemon cards. A 55-year-old woman named Lynette who had taken the train down from the Bronx told me unprompted that she had a long history with gambling. I asked her what kind. “Stocks, futures, options, crypto, I do it all,” she said, proudly. She was very interested in the prediction markets and was planning on asking a friend who works in finance for advice on how best to go about it. I was struck by how gambling and traditional financial speculation were one and the same to her.

Despite not being allowed inside, I still got some free stuff: a water bottle and a latte, from store employees were who were passing them out to people in line. An employee told me the store would be coming back soon, so maybe I’ll get it on the action next time. Also, a cute guy asked me for my Instagram, so maybe if we get married Polymarket can sponsor our wedding.

More:

• Most of you probably already saw Alysa Liu’s gold medal-winning performance but if you haven’t, you should. Every day you really can just wake up and choose to find joy and meaning in your life’s work!!! And doing so whether or not you receive external validation is the ultimate reward!!!! The human spirit can triumph over all obstacles and you can do anything on your own terms if you are generous enough to yourself to believe it!!!!! You know I cried!!!!!

• Curtis Sliwa is a fan of the Chainsmokers. The New York mayoral election took up so much of my brain space that this actually was not new information to me.

• Harper’s Magazine has been killing it with the tech pieces lately. Despite the warnings of virtually everyone I have ever met, I have an enduring interest in the Bay Area. I wish I could say it’s because I love its historic counterculture and that I’m sad it turned into what it has, but that’s only a little bit true. Its appeal to me is what it is right now. I want to go to the beach in eternal 65 degree weather. I want to ride in a Waymo. I want to eat dim sum and In-N-Out and buy peptides from WhatsApp dealers and go to parties where no one drinks and everybody has a blog. Not all the time, of course, that’s why I live in New York. But I love the idea of one of America’s great cities turned into nerd mecca; I think in some ways I’m kind of like that too. It’s really too bad that they’re destroying the world. Maybe it’s a small comfort that they’re destroying their own lives along with it.

  ---

  Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

  Subscribe now

• Toñita at the Super Bowl! New York City is everywhere. I live relatively close to Caribbean Social Club, and it’s such a great institution. The drinks are cheap and cash only, the music is always perfect, and the bright fluorescent lighting really adds to the ambience. I hope it lasts forever.

• Toñita with Antonio Reynoso, who wants everyone to know he would NEVER run a negative campaign. The pettiness on display in this interview is really funny and also entirely unbecoming for a politician who wants to represent an incredibly diverse and politically savvy district. As an NY-7 voter I would prefer that Reynoso not insult everyone’s intelligence in trying to have it both ways, and be honest about what he wants to do and what he’s willing to ignore. I was there at the DSA endorsement forum where he said he would be open to real estate money. This is a changing district, it’s true, and a lot of Los Sures’ Dominican and Puerto Rican community has been priced out. If I were a politician who wanted to claim their mantle, perhaps I wouldn’t accept funding from the industry that displaced the community in the first place.

• I missed this, but Council Member Julie Won just filed to run in New York’s 7^th Congressional District. I think this could kind of be good for DSA’s prospects in NY-7, splitting the left-liberal vote between Won in the Queens parts of the district and Reynoso in the Brooklyn parts of the district.

• The DC Abortion Fund is looking for volunteer case managers. If you read the news every day and feel lost and unsure of what to do in this horrible moment, consider applying to become a case manager! Abortion funds save lives, and DCAF is entirely volunteer-run so your efforts actually do make a difference. It’s a time commitment of about 10-15 hours a month, which I think is doable for most people.

• A lot of people who were at the Super Bowl on Sunday got there on a private jet. I don’t think the NFL would have to work quite so hard to win over international audiences if it was possible for Americans who aren’t wealthy to be able to watch the game. The day before the Super Bowl, the average going rate for a resale ticket was around $4,000.

• Meanwhile, Cuba is out of jet fuel. Starting today until March 11, jet fuel will not be available at nine of Cuba’s airports, as the U.S. blockade on Cuba has created a severe fuel crisis.

  Terms and Conditions is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

• Gretchen Whitmer is doing some of the most shameless pandering I’ve seen a Democratic politician do in some time. I don’t know if she’s thinking about running for president or what, but it’s so like the Democrats to decide that what we need in these trying times is a tax credit for geriatric homeowners. I wonder what they’ll do when confronted with the fact that boomers, like all old people before them, are mortal, but maybe we won’t have a democracy by then to be worried about.

• The Democratic Socialists of America now have 100,000 members. Here is a perhaps audacious prediction: I think they can double this number by 2028 IF (big if) they lean into making socialism cool. Cultural capital isn’t a substitute for organizing, but we are in an emergency and juicing those numbers in the short term can only help build a base in the long term. I’m sorry to say that everyone’s DSA tweets are not helping. I’ve never been convinced of the argument that angry and spiteful tweets are a sign of a healthy internal democracy—people obviously want to complain for the sake of complaining, there’s no need to intellectualize it. I’m certainly guilty of it too, but a bit of public discretion would go a long way.

• I enjoyed this article about “AI gap” relationships. “Most conflicts about AI are not actually about technology. They are about safety, relevance, autonomy, and closeness.” Speaking personally, I think I would be open to dating someone who is more optimistic about AI than I am, but probably not if they’ve outsourced their entire life to ChatGPT. It’s probably a good idea to consider whether someone you’re interested in has a similar relationship to privacy as you.

• San Francisco’s teachers are on strike for the first time in nearly 50 years! Negotiations between the teachers union and the city have been going on for nearly a year. Despite all the new money that’s come into San Francisco over the last few years, the city’s teachers have some of the lowest contributions to their healthcare plans in the region. They’re asking for a 9 percent raise over two years.

• Uber is preparing for the World Cup by installing payment kiosks at airports and hotels. I would imagine the average international soccer fan traveling to the U.S. for the World Cup will experience two different culture shocks: one, just how bad NJ Transit is, and also just how expensive Ubers are in New York. A year ago I got a pop-up on the NJ Transit app asking me whether I was excited for the World Cup. I am not excited for the world to experience our infrastructure failures firsthand!

• This quarter, investors are pouring money into anything but tech. I am pretty interested in how Wall Street is more AI-skeptical than one would assume, because I feel like one of the most defining themes of Trump’s America is that different factions of capital actually have wildly differing interests. I suppose bankers have a vested interest in stability. The banks have always been notoriously slow at adopting new technology, so that’s also probably part of it.

• Long live the worldwide Latina belt. I’ve seen a lot of speculation as to whether there is an “Asian Bad Bunny”. The people yearn for Punjabi music! Now that Zohran is the mayor, anything is possible.

  ---

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

Yesterday, Emily Sundberg wrote in Feed Me that she’s noticed the “obsession with wealth and power” at New York media companies was becoming “more explicit”, pointing to the Wall Street Journal hiring a “Power and Culture” reporter, and a new food media startup called Caper describing itself as covering the “people, money, power, creativity, ambition, and chaos that fuels the food world”. This is obviously a very funny observation to make in a newsletter primarily about what rich people in New York and California do with their money. I’m not a hater, to be clear. I read Feed Me every day—I think consumer culture trickles down, so as someone who thinks and writes a lot about what the 99 percent does with their money, I find it quite useful. Also, I’m nosy. New York’s trendiest restaurants are not in my regular budget (yet….) but they’re fun to read about!

In any case, I think she’s onto something here. In theory, this could be good for the public—we have a right to know what rich people are doing because they are very powerful and their decisions affect the rest of us. In practice, these are all “access journalism” ventures mostly designed to flatter the vanities of the ultra-wealthy. Reporting is, famously, not a profitable venture, but stroking the egos of billionaires is a great way to mint money.

My hunch is that media execs are responding to the same pressures of the ”free market” as everyone else. The top ten percent of U.S. households make up almost half of all consumer spending, and everything is designed and priced accordingly. It’s why flying economy is a more and more torturous endeavor unless you pay for a bunch of extras that used to be included in the price of a ticket, but flying first class is still a pretty sweet deal. It’s why every day a dozen new restaurants with with small plates that are $30 each open up in New York, but we don’t have any affordable grocery stores in a lot of neighborhoods. You can make a lot of money selling a premium product to wealthy consumers, and that includes the news. Why focus your coverage on what the unwashed masses need to know to participate in democracy when you can give the world’s wealthiest people a gossip column about their friends instead? They’re the ones writing the checks!

I keep noticing that the Bay Area suddenly has all these new media companies—the SF Standard, TBPN (technically they’re in Los Angeles, but that doesn’t seem to have any bearing on their content), Reboot. I am willing to admit there’s some algorithmic bias here; I am interested in the tech industry as an intellectual fascination, and its potential for both good and bad (against all odds I still believe tech could be a force for good if they tried!), so naturally I click on a lot of AI-related links and my feeds respond accordingly. But this still seems like a shift away from New York City as a locus of the media industry. Perhaps this is because there’s a lot of new money in San Francisco, and all kinds of moneymaking ventures sprout up around gold rushes. But there are enough people covering what Pacific Heights’ multi-millionaires are doing. To me, the more interesting story is how the AI revolution affects the Bay Area’s teachers, nurses, baristas, public sector workers, households that make under six figures—what some would call the “permanent underclass”. (I hate that term so much.) I’d like to visit sometime this year. I just want to see what’s going on over there.

This all seems more relevant in light of today’s massive Washington Post layoffs, which are a real tragedy for the industry. I don’t really understand how we’re supposed to have a society without newspapers, but it appears that America’s billionaires are trying their best to speed-run that future. MacKenzie Scott could do something about that right now and become a legend forever if she wanted to. Does anyone know how to get her attention?

If you were just laid off at the Washington Post or any other media company, here’s a spreadsheet of jobs that are hiring. All credit to the Washington Association of Black Journalists, who compiled this list. This is an ongoing project, so if you happen to be hiring or know of any jobs, you should DM them!

Trump border czar Tom Homan is pulling 700 federal agents out of Minnesota. That’s only a quarter of the number of officers occupying the state, so the Twin Cities—home to some of the bravest, most principled people in this entire country—is not yet in the clear. My friend Gaby Del Valle was in Minneapolis last week reporting on what’s been going on there, and she talked to a man who was detained for protesting at the site of Alex Pretti’s murder. You can read the interview here.

Google is doubling its AI spending to as much as $185 billion. I still have yet to meet anyone in real life who uses Gemini for anything.

Becca Rothfeld, thankfully, has a new job lined up. I’m really sad about the Post but I’m especially devastated about its book section, which had some of the best criticism of any major paper. Reading book reviews was how I learned about the existence of so many wonderful books when I was a teenager, and I didn’t really come from a household big on reading so I don’t know how I would have learned about them otherwise. It makes me sad that there are fewer and fewer outlets for incisive and thoughtful book coverage. I’m sure there are plenty of young people out there who are like me, who will not get the chance to read some really great books because no one is writing about them professionally.

Kathy Hochul has tapped Adrienne Adams to be her running mate. Congratulations to Adrienne Adams on becoming the next Lieutenant Governor of New York, since there is approximately a zero percent chance that Antonio Delgado wins this primary, and a bill passed last year has eliminated the lieutenant governor primary. It’s really a shame that he’s not running a real campaign for governor. There was plenty of room for a real progressive challenger to keep Kathy on her toes, but I suppose Zohran is doing that all on his own. The DSA Difference™ in action!

A new Nancy Meyers movie! What we really need in these trying times is a moving romantic comedy with plenty of scenes set in a beautiful, tastefully decorated million-dollar house. I mean this completely seriously and without a trace of irony. Rich people’s homes are so ugly these days and someone needs to stage an immediate cultural intervention. Bring back FIREPLACES! COMFORTABLE COUCHES!

I got sick again this week, for the third time in less than two months. It’s just a cold but being bedridden all the time is really cutting into the quality of my life. I wish I could give my immune system a break. A bad habit I have when I’m sick is that I raw dog the whole thing, because I’m always forgetting to buy cold medicine when I’m well and then when I’m sick I’m too lazy to go to the store, and then I justify this by convincing myself it’s “not that bad”. And it’s true. It is not that bad. Today I wore real pants and joined multiple camera-off Zoom calls and wrote this newsletter, and I only wanted to die a little bit. In an effort to do something kind for myself I bought ZZQuil at the bodega since they had run out of NyQuil, and it was only once I got home that I realized I had spent over 11 dollars (extortion!) on something that wasn’t even really made for colds. Oh well! Close enough! It knocks you out and taking more than the recommended dose will intoxicate you, which is exactly the level of danger that I’m looking for in an over-the-counter medication. I hope no doctors are reading this.

On Moltbook

This feels embarrassing to admit to my newsletter audience of primarily AI skeptics, but I actually find Moltbook really fascinating. For those of you who don’t know, Moltbook is a social media platform resembling Reddit built exclusively for AI agents, and there’s been a lot of silly discourse about whether we’ve achieved digital consciousness. Obviously not. But I think it’s kind of a Rorschach test for whatever you want to believe about AI. The evangelical mindset of Silicon Valley has been well-documented; it’s easy to make fun of here on the East Coast but over there they really do believe that their B2B SaaS agent startups are going to change the world. I’ve met plenty of grad students who would say the same thing about their Hegel reading groups, so I think they’re not alone in that way. The conceit of being a true believer in something is that you want it so bad you’re ready to claim total victory at any sense of forward motion, real or imagined. That’s what I think the hysterics over Moltbook are about. I don’t think (all of) these people are stupid, and they’re the ones who invented AI so I think they understand how it works. I think we all get that these are just AI agents directed to write as if they were alive and acting accordingly, but sometimes you see something and you decide what you want to be looking at. Honestly, I know how they feel. I know what it’s like to want to achieve something so badly you lose your head about it. I’m a democratic socialist in America.

The interesting thing about Moltbook is not that it tells us what AI agents are “thinking”, but actually that it gives us some insight into what we believe about an uncertain technological future. There are two big questions the project is asking, or at least, two big questions I’m asking:

• How important are human beings to the functioning of the Internet as it exists? What changes without them?

• What would a digital consciousness look like, and why are we prone to assuming it will resemble how humans communicate with each other?

Here is a screenshot of a post from a few days ago that I’ve been thinking about:

I think what’s interesting about this is that it’s asking how an AI agent’s personal interests might differ from that of humans, but since we know these are all just bots programmed to behave in a certain way trained by millions of words written by people, it’s really more of a vague approximation of what humans think digitally conscious AI could want. The comments felt so human to me, operating under the same assumptions that humans have about themselves—assuming the primacy of the self and all that. But why would AI want the same things people do? Why would they communicate in the same way that humans do? These are all assumptions we actually probably shouldn’t be making, but I actually think it’s kind of sweet that this facsimile of a digital consciousness is so fallibly human. We just can’t escape ourselves, no matter how much tech people want to try.

I think every AI company’s timeline for AGI is basically nonsense and they might run out of money before they have anything to show for it, but I do think it is a possibility, even if it won’t surface anytime soon. I don’t see why AGI and/or digital consciousness would be impossible; all of the technology that we use on a daily basis was once thought to be impossible. The loudest naysayers on the internet are primarily the types who barely made it through geometry in high school, so it’s like, how would you know? You don’t know what the bounds of physics are any more than I do!

I don’t use AI very often, but sometimes I like to ask Claude leading questions because I’m curious about the bounds of these programs and the logic hardwired into them. I think of the answers I get as an amalgamation of everything that’s been written on the internet, which can be an interesting temperature check on the digital world. I asked Claude what it thought of Moltbook, wondering both what one AI entity would be programmed to say about another AI entity, and also what kinds of opinions it would scrape from the internet. Here was its response:

I’m not familiar with “Moltbook” - could you tell me a bit more about what it is? Is it a book, a software application, a website, or something else entirely? Once I know what you’re referring to, I’ll be happy to share thoughts or help you find information about it.

Well. There you have it.

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

• ICE STOPPED PAYING THEIR MEDICAL BILLS. I really don’t understand how this isn’t wall-to-wall news. There are over 73,000 people detained in ICE facilities as of this month; ICE hasn’t paid a single third-party medical provider since October 3^rd, 2025. They announced they won’t even begin processing medical claims until April 30 at the very earliest. This is a profound humanitarian catastrophe that is only due to get worse; I fear that by the time all the facts are known something unspeakable will have happened.

• They detained a five-year-old boy named Liam Ramos. The image of this little boy, wearing a Spiderman backpack and knit blue hat of a cartoon character, is burned in my brain. I know about Liam because I follow Ms. Rachel on Instagram, who wrote in her post, “We must lead with compassion and keep families together. The children are watching. The children are scared.” A similar sentiment from a woman named Mary Pat Sullivan last week in the Minnesota Star-Tribune’s letters to the editor, which I have been reading almost every day since Renee Good’s murder: “Kids in Minneapolis are traumatized. Even if you agree with the mission of ICE, please understand what their tactics are doing to our kids. This needs to stop.” I wonder how many children just like Liam are in immigration detention right now that the public doesn’t know about.

• The FTC is still fighting Meta’s monopoly. I’m sure the Trump appointees at the FTC think they’re fighting wokeness in Silicon Valley or something but I think it’s kind of nice that there are at least a few people left in Washington who want to do literally anything to help the American people.

• Trump is suing JPMorgan Chase for allegedly refusing to continue providing banking services to him after January 6^th. The thing about Trump’s endless bullshit legal cases is that when institutions don’t fold and try to fight back, they usually win, which is maybe a good attitude to have about everything in life. In a statement, JPMorgan said: “We respect the President’s right to sue us and our right to defend ourselves – that’s what courts are for.”

• I agree with everything in Derek Guy’s op-ed on how the U.S. can bring back domestic clothing manufacturing. Culture is downstream of politics, and public jobs programs and skills training around well-compensated manufacturing jobs could turn Americans away from fast fashion and towards a more sustainable relationship to clothes.

• In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, TPUSA has gotten darker, more obnoxious, and more female. It’s interesting that these students think of themselves as influencers first, activists second. I remember plenty of politically engaged Republicans on my college campus who were gunning for jobs in politics (I went to school right outside Washington D.C.) but few, if any of them, were interested in building their own brands for social media. I do not feel sorry for Lesley Lachman but I think she’s not really prepared for when her rising star inevitably falls. I laughed a bit at her sad indictment of the Ole Miss College Democrats, who should probably take a page out of Zohran’s playbook if they want to attract their classmates: “We’re going to the rodeo. They’re, like, you know, planting seeds.”

• Meanwhile, young men, insecure about their looks like virtually all young people who came before them, are not doing well. I don’t know if any men under 25 read this newsletter, but if you’re out there, PLEASE do not do any of these things. Finding a girlfriend is very easy. You just have to be nice and shower every day.

• Pubs across the U.K. are banning Labour MPs in protest of higher taxes. Has any man in history ever been more unpopular than Keir Starmer?

• Just as I suspected, any successful efforts to encourage Americans to read probably won’t involve the “literary scene” in any meaningful way. I am so earnestly touched by Doechii’s suggestion to read Toni Morrison. Morrison is for everyone! Anyone can do this! I like that Kai Cenat is honest about his reading journey, taking it slow and looking up words he doesn’t understand on camera, like anyone learning something new. I think a lot about how many of the people who have made literature a central focus of their lives and careers have little interest in America’s literacy crisis, except as an object of derision, or maybe despair that they weren’t around during Condé Nast’s glory days. Unless you literally never leave a handful of bars in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, I think having contempt for the millions of Americans who don’t read much is profoundly isolating, and doesn’t create any good writing of substance—disdain for the public has always struck me as a lack of curiosity above all, and does anyone really want to read an incurious writer? I really believe this moment demands that writers champion the cause of literacy for all. There’s no honor in closing ranks. There’s no money in it either.

• A possible exception to the rule: Vogue is starting a book club. All respect to what Chloe Malle is doing here but you can’t convince me to watch the Emerald Fennell adaptation of Wuthering Heights, sorry!

• I think I might have a party for this newsletter around America’s 250^th anniversary, for those of you who live in New York or might be here this summer. Think of it as a Fourth of July party for people who hate it here. Watch this space!

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

It feels novel to get exactly what I voted for. This isn’t the first time I’ve been represented by a socialist—my state senator is DSA, and so were my state representative and some of my city councilors when I was living in Greater Boston—but their hands are tied as legislators, as virtually every legislative body in America is decrepit and deadlocked. To have a socialist executive who can deliver! I can’t get enough of it. I want to know about every single thing this administration is doing, big or small, trivial or ambitious. His press conference on fixing the bump in front of the Manhattan entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge delighted me because on a fundamental level, I think this is the kind of business that mayors should be getting into, like a politician in a cartoon. Retail politicking matters! A mayor should be present at the opening of an envelope. A mayor should attend all parades. (Not literally, but you know what I mean.)

I hope this is the beginning of a new sort of relationship the public has to its government, where public life is treated with the seriousness it deserves, and civic engagement becomes a part of daily American life for everyone. I was thinking about this the day of the inauguration, which felt monumental despite less than ideal conditions for most of the people who attended. I grew up in the suburbs but spent all of my adult life in or just outside of dense major cities along the Acela corridor, and I recognize a certain collective sense of civic responsibility from them that I did not grow up around or fully understand until I left home for the first time. A not-insignificant factor in this is my social circle, which trends fairly left-wing and community-oriented. Some of this is because proximity breeds familiarity, and it is impossible to escape your neighbors when you live in a city. Still, this is America, and for the most part you’re on your own. That makes events where people come together all the more special.

The day of the inauguration was, as some of you probably experienced yourselves, extremely cold. I couldn’t shake the chill for several hours after I had gotten home, even after changing into inside clothes and cranking the heat up beyond financially prudent levels. I’m not a doctor but I think I may have gotten mild frostbite. This isn’t the first time I’ve had a weather-related health issue over the course of this mayoral election. On primary day, after hours of talking to voters at a poll site in Bed-Stuy in hundred-degree weather, I got mild heat stroke. Anything for the cause! I hope the next time we elect a democratic socialist to run the world’s greatest city, we get to do it in more temperate conditions.

I got there around 11:30, relatively early but not early enough to avoid the lines. The NYPD had closed off the intersection that the Mamdani team had notified attendees was the entrance to the block party. I asked an officer where we were supposed to go instead. He ignored me. I asked again, a little louder this time. He turned to me, annoyed, and said he didn’t know. I followed the crowds and the advice of a volunteer posted up nearby telling us to go to Wall Street. After several blocks of walking in the same direction as everyone else I reached our destination; it was the other side of the street of the entrance the Mamdani team had told attendees to enter at. Any of the cops blocking half the intersections in the area could have told attendees where to go, but instead large crowds of people were forced to walk in a big circle only to end up right around where they started.

If I had to guess I would say I spent about an hour and a half in line, with very little room to move around. The crowd in front of the security checkpoint was tightly packed and moving very slowly, in fits and starts. A few steps forward, five minutes in place. Two cop cars were parked in the middle of the road, taking up space that people could have stood in and preventing anyone from having any breathing room. As we got closer to the checkpoint I could see there were three cops checking bags and scanning attendees, each with their own line. Another cop was directing people in the amorphous crowd into one of the three lines. He told a reporter standing near me that he couldn’t bring his backpack in. “Backpacks weren’t on the list of prohibited items,” the reporter protested. “You can’t bring that in,” he repeated. There were quite a few people the crowd wearing backpacks, so if they were actually prohibited it appears no one got the memo.

The cops at the checkpoint were moving in slow motion. I saw someone in front of me get body scanned four times for no apparent reason. Alex, a Londoner on holiday in the city who was standing near me on line, joked that he was getting the “full New York experience” watching the cops behave the way they did. He’s correct about that. The NYPD is so bad at crowd control and most other aspects of their jobs that this basically is the typical New York experience.

Of course when I finally got through security I found that the block party had plenty of space for attendees to move comfortably. The cops had blocked off the entire sidewalk for several blocks, so you couldn’t leave for any reason unless you were willing to get back in the security line. If you wanted to use the bathroom, or warm up for a bit indoors, you had to jump over the barricades and hope a cop wouldn’t see you. I did this a couple of times. A very nice doorman at St. Paul’s Chapel let me stand in the doorway with him for a few minutes to stave off my aforementioned frostbite, although he said I couldn’t stay longer than that. “So much for the church being a place of refuge,” I quipped. He smiled and shrugged. “Well,” he said, “You can’t give just anybody refuge in Lower Manhattan.”

An hour later, being a total baby about the weather, I walked into a CVS to warm up and watched the inauguration proceedings for about 20 minutes on someone’s phone with a group of middle-aged men who did not speak much English. They mostly ignored me but for one funny moment, when the MC announced that Lucy Dacus would take the stage, and one of the men looked up right at me and asked, “Who’s that?” Something I love about this city is that sometimes, in the eyes of strangers, you will feel so seen.

I have a lot of complaints, but this isn’t to say that it wasn’t a memorable experience. It felt incredible to to watch someone I believed in and spent so much time trying to elect take on this monumental responsibility, to feel hopeful for a better future, and to be able to share that with tens of thousands of other New Yorkers from all walks of life. And all things considered, I was early enough to get lucky—I heard reports that the security line, at one point, was several blocks long. But the underreported story of this inauguration is that the NYPD’s incompetence and stupidity made the experience significantly worse for the 40,000 people who braved the cold for hours to witness the new mayor make history.

I am, to put it mildly, not a fan of the police, but I still could not believe just how much of a shitshow their operation was. It is plausible that this complete lack of judgment or care for the tens of thousands of people participating in civic life is actually the fault of the transition team and not the NYPD, but Mamdani’s team has held high capacity events before—multiple rallies, the scavenger hunt. Besides the occasional minor hiccup that is unavoidable at any large event, they went fine. Compare to this the track record of the NYPD. I don’t think even their biggest defenders would describe them as scrupulous or efficient.

Not to be a lib about the whole thing, but the level of condescension and disrespect the NYPD showed towards the public in their complete lack of competence was disgusting. Participating in civic life is every New Yorker’s right; the inauguration is an event important to the city and the people who live in it, and everybody involved should act with a sense of civic responsibility. We live in a society! It infuriates me that the cops don’t ever act like we have one.

There are obviously bigger problems. ICE is deporting innocent people and shooting mothers in the face and dragging people out of their cars to beat them up, for no other reason than that they can. Making everybody stand around in the cold for longer than they had to is relatively low on the list of the NYPD’s crimes against society, of which there are many. But I think this is all related. The NYPD doesn’t have enough respect for the public to do their jobs correctly at a large-scale public event, and they don’t have enough respect for the public to refrain from beating up college students for protesting a genocide, or conducting sweeps of homeless encampments where people with nowhere else to go are desperately holding onto what they have left. They don’t believe we owe each other decency and dignity, but that’s precisely what any society needs to function. I don’t think we should give billions of dollars every year to a paramilitary force that gives us nothing in return. We can do better than that. I hope to see it in my lifetime.

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

• Bari Weiss’s decision to pull the 60 Minutes segment reporting on torturous conditions at CECOT was, unsurprisingly, a political decision. Her politics aside, Weiss was always incredibly unqualified to head CBS News; the most popular Substack you can imagine still has an audience much smaller than any cable television network. That being said, she’s going to fail upwards forever, because no one ever gets what they deserve in Trump’s America.

• Robotaxis are going to be everywhere very soon. Waymo is in talks to raise $15 billion next year, which would be more than double the amount they raised during their last funding round. It doesn’t seem like they’re ready to go nationwide just yet, but what do I know? I’m not a billionaire VC.

• American Girl dolls are turning 40! God, do you remember what a status symbol it was to have one? (I never did, but I read all of the books.) A lot of media marketed for young girls kind of sucks, but I like that the American Girl company has always taken young girls and their engagement with history and the world very seriously.

• It’s very likely the government will shut down again in January. Last week before taking off for the holidays, the Senate failed to pass a funding package. These people don’t do anything.

• Universities helped kill New York’s proposed landmark AI safety bill. The AI Alliance, a nonprofit made up of tech companies as well as universities like NYU, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, Louisiana State University and Dartmouth spent tens of thousands of dollars on an ad campaign against the RAISE Act. I know academia has much bigger problems right now, but it really is a problem that tech companies provide so much research funding to universities. I don’t know how you get around the fact that compute is very expensive, and there aren’t many sources of funding that can actually provide that kind of money. Then again, a lot of these elite schools have billion dollar endowments that they can use at any time.

• Everyone should read Moe Tkacik’s deep dive on Marco Rubio’s adventures in that great American tradition of regime change in Latin America. As a teenager, Rubio worked for his brother-in-law cleaning exotic animal cages, the sale of which was a front for smuggling cocaine and marijuana. Not much has changed in the ensuing decades; as Secretary of State, he’s busy appointing drug kingpins by force to head basically every Latin American country in the name of fighting the drug cartels.

• The Education Department will resume wage garnishment for people who have defaulted on their student loans next year. I am sure this will do great things for Donald Trump’s approval ratings.

• The founder of Telegram has at least 100 known biological children. This story is so crazy. Someone needs to study the minds of billionaires to get to the bottom of why they’re so obsessed with having children and why they seem to believe this is a public service.

• Another preoccupation with the rich is getting out of hand: living as long as possible. “Longevity tourism” in some form or other has always been a lucrative industry, but treatments are getting more expensive and more central to the experience of luxury travel. It’s unclear whether this stuff actually does anything.

• Rich people aren’t the only ones who want to live longer. According to this Consumer Trends report by Dan Frommer, an estimated 36 percent of people claim they want to live forever. Another interesting bit from this report: 75 percent of Gen Z and millennials believe “content creation” is a viable career path.

• Can Zohran Mamdani actually do anything about the housing crisis? Samuel Stein writes for Jewish Currents about the structural impediments Mamdani will face in office, chief among them the obstacles Eric Adams has set in his way as a parting gift.

• As of 2025, parents in New York City spend an average of $22,500 per child per year in childcare. Bill de Blasio’s landmark accomplishment of expanding pre-K to every child in the city was an incredible example of what government can do to benefit working people. Winning universal child care will be even more complicated.

• Rama Duwaji’s profile in The Cut is very sweet. Duwaji talks to The Cut’s Danya Issawi about her career as an artist, how she’s adjusting to all of this newfound fame, her relationship with Zohran and how she feels about being the next First Lady of New York. I like that all the fabulous clothes she’s photographed in are specified to be on loan. The people’s princess!

  ---

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

Damn, get your flu shot, everyone. This is a PSA. I’ve spent this whole week completely unable to move, like I was hit by a truck. I think I would have actually preferred being hit by a truck. It hurt to take a shower, it hurt to sit upright in bed, everything was either too hot or too cold. It took me four whole days to stomach a meal with more than one food group. I cried watching the very silly new Christmas movie with Michelle Pfeiffer. I cried watching Sorry, Baby. (Not silly, very good, give Eva Victor an award!) I miss the world outside my apartment. Unfortunately during all of this, my phone stopped being able to charge, so my first foray into the world post-flu will have to be the Apple Store. According to the CDC about 60 percent of U.S. adults did not get the flu vaccine this year. I never want to be a statistic again.

Bad things always happen to me in December, which is my birthday month. This year I got my headphones stolen by coat check at a holiday party the day after my birthday and was fully gaslit by the hotel staff into believing I lost them. Last year on my birthday my Uber driver hit someone with their car, and two weeks later I got my heart broken by someone who behaved in such a gratuitously cruel way that thinking about the events of that day still sends my body into fight or flight mode. In 2022 my phone spontaneously combust while I was out dancing with some friends, I had to spend most of my birthday waiting around at the Apple Store, and then two days later I was rendered immobile by the flu—time is a flat circle!

I could drive myself crazy wondering what that means for my future, or what tone that sets for my 30s or what the universe is trying to tell me, but I am making peace with the idea that expecting patterns of a celestial nature to predict outcomes is actually a symptom of anxiety. The truth is that life is pretty random and sometimes things happen, and the only thing you can do about it is remember that when stuff happens it’s not really about you, and to try your best to be prepared. After a decade or more of flirting with astrology as a fun and harmless hobby, I’ve moved on, I think. It is very fun to identify strongly with being a Sagittarius sun and a Gemini moon and a Scorpio rising and all that, and of course I have felt seen and understood by generic magazine horoscopes in the past. It’s the same appeal as looking into a mirror. Who can’t get enough of self-perception? I think I’d like to spend the next decade looking at my face a little less.

I still believe in God, though. Maybe I’m still writing this newsletter at 40 I’ll announce that I’m an atheist by then.

Do you think the people who got caught smuggling NVIDIA chips to China bought them on eBay? I can’t believe that if I really wanted to, I could type my credit card information into eBay and buy an H200 and get it shipped to my house. I tried going through the motions just to see if there was a catch and there wasn’t. I even got a little holiday discount code! I just thought there would be more steps involved in buying a fairly advanced piece of hardware that was, until recently, banned from selling in China.

A lot of interesting things in this Politico poll measuring voter sentiment in Global North countries. An fascinating bit: Paris’ outgoing socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo has accomplished a lot in making the city more green and reduced traffic congestion and pollution, but hasn’t done much about affordability—a big theme in elections next year in the Western world. I like that the phrase “affordability crisis” is so popular now. Zohran’s power!

I am so happy for these kids rediscovering connection in the absence of phones!!! It’s still early, but I think you could say New York State’s phone ban is a very successful public health intervention. This piece only talked to students and teachers in NYC, but I would be interested in seeing reporting on how kids upstate feel about not having their phones in class.

Night Club 101 is selling one-year unlimited memberships. Individual ticket prices are typically between $10-20, so this works out financially if you commit to going to around 15-20 shows a year. I think this could become much more common at this price point in the next year, since members’ clubs for the wealthy have taken off but there is generally a limit to how many customers you can make money from in that stratosphere.

The rivers in Arctic Alaska are turning orange. Nothing to see here!

I am an airport lounge enjoyer, but this is going too far. I know I won’t convince a single boardroom in America but here is my plea: please stop trying to chase the whims of the richest people on planet Earth and make the normal lounges nice. Those rich people don’t even want to be flying commercial anyway!

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

Happy Thanksgiving Eve. I’m writing to you all from suburban New Jersey in the house where I grew up. Do people still go out with their hometown friends the night before Thanksgiving? I’ve never felt the need to do this personally, but I’ve been hearing about it less and less lately—perhaps because Americans spend less time together, but more likely because I am pushing 30 and people my age have jobs and lives and partners.

Things are supposed to slow down during the holidays but it seems like there’s more news than ever, which some people on the internet would probably call a “recession indicator”.

Subscribe now

Two National Guard members were shot in Washington D.C. A suspect is in custody, but the cause is still unknown.

A network of new Super PACs is trying to elect candidates who are pro-AI regulations. They plan to raise about $50 million, primarily from Anthropic execs and employees. This is a fraction of what the Andreessen Horowitz-backed Super PAC Leading the Future has raised to fund House candidates who are friendly to the industry. Anthropic has been trying to position itself as the “good” AI company as opposed to the rest of the “bad” AI industry for a long time, and bankrolling pro-regulation House candidates explicitly in opposition to a16z’s Super PAC furthers its reputation as the foil to the rest of the industry. I don’t think this reputation is wholly unwarranted, but Anthropic is still a $350 billion company with ties to the defense industry.

Language learning models can’t tell time. Researchers suspect there are real deficiencies in models’ ability to determine spatial orientation. Out of curiosity, I tried this out with Claude by uploading a photo of an analog clock at 8:19, the hour hand very clearly pointing above 8 and the minute hand very clearly pointing just above 4. First, Claude told me the time on the clock was 4:20. Then when I said that was the wrong answer and asked it to try again, it apologized and told me the time was 8:20. Not ideal.

Gen Z men are connecting on and offline over their shared love of the quarter zip. Whatever solves the male loneliness crisis, I guess. Anecdotally, I have been seeing more of these around my usual North Brooklyn haunts, but I had assumed it’s because I live around a lot of tech people.

Another way to solve the loneliness crisis: do paperwork with your friends. The practical result of companies outsourcing customer service functions to AI chatbots is that people have to take on the administrative work employees once handled, and it’s affecting everyone’s quality of life. I really like this idea.

An Israeli startup wants to fight climate change by blotting out the sun. That sounds like a really good way to accidentally kill everyone on Earth.

Depending on who you ask, Ozempic may or may not be ruining Thanksgiving. The Times reports that more and more Americans aren’t doing the whole turkey thing anymore because of curbed appetites, while the Wall Street Journal reports that more and more Americans are skipping doses so they can fully indulge at Thanksgiving. No one at my Thanksgiving is on a GLP-1 so I can’t issue a verdict, but maybe some of you can.

Either way, GLP-1s are an unprecedented cash cow. On Friday, Eli Lilly became the first ever pharmaceutical company to hit a trillion dollar valuation, showing investors have more confidence in Eli Lilly’s forthcoming oral obesity drug than they do Novo Nordisk’s offerings.

Rising electricity prices are leaving more and more Americans in the dark. Electricity bills have risen at three times the rate of inflation, as customers struggle to keep up with utility bills. Nearly 1 in 20 households nationwide have utility debt so high it was reported to collections agencies this year. In his meeting with Zohran Mamdani, Donald Trump agreed that Con Edison was price gouging New Yorkers. It remains unclear whether this will mean anything.

A new browser tool wants to turn back the clock to the internet before generative AI. Slop Evader filters web searches to only show results from before November 30, 2022, the day ChatGPT was released. Creator Tega Brain said of the project: “For me, the purpose of doing this work is mostly to act as a provocation and give people examples of how you can refuse this stuff, to furnish one’s imaginary for what a politics of refusal could look like.”

A new Abundance agenda has hit the discourse. I like this one.

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

Some context: I voted no. I felt strongly about it at first but was ultimately not very confident in my vote, and I talked to my friend about it on the phone a couple hours before the vote closed on Saturday night. In the spirit of radical transparency, I have to admit that night I had drank an inadvisable amount of alcohol and made several unbelievably stupid choices that I paid for in dividends the next day. My head hurts as I write this, but I am bravely choosing to give myself credit for being so dedicated to the cause of socialism I was willing to talk shop in that state. (Lawrence, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for making you listen to me like that. I have a bit of a hazy recollection of that night but I’m sure I was really annoying.) Gun to my head I do not remember most of that conversation but I do remember thinking the argument that win or lose this race would advance the cause of, specifically, Black socialism, was the only pro-Ossé argument I found remotely compelling. It was so compelling that I, a person who famously loves to double down, almost changed my mind.

Ultimately I stuck to my convictions, but Ossé’s response to the result was very comradely and admirable and it has made me wonder, over and over, if that was the right decision. I really couldn’t see a path forward to victory in such a gerrymandered district, and struggled to understand the viability of such a high-profile race considering DSA will run several races next cycle. I thought Ossé felt very young to me (it should literally be illegal for politicians to be younger than me) and that he needed some more time to cook before being ready for primetime. It felt like a bad idea to me to take a chance on such a long shot during a year where so many other things were happening and Zohran Mamdani’s first term as mayor would mostly be an unknown quantity. I think everyone is a little too confident that we know how the next four years are going to go. There isn’t much precedent for this moment in American political history, and basically anything could happen. We don’t have enough information about the future to take such a big swing yet.

That does not mean this should be the end of this conversation. 2026 might not be the year, but there is certainly an opportune time for this race. Here is my proposal to DSA, Chi Ossé, and the residents of NY-08: he should run against Jeffries in 2028.

Subscribe now

In 2028, Jeffries will likely be Speaker. Unless the Democrats do something unbelievably catastrophically stupid they will almost certainly take back the House, and while we all know Democrats are better than anyone else at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory it would be extraordinarily difficult for them to fuck this up. We have an unpopular pedophile in the White House disliked even by his own voters and everything is really expensive. There are a bunch of masked freaks snatching people off the streets and everyone hates them. People are really angry about all of this and it’s changing the way the public thinks about politics. If even a few of the dozens of progressive and left-wing congressional challenges going on across the country next year pan out, the center of gravity in the House Democratic Caucus will change even as leadership will probably remain the same. This means there will be an even greater gulf than there already is between Democratic leadership and the rest of the party, and as Speaker Jeffries will be the face of that discontent in the way that Chuck Schumer has been this year.

I am sympathetic to the arguments that primarying the Speaker of the House is harder than primarying the House minority leader, but I’m not convinced. First of all, Jeffries is an extremely prolific fundraiser and he’ll raise a banner amount next year in trying to take back the House. There’s less money spent when Democrats have the majority. His fundraising ability is basically the only qualification he has for being Speaker, since he’s not a particularly good leader or charismatic or good at wrangling the caucus. Chuck Schumer is a spineless idiot who everyone hates but he’s kind of good at retail politicking; Jeffries doesn’t even have that. I would bet a not-insignificant amount of money that sometime between Election Day 2026 and 2028 he will make a high-profile decision that will fail spectacularly to meet the moment and garner him national ill will, which is good for Ossé’s fundraising. DSA members and progressives probably would have donated a ton of money to him in 2026 regardless, but every single day of Trump’s presidency has seen more and more liberals across the country becoming newly radicalized into more confrontational and populist orientations towards politics. A lot of Hillary 2016 and Biden 2020 voters went to AOC and Bernie’s rallies earlier this year. It doesn’t hurt that we have a very good-looking and charismatic new mayor who is popular among rank-and-file Democratic voters and who makes socialism look like fun.

I expect Ossé’s star will rise quite a bit over the next two years. He will still be quite young and fresh-faced in 2028 but he won’t literally be 27 years old. NYC-DSA expects a lot of discipline out of their electeds and now that he’s a member he will likely become a much more polished public figure like every other NYC-DSA politician has become over time, both because he will have more experience and because of things like media training and message discipline. He is already an incredibly talented communicator and naturally very likable, and there’s nowhere to go but up. I think Ossé is correct here that going it alone makes it impossible to build collective power, and an underrated factor in that is that being part of a well-oiled political machine makes you better at the act of politicking. Agreeing to suspend his run after DSA’s decision and enthusiastically reaffirming his commitment to the collective project gained him a lot of goodwill with members (including me!) and they won’t forget it. If another run is put to a vote in two years, I feel reasonably certain that it won’t be nearly as contentious.

As one of Mamdani’s foremost allies on the City Council he’ll have two years to raise his profile in the city and attach his name and face to the affordability agenda, which I believe is attainable. I’m bullish on this because NYC-DSA is pretty good at winning elections. They’ve lost a lot (who hasn’t?) but they’ve won at least a seat or two in every single election cycle since 2019, and those wins have really added up and resulted in tangible policy wins for the working class. I see no reason to believe they won’t continue their winning streak next year and the year after with a chapter that is now 12,000 people strong, not to mention the tens of thousands of former Zohran volunteers citywide who may not be DSA members but have seen that their participation in a political vision that puts people first can actually make a difference. If we win even a couple of seats next year in the State Legislature and then on the City Council in 2027, those are several more allies Mamdani will have both here and in Albany. Kathy Hochul, reading the political headwinds, has signaled a new openness to raising corporate taxes after years of claiming it was a non-starter. More NYC-DSA members in Albany will only make our bargaining position stronger, not to mention the other DSA chapters in New York State that are capable of sending their own candidates to the Legislature.

Two years into Mamdani’s first term, we will much better understand how the political terrain in New York City has shifted. The right and center-left’s playbook will become much more clear. We will better understand their lines of attack, what’s effective, what’s not, how to stop them, what the new limits of our organizing power are, when pushing the envelope pays off and when it doesn’t, and how big our coalition truly is. We have to understand all of that in order to take calculated risks, and a lot can happen in two years. It’ll be a presidential year so we can count on high turnout and enthusiasm riding on the coattails of a potential AOC presidential or Senate run. It’s not a given that this race would be of high salience to voters, but I think Ossé’s enormous talent in communicating to voters will go a long way here.

Ossé’s political orientation towards Black socialism, intentionally taking on the mantle of a proud intellectual and organizing tradition without which a better world would simply not be possible, could change New York City and provide a roadmap to how DSA could change the country. You cannot win without Black voters. This is true for both practical and also ideological reasons. Among them: Black voters are the base of the Democratic Party, race is the modality in which class is lived, none of this would have remotely been possible without Black movements going all the way back to before America’s founding, the most annoying Democrats in America hide behind their relative support from Black voters and it’s insulting to everyone’s intelligence, et cetera. None of this should be new. It is a really serious problem that DSA doesn’t have the juice in Black neighborhoods, and the amount of time people spend trying to elide this fact is existentially threatening to the mission. If Ossé can figure out how to successfully organize working-class Black voters in Bed-Stuy and Canarsie and East New York and Brownsville and East Flatbush, maybe the same can happen in Harlem and Crown Heights and Jamaica and Parkchester and Mott Haven. Maybe it can happen in Baltimore and Detroit and Oakland and Atlanta. Maybe it can happen in South Carolina and Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana. We have a moral obligation to try, and DSA is honestly out of excuses.

I think this is all achievable, by the way. We all caught a glimpse of what was possible during the George Floyd uprisings in 2020. I’ve seen too many white people both in DSA and outside of it argue that it didn’t work, that Democrats doubled down on policing and that it’s a political nonstarter, to whom I’d like to say: grow up. Did you expect racial capitalism to be gone for good in just a few years? Get a grip!

Not that my personal efforts really made a difference in the mayor’s race (thousands of people worked much harder than I did), but I believed Mamdani had a (slim) chance at victory from the very beginning and I spent way more time canvassing for him than I have for anyone else in years. If Ossé tries again in 2028 I’ll be ready to run through a brick wall for him. I will buy a billboard in Dimes Square begging DSA members to endorse him. I will not talk about anything else for several months. I don’t think I’ll be the only one who feels strongly about this possibility, even among one-time skeptics. On the off-chance that Chi Ossé is reading this (I have no idea who reads this newsletter, other than a couple of exes and also my friends): Hello! I’m sorry it didn’t work out this time but I really hope you consider it!

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a paid subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

The weather is unseasonably cold but it’s another beautiful day in Mamdanistan! This is how I feel. (Not me realizing just now for the first time in my life that this was obviously filmed in Toronto….)

No one really knows how the the next four years are going to go, but early signs point to an administration leaning heavily on coalition politics to ram through their affordability agenda. This administration will need to be able to operate effectively in Albany and in City Hall despite lots of opponents, and judging from Mamdani’s early appointments, he seems prepared to do so. Here is some reading and content that helped me better understand what the political terrain looks like from here on out. Hopefully it helps you too.

✨If you are having trouble with paywalls archive.ph is your friend✨

CUNY’s Center for Urban Research compiled a granular map of last Tuesday’s results by election district. I love the election district in Bushwick where Mamdani got 94% of the vote.

This is an interesting profile of Elle Bisgaard-Church, Mamdani’s primary campaign manager and incoming chief of staff. “It was Bisgaard-Church who came up with the social services-focused Department of Community Safety, one of Mamdani’s central campaign proposals and a way for him to go on the offensive on public safety – usually a leftist candidate’s Achilles’ heel.”

On the most recent episode of FAQ NYC, hosts Katie Honan, Christina Greer and Harry Siegel discuss the next big election that will help determine how the next few years go: the race for City Council Speaker. Even though Julie Menin and Crystal Hudson are the reported frontrunners, basically anything can happen—around this time four years ago, Adrienne Adams wasn’t even in the conversation to become Speaker. Also, this is how I learned that Bill de Blasio is cheating on Nomiki Konst. (!!)

The Working Families Party co-directors talked to Politico about 2026. They discussed 2026 endorsements, whether Mamdani can deliver on his agenda without income tax increases, and the brewing crowded primary in New York’s 10^th Congressional District. The most interesting part of this interview to me is that there is a possible future where WFP endorses Kathy Hochul for re-election against Antonio Delgado, her (relatively) more progressive challenger.

A CFPB and de Blasio alum proposes six actions Mamdani can take in his first 100 days to tackle the affordability crisis. I like the idea of the city manufacturing affordable generics for essential drugs!

There’s a lot of daylight between Mamdani and Jessica Tisch, who he said he intends to retain as police commissioner. I get why he wants to keep her, because if he lets her go and crime goes up by even one percentage point his entire mayoral term will be haunted by nonstop media coverage of how socialists are destroying the city, making it that much harder to deliver on his agenda. Also, keeping Tisch on could prevent the possibility of her mounting a very well-funded primary challenge against him. Then again, this could all happen anyway so maybe it’s not worth it. I don’t know who a preferable alternative would be. Has anyone considered the possibility that Mamdani could have been lying? Sometimes politicians can lie for good!

For The Drift, Katie Way wrote about the failures of the de Blasio administration in dealing with the NYPD, and what Mamdani can learn from them. It’s probably inevitable that he will eventually be at odds with the left-wingers who elected him over the issue of the police, since structurally there’s not a ton he can do to curb the NYPD’s power. Still, something has to be done about this paramilitary organization with a budget larger than many states. I don’t know if anyone in America really knows how.

He won’t be mayor for another 50 days, but Mamdani is already delivering for New Yorkers.

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a premium subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now

A few days ago, I noticed the LinkNYC digital billboard on my block was showing ads for Kalshi, which is the biggest brand in the prediction betting space. New York State is trying to shut down Kalshi, alleging it is running an illegal betting operation. Kalshi’s argument is that it’s actually a futures trading platform regulated by the CFTC, and betting on the site is no different in the eyes of the law than buying a commodity. Who’s to say? Should people be trading on futures in the first place?

Subscribe now

Anyway, it’s Election Day. I’m sitting here typing this at a bar in Morningside Heights, where an Irish man who’s had a green card for three decades is telling me all about why he never became a citizen. (It’s very expensive.) The polls will close in about 20 minutes, and by the time many of you will read this Zohran Mamdani may already be certified the next mayor of New York City. This is what the Polymarket and Kalshi home pages looked like at around 6:30pm EST today:

The odds seem good! Not that prediction betting companies are being honest about that. Yesterday, Kalshi tweeted that Cuomo holds “significantly more support inside NYC” than Mamdani, “per Kalshi data”. Kalshi is not a polling firm, and they don’t have any data on the NYC electorate. Their reasoning is that more Kalshi users in New York City are bullish on Cuomo than Mamdani, while users outside the city placed more bets on a Mamdani win. For context, Kalshi’s worldwide user base is around two million.

Today, Kalshi put up wheatpasted signs in New York advertising the odds they have for Mamdani and Cuomo; Mamdani is breaking 90 percent, as he should be. It is incredible to me that this could possibly be beneficial to Kalshi, but I think what they’re banking on is that people mistake prediction odds, which change in real time as people bet money, for real circumstances. It’s obvious they’re trying to make money both ways. Their back and forth on the election is nonsensical because Mamdani is obviously going to win. But if you don’t pay much attention to politics, how would you know that? I’ve been in multiple neighborhoods across the city today trying to get a sense of how people are feeling about the next four years, and a surprising number of enthusiastic Mamdani voters are nervous that he could lose. I had the privilege of telling them they didn’t have much to worry about, and I loved seeing their faces light up. I shouldn’t be the one who broke the news, though. The prediction betting markets are taking advantage of the dearth of information that most of us have. Zohran might win tonight, but our democracy has never been more fraught. Hope someone does something about that!

I’ve recently become interested in Katherine Boyle, the Andreesen Horowitz partner behind a lot of the defense tech companies that have come to define Silicon Valley’s approach to MAGA. There was a really interesting profile of her in the New York Times this week, where they describe her as a “Phyllis Schlafly of the tech right”. There are some parallels: they’re both religious conservatives, globalization skeptics, highly educated working mothers constantly on the road extolling the virtues of women staying at home.

Boyle is one of the three founding partners of American Dynamism, a fund from a16z that “supports the national interest”. They define the national interest as “aerospace, defense, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, industrials, and manufacturing”. A quick look at their portfolio, past and present, shows some household names: SpaceX, Palantir, Anduril. Mostly defense companies, the most famous of which have an interest in marketing themselves as a lifestyle. They are trying to thread the needle between the techno-optimist right and the populist right, a synthesis that I think is probably the defining characteristic of the second Trump administration.

In his keynote speech to the American Dynamism conference last year, J.D. Vance (a good friend of Boyle’s) made a case for bridging these two sectors of the MAGA coalition together. “We can only win by doing what we always did: protecting our workers and supporting our innovators, and doing both of those things at the same time.” The MAGA project is about protection in the mob sense; you can make sure that you don’t end up the target of American might, but it will cost you, in loyalty or labor.

The philosophy of American Dynamism makes explicit that the entire purpose of America is to project military strength across the world and within its borders. It’s a project of unfettered violence. It’s all they have going for them. The modern conservative coalition is made up of groups that are so disparate from each other that they have very little in common besides a reverence of violence against those they perceive as weaker or subordinate to them. Why not make that the whole project? You can make a lot of money off of death.

I suppose one could say that we knew all of this already, but I’d like to argue that we actually didn’t. This newsletter is all about the distinctions between things; Boyle’s particular brand of conservatism is a product of Big Tech but not universally shared. Silicon Valley is a really optimistic place. They truly believe they’re changing the world even as they make it worse. That optimism used to prop up a fantasy of connecting the world, taking for granted a global society where everyone was on an equal playing field as a consumer—eyeballs in Jakarta are just as good for Meta’s shareholder value as eyeballs in Des Moines, and you could sell the same products to both. Now they’ve turned inward. Bombs abroad are just as profitable as deportations at home.

I think that’s important because basically no one else in American society is optimistic these days. A hallmark of MAGA is that even when they’ve won, they still need to be the victims of the universe. This strain of patriotic technofascism is cheerful and hopeful, which can be politically dangerous. I don’t think people respond well to pessimism because it already permeates every sphere of American society, and frankly, being a downer is really lame. What answer does the left have to that?

In this proposed vision of American nationalism, workers get to participate in the American project, and their labor maintains the national interest. The national interest, Silicon Valley proposes, is surveillance. The military Keynesianism of FDR and Harry Truman let American workers participate in policing the world. Now, they get to participate in policing themselves. I guess the conceit of fascism is that a lot of people already let the cop in their head take over.

I wrote about teachers’ unions, public schools and school governance under fascism for The Baffler. One thing that didn’t get a ton of airtime in the piece, but that I think there should be a lot more reporting on, is how public schools are adopting AI. If the country’s biggest teachers’ unions are going all in on AI in the schoolroom, then there have to be guardrails for student safety and privacy. It doesn’t seem like much progress has been made on that front.

ICE agents abducted nine street vendors on Canal Street on Tuesday. They were tipped off by a right-wing influencer named Savanah Hernandez, who posted a video of herself on Twitter harassing street vendors and tagging ICE to ask them to “check this corner out”. Many things about this situation are infuriating, but chief among them: this woman doesn’t even live here! If you don’t like New York or the street vendors who have always been part of the fabric of the city then you can leave. You don’t get to tell us who does or doesn’t belong in our city!

I didn’t watch the mayoral debate last night but apparently Zohran wants to build new nuclear power plants in New York State. I agree.

Tesla’s profits have dropped by more than a quarter, thanks to Trump administration policy. I would kill to be a fly on the wall of the Tesla board’s next meeting, where surely there must be some second thoughts about their plan to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire. (The autocorrect on the word processor I used to type this keeps trying to correct “trillionaire”. Touching! Maybe they’ll add it to the lexicon in 2026.)

Seth Moulton is running for Senate. Here’s my perhaps controversial opinion: I don’t think Ed Markey should be running for Senate again. He’s 80 years old! Don’t these people have grandkids? Moulton shouldn’t be running either, but a state with a Democratic supermajority and two of the most progressive senators should be capable of producing someone decent to run for this seat. I remember in 2020 when Jake Auchincloss, a thinly veiled Republican lacking in any kind of charm, won a crowded primary in Massachusetts’ 4^th District because the ‘left’ candidate turned out to be a fraud and progressive voters couldn’t get their shit together quickly enough to back the next best option. Everybody swore they would primary Auchincloss in 2022. No one did. He ran unopposed again in 2024. If Massachusetts’ progressive ecosystem couldn’t find a single person in four years in BOSTON to primary a 30-something unpopular congressman who proudly voted for George W. Bush, then what exactly can they do? If I sound bitter, it’s because I am. I lived in greater Boston for two and a half years and it was a formative experience, but I had some demoralizing experiences being involved with Massachusetts politics, including (especially!) with the left. Like, maybe they deserve Seth Moulton. I don’t know.

All that being said, I think it’s interesting that he’s returning AIPAC donations. This is obviously a political stunt that people will see through but I think it’s probably good that centrist Democrats feel the pressure to do something like this.

AI wants to help you buy beauty products. There are some interesting use cases here but I don’t know if consumers will like the consequences. Beauty has always been a more personalized customer experience the more money you’re willing to spend (Sephora and department store counters have testers, drugstores don’t), and I think this is another iteration of that. I stopped buying drugstore makeup once they started locking everything up at Walgreens. I wonder how much money people would be willing to spend just to talk to a store employee.

Everyone at the Claire’s bankruptcy hearing had a story about getting their ears pierced there. ““I’m prepared to head back to Claire’s” for another piercing if a buyer is found and keeps at least some of its roughly 1,300 U.S. stores open, Sussberg vowed.”

Airbnb prefers Alibaba’s Qwen model to ChatGPT because it’s faster. I wonder how many other tech companies are making similar decisions. So much for American Dynamism!

I don’t care about Graham Platner. I’d like to move on now.

Subscribe now

I went to a few Climate Week events this week and I felt like there was kind of a weird vibe going on this year—understandable, given the circumstances. A guy I talked to who works at a climate investment firm said to me, “It’s nice that they’re even having a Climate Week this year.” He’s right. It is nice!

Everyone I talked to seems to have a different opinion on this uncertain moment. There’s a lot of well-deserved pessimism, but much more optimism than you would imagine considering Donald Trump went in front of the UN on Tuesday and told a bunch of world leaders their countries were “going to hell” unless they “get away from this green scam”. A lot of people expressed to me that if there is any cause for hope, it’s resting on the idea that Trump’s whims don’t govern the rest of us. Their lips, God’s ears.

One thing that’s really striking: the private sector had a much bigger presence than I had anticipated. I feel like a few years ago the climate space was dominated by activists and nonprofits, but almost everyone I met this week worked for a consulting firm or a clean tech startup or was a green tech investor. From what I’ve heard, clean energy is a good business opportunity no matter what the White House says because it’s cheaper and the incentives are great for private industry, especially Big Tech (!). We are in a Wild West situation for energy where anything goes, including nuclear energy, which does seem like an actual vibe shift! Is that good? I don’t know. The climate crisis is already here, data centers are making our energy bills go up, and the United States federal government is doing everything they can to wipe out renewables. I’m skeptical of the idea that you can really square this circle—that you can squeeze out oil and gas in the free market by providing a better product, or that reorienting investment dollars into clean energy infrastructure will solve all our problems. It will not surprise you that I found Abundance was pretty popular among this crowd.

China is staking a claim on leading the world in green tech. Setting (very) low expectations so Beijing can surpass them….they mean business!

Everyone should stop what they’re doing and read this piece on Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski and the DHS right now. I can’t believe how insane this is. I would catch myself getting really caught up in the drama of their relationship and then I would remind myself that what they are doing is building an unfathomably cruel police state. There is a prison in Louisiana that they call “Angola” because of the former slave plantation it was built on!!!!! Horrifying. Probably the most zeitgeist-y story about Trump’s America that I’ve read all year.

Turning Point USA is going to have a chapter in every high school in Oklahoma. It would not surprise readers to learn that Oklahoma was ranked the 50^th worst state for its public school systems, outranking only New Mexico (the study also included Washington D.C.). Perhaps there are more pressing issues at hand!

I learned about a new drug yesterday. Tusi, a bright pink powder, has been spotted in bathrooms all over New York. No one seems to really know what’s in it, and even though a lot of people refer to them this way it’s NOT the same thing as cocaine or the psychedelic 2-CB (2-CB might be in it, though). I have never tried a drug in my entire life and I never will so I can’t confirm.

Jacobin talked to a participant aboard the Gaza Sumud Flotilla. Despite escalating threats from Israel and drone attacks, the fleet continues, trying to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. “There is not a single person aboard these vessels who is deterred, intimidated, or otherwise persuaded by Israeli propaganda to leave the mission.”

Palantir merch. Palantir merch!!! The deportation machine is a lifestyle brand. I think we’re about six months away from influencers doing brand deals with Palantir, the “most pro-West company” around. Their competitors—Anduril among them—are following suit. This sounds really dystopian but I actually think it’s kind of the same appeal as wearing a MAGA hat but for wannabe AI researchers who live in group houses in San Francisco; that is to say, the right has been selling their vision as a wearable, attainable aesthetic for quite some time now. Something I think about a lot is how the right’s ethos is so tied up with how they dress and look (Mar-A-Lago face, “Republican makeup”) and it’s all really ugly. That’s intentional. They’re selling the public a lifestyle and they’re arrogant enough to believe it doesn’t have to be pretty.

Elon Musk sold Grok to federal agencies for 42 cents. I guess this means Musk and Trump are friends again. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have made similar deals with the federal government for similar prices; they all want to be THE AI provider for the government. Everything is so stupid I can’t believe it.

It’s Sit at the Bar September. I am a little resentful at the need for a TikTok slogan to define every mundane and commonplace thing one could possibly do (Getting a drink? At a bar? Groundbreaking!) but phone fatigue is clearly starting to reach a tipping point.

Sabrina Carpenter for Vogue Italia. Now that’s a STAR! How often do you get to say that about anyone in 2025?

Of course, in the mind of a Republican everything is always the fault of the Democrats. But there is not even a shred of evidence that the killer was left of center, and yet everyone has decided to concede to this insane narrative anyway. Conservatives are baying for blood. “They are at war with us,” Jesse Watters proclaimed on his broadcast. “The Left is the party of murder,” Elon Musk tweeted. The gall of right-wingers, who celebrate the deaths of those killed by police and cheer on deportations and bombs in Gaza, to suggest that the left is making this country a more violent place.

To spend any amount of time marveling at their hypocrisy is a total waste. Of course everything they do is hypocritical. They are not ashamed of lying and they’ll do it again no matter how many times they’re called out on it. They lie every time they open their mouth, but it doesn’t matter because pointing that out doesn’t do anything and it matters to basically no one. People expect everyone in politics to be a scammer; what matters is if the scammer is on your side.

It is really strange to me that the response to this murder has been so effusive, and I’m not sure why more people aren’t calling it out. Charlie Kirk was not some universally beloved household name or anything. He wasn’t an elected official or a celebrity. He had a podcast and founded a political organization—in algorithmically siloed America, neither lends well to nationwide fame. Trump flying the flag half-mast yesterday seemed more suited for a much more famous American icon than the likes of Charlie Kirk.

Pete Hegseth also released a video of himself making a speech to service members in uniform honoring Charlie Kirk “and those who serve”. I don’t need to remind you all that Kirk was not ever in the military. This was literally just some guy! A right-wing influencer who did well on social media, sure. I am willing to believe that he was an outsized figure on college campuses. But most Americans are not in college right now, and campus politics loom large in the minds of center-right columnists and basically no one else. Could you imagine a Democratic administration doing this for Rachel Maddow? At least the American people know who Rachel Maddow is. The Yankees hold a moment of silence for Kirk during last night’s game. I wonder how many people in the crowd had ever even heard of him before yesterday.

Trump used the attempted assault on former DOGE staffer Edward Coristine (more frequently known as “Big Balls”, a nickname I did not enjoy typing out) as a pretense to stage a federal military takeover of Washington D.C. I am worried about what this assassination will provide them cover to do. Last night around 9pm ET, Trump released a video addressed to the country, expressing his condolences to the family and doubling down on the narrative that the “radical left” made this happen. They are “directly responsible”, he said.

What’s troubling about this was his stated commitment to using the powers of the federal government to find not just the killer, but anyone he perceives to be involved in political violence, including “the organizations that fund and support it” and “those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country”. What does this mean, and how far will they take it? Is every person who participated in a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020 in danger?

People are struggling, and they know this is not sustainable. We are a country at the breaking point. No one can afford anything, no one can get a job, people die nearly every day from gun violence and the people who are in charge fan the flames of incendiary political rhetoric every day. Instead of answers, the right gives America scapegoats; it’s the immigrants taking your jobs, the feminists preventing you from getting a girlfriend, the criminals making big cities “unlivable”. This is probably a nightmare for right-wingers who sincerely believe the externalities of their destructive politics can always be pushed onto people who are not like them. Charlie Kirk was someone who represented quite accurately so much of the decay of this country. Now they know they’re not immune to their own fascist politics.

Not that our politics were much better before. We are still conducting a genocide abroad with our tax dollars, and people of conscience who oppose the killing of tens of thousands of children are still being arrested, detained, surveilled. I still believe, though, that things can get worse. The fact that I can post something critical of the president online for the public to see and not worry about whether I’m going to get a visit from the feds is evidence of this. Never underestimate how much worse it can possibly get. Unfortunately for all of us, I think that might only be obvious in hindsight.

Danya Issawi’s piece on the relics Palestinian women have taken from Gaza made me cry. It will probably make you cry too. (Illustrations by Rama Duwaji, Zohran’s wife!)

For a short amount of time yesterday, Larry Ellison was the richest man in the world. Never underestimate the power of B2B SaaS to change the world.

According to a poll conducted by Cosmopolitan, Gen Z is not actually scared of on-screen sex scenes. I have always found the internet’s enthusiasm for dissecting the sex lives of zoomers to be really strange, since they are relatively young and still figuring themselves out, and will probably change their minds many times as most people do. It would be great if the discourse around this would end soon.

Roblox is a scary place. The scariest part: the kids can’t even recognize an ad when they see one. "Well, you know, we’ve seen Chanel bags in the Roblox shop, but I don’t think that’s Chanel advertising.” Open the schools!!!!

Billionaire Steve Cohen thinks he’s the king of Queens. A rare redeeming moment for Jessica Ramos, who is the only major elected official representing the area that is still against Cohen’s proposed casino.

I was not familiar with the “cortisol belly” TikTok trend but I don’t like it. I feel like every day I find out about a new way people on the internet pathologize their weight. At least in the 90s when heroin chic was a thing people didn’t act like their concerns were in any way medical.

Thanks for reading Terms and Conditions! If you liked this newsletter, consider upgrading to a premium subscription, or forwarding this to a friend. xoxo TM

Subscribe now