newsletter

11.13 | to be eager, young & against the machine

Being doubtful of a young upstart with few inroads into the system is a fair critique! I worry about it myself!

elaine

13 Nov 2025 — 7 min read

✉️ letter #71

So, the candidate I voted for actually won last week! Hurrah! Having voted early, I’d spent Election Day out by the Finger Lakes region, hiking and generally enjoying some moments of zen in nature while occasionally checking the numbers. But I’ll be honest, I wasn’t particularly anxious. I’d predicted to My Guy that I expected about a ten-point lead for Mamdani versus Cuomo, and felt pretty validated the next morning when that was basically what had happened.

Don’t call me an oracle yet, I vastly over-predicted what numbers Sliwa would get - perhaps I was a little too charmed by his riotous performances at the debates, even if I never-for-a-second felt his actual platform made sense.

My Guy was a bit salty about it all, having been a Mamdani-doubter since the beginning. It could be because he’s Gen X and therefore in a completely different internet bubble than I am, but I’ve spent a good part of the year carefully explaining to him that:

“Yes, the sexual allegations against Cuomo are many and valid, and despite his Daddy-vibed COVID fireside chats (which I appreciated too btw!) there’s a lot Cuomo handled pretty badly during the pandemic.”

and...

“No, the whole Mamdani is a trust-fund kid who had a big wedding controversy is actually AIPAC-funded spin on some pretty normal immigrant upper-middle-class activities, but also hilariously hypocritical when his competitor is a MULTI-MILLIONAIRE whose dad was literally Governor of New York.”

I have a lot to say about the critiques of Mamdani’s class status and education being used against him, the bizarre logical gaps inherent within the argument that his background disqualifies him espousing his proposed policies, and why that personally offends me, but it could fill a whole other newsletter. Maybe later!

🎼 the soundtrack | Going Crazy - NNAMDï

In the meantime, I will engage with an argument My Guy brought up, which I do actually feel has some merit: can someone with so little experience in the New York political machine actually do enough to not get steamrolled by that political machine?

Because I get that! I’ve spent this year slowly digesting Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, and just as the election was hitting its stride, I reached the part where the young, charismatic, progressive and popular mayor John Lindsay (1966-1973) came on the scene. There are some very stark parallels.

Both were consider young upstarts bringing new energy to the race - Lindsay’s unofficial model was, “He is fresh and everyone else is tired.” (lol)
Both possessed a deep moralistic strain in their campaigns, seeking to upend unjust power structures that had become ingrained into city planning.
Both ran on messages that the whole system of the city was in crisis and becoming unlivable for the average New Yorker.
Both campaigns hit hard and got people to the polling stations. In fact, the 2 million-strong voter turnout this year hadn’t been seen since Lindsay’s 1969 reelection.

And how did Lindsay do? Caro went pretty hard on the mayor in his book (probably under the anxiety of it all unfolding in real time) saying, “The ignorance of some of these men concerning the true nature and powers of public authorities would have been ludicrous if it had not been the city’s future that that ignorance was jeopardizing.”

Lindsay the Reformer’s action plans for New York put him directly up against master planner Robert Moses, but he lacked the deep knowledge of the state’s financial and political mechanisms that Moses had more-or-less designed. Lindsay was routed with ease. In the end, most people don’t remember Lindsay as a great mayor — heck, if you went out on the street and asked New Yorkers about their mayors, would anyone even know his name?

Which is all to say, being doubtful of a young upstart with few inroads into the system is a fair critique! I worry about it myself!

...Except that I truly believe we’re in a different New York now. For one, there is no Robert Moses anymore. That guy was, for better or worse, truly one-in-a-billion in his energy, drive, singular ambition to reshape the city to his liking, and calculated ruthlessness in doing so. In his place now, there’s a half dozen incredibly well-funded corporate lobbies, which require a different sort of strategic finesse. But at least they don’t directly control a shocking amount of city money and the extraordinary ability to enter or exit Manhattan.

Plus, at least so far, our new boy been making some surprisingly savvy moves: namely, waiting until Election Day to disclose he voted for some of the more controversial “City of Yes” ballot proposals that speed up development processes by sidestepping community boards/councils. These have as equal a chance of screwing over conservative NIMBY groups as it does justice organizations fighting for disadvantaged community voices. Some of my Dem-Soc compadres will hate me for saying so, but it was very strategic to not get bogged down in that debate right before people went to the polls. Another whole other newsletter topic, maybe later!

AND. AND. I want to, no I need to talk about his mayoral transition team, because my heart leapt when I saw who was on it. Honestly, the fact that its diverse and all women was not nearly as important to me as the fact that those women were 100% certified baddies. Names that immediately popped out to me:

Grace Bonilla: An absolute giant in delivering equity initiatives to New York City both through civic organizations and within the Mayor’s office. If you’re talking about the necessity of knowing the machine, she was a key player in both the Bloomberg and DeBlasio administrations, leading the social service agency and putting racial justice at the forefront of access to resources. She’s most recently been in charge of United Way, a not-for-profit that’s been mobilizing community-driven solutions in education, health, and financial security.
Maria Torres-Springer: First Deputy Mayor under Adams who was particularly known for turning progressive values into practical results. She led efforts to strengthen the economy while creating new homes and preserve public housing, she was the first woman President of New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) which gave us our (frankly under-hyped) NY ferry service, and she had the integrity to quit her role when Adams made a deal with Trump to drop his corruption investigation.
Lina Khan: If you don’t know Lina Khan, you ought to learn everything about her immediately. She was one of the most effective FTC Trade Commissioners in recent history, becoming a literal antitrust and consumer protection warrior so challenging that corporation lobbyists were on the knees begging the administration to fire her. Some things you can directly thank her for include banning “junk fees,” making it easier to cancel subscriptions, lowering drug prices, releasing $60 million in illegally withheld tips to gig drivers, and aggressively policing consumer data sales. If anything tech- or pharma-based got just a little less noticeably annoying for you during the Biden administration, it was probably Lina’s work.

I’m sure Melanie Hartzog and Executive Director Elana Leopold are cool too, but I admittedly know a lot less about them.

In any case, America tends to focus really hard on the singular person on top when they tell stories, but even singularly singular people like Robert Moses can only do the things they do if they’re propped up by excellent people around them. Maybe Lindsay's team kind of sucked in comparison? I am cautiously optimistic when I see who’s been chosen to prop up Zohran.

🪢related threads

"Our Time is Now" - an earlier Mamdani speech transcribed in posterity by Jacobin that's worth a read, if only to keep tabs on how much his eventual record matches his platform.
Even though Mamdani just about never said the words "climate" anywhere, most folks are calling it a win for the "take climate change seriously" agenda. In several of my Climate School classes, we've been talking about the sadly necessary paradigm shift of tying climate action to the more day-to-day things people actually care about – pollution, comfort, security etc. [Mother Jones]
Just a little bit about the whole class/education thing, from the Director of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College, about reporters wanting to hear about Mamdani's major in Africana Studies at Bowdoin College. Namely: "Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist—and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It’s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. “People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003." [LitHub]
In a similar vein, Anthropic recently shocked everyone by posting a six-figure writing job. It turns out that having breadth and depth of knowledge and the skills to transform it into real gut-punch thought leadership isn't something a content mill can create even with AI. Shae Omonijo, who's built up a pretty amazing platform on humanism in the digital age, argues for why this makes sense. [Shae's Substack]

✨enjoying: a piece of pop culture fun

Since we talked about Robert Moses... might I interest anybody in please please please watching Francis Ford Coppola's incredibly messy ode to The Great Man, Megalopolis?

I went to see it sometime when it came out in theaters last year and it was decidedly NOT GOOD. But it was NOT GOOD to the point of being kind of hilarious? Near the end, the entire audience was laughing hard at the unintentional magic on screen.

So how sad was I when I could not find anyone to discourse about it with! This movie was cult favorite The Room but with A-list actors and a budget that bankrupted its award-winning maestro. It was equal parts baffling and beguiling in its bafflement. Who was this movie made for? What was it trying to say exactly? Why is Adam Driver reciting Hamlet at a press tour on sky bridges? Did a satellite just fall out of the sky and destroy lower Manhattan??

"WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS BONER I GOT?" (spoiler alert but come on!!!)