Your questions answered on Dem party failures, GOP crimes, Die Hard, and more!
By Sarah Kendzior | December 4 2024
Steve: I’ve read all of your books and essays. When I pass along some of your essays or when I had our book club read Hiding in Plain Sight, many people say you’re too depressing for them. How do you respond to this?
SK: Fellow Missourian Harry Truman, when accused of giving people hell, said: “I never gave anyone hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell.” The same applies to me. Only I never nuked a civilian population.
Our global plight is objectively depressing. But the most depressing thing of all is dishonesty. A problem must be acknowledged in order to be solved. I write because I believe that things can change for the better. The more we know, the greater our ability to create a just world. If truth didn’t matter, elites wouldn’t try so hard to suppress it. So I’ll keep telling the truth, hard as it is to hear, and hard as it is to write.
Kas: I just started rewatching The X-Files (having not watched since it originally aired) and I’m finding the show so comforting. I think because of the 90s throwback vibe and its basic premise that the government is always lying to you. I’m wondering if you have thoughts on The X-Files, especially since you wrote beautifully about Twin Peaks —which I assume has some similar motifs.
SK: I was and remain a big X-Files fan! It debuted when I was 15 and was a formative influence. I wrote about it in my book They Knew, along with its spinoff, The Lone Gunmen, that negated the “no one could have imagined 9/11” canard by having the World Trade Center nearly attacked by a plane in the first episode. I also wrote about it in The Last American Road Trip because of course my first teenage road trip was to Roswell. (Millennium also appears in that book — and you should watch Millennium season two along with Twin Peaks; they are excellent and reflect our era well.)
The X-Files is an exceptional series, especially the Morgan and Wong conspiracy arcs and the Darin Morgan episodes. I relate to Clyde Bruckman and wish I didn’t. I could go on about XF forever; when I was in college, I covered the show for Fangoria and interviewed Kim Manners, among others. (I just discovered someone put that interview online back in 2000; how delightfully mortifying now.) I may write about X-Files for this newsletter. But I feel like I wrote several X-Files books that are, unfortunately, non-fiction. The X-Files wasn’t quite ahead of its time: it reflected a dark continuum and debuted in the decade with the greatest freedom to discuss it. [ . . . ]
I am on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, the most famous concert hall in Nashville. A photographer tells me to smile. I hate getting my picture taken, but that day smiling came easy.
After years apart due to the pandemic, my family was reunited: my mother and father, my husband and children, and my sister and her husband and kids. We were in Nashville to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. My parents drove from Connecticut, my sister flew from Dallas, and we drove from St. Louis. It was the first time the ten of us had taken a vacation together.
We didn’t know it would be the last.
Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of country music’s holy ground. Legends surrounded me: Willie, Dolly, Hank, and my favorite, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, who sang with the weariness of reconciling mortality with morality; Johnny Cash, apocalyptic and American to the end.
There is no better music to ride out a pandemic than Johnny Cash. That’s a truth I never wanted to learn. Twenty-first-century truths are like that.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I had taken the kids to the Johnny Cash Museum the day before. I showed them his guitar, his crucifix ring, his handwritten lyrics to “Folsom Prison Blues.”
They shrugged. They knew Johnny Cash — his baritone blared through their childhoods — but preferred the Glen Campbell Museum, where we belted out “Rhinestone Cowboy” karaoke to the horrified amusement of other patrons. Nashville was in full “Nash Vegas” mode and the kids lapped up the flash. Being in the Johnny Cash Museum was too much like being at home.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” my son said when he found me on a bench, tears streaming down my face.
“Nothing,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m watching the last music video Johnny Cash made before he died. He was dying in this video. He was 71, the same age my parents are now. I was so scared they would die when covid came. I still am. I keep thinking about it and how lucky we are to see each other again.”
“And celebrate the anniversary,” he said. He was ten.
“That’s right. Watch with me. You can see a whole life in this video. You can see life go by so fast. Decades and decades, memory and regret, time too fast to bear.”
Will Mamdani bring back the city I remember? Can anyone?
By Sarah Kendzior | November 6 2025
I unpacked a box in the basement and photographed the remains of a life.
A notebook from the New York Daily News, where I earned $40,000 a year in my first job out of college: a job that later became an unpaid internship and now is probably done by AI. A Nokia cell, used for making calls: what else could a phone do? A card for a video store in Astoria, where I paid $900 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.
And the object that shifts Before to After: a keychain adorned with the flag, the Statue of Liberty, and God Bless America. I don’t know where I got it. But I know when: September 12, 2001. I attached it to my purse and wore it without irony, for a time.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
At the Daily News, I worked in the “web room” with the other twentysomethings. Our job was to put a replica of the print paper online. This was a monotonous task performed between the hours of 7 pm and 3 am, but I didn’t complain. A job was a job. The nights left my days free to explore New York City, and I did so with abandon.
I rode subways to every borough, getting off at random stops just to see what was there. I experienced everything firsthand because no other experience was possible: Google Streetview was not there to deter or entice. The streets of New York were paved in serendipity.
In 2002, I felt the ground shift: the march of corporate CHUDout of the sewers into the boardrooms. New York’s criminal underground had risen to the top. The FBI, which had investigated transnational organized crime in the late 1990s and early 2000s, abandoned that pursuit after 9/11 for a narrow focus on Islamic terrorism.
Ordinary New Yorkers paid the price in both freedom and in cash, as prices rose to reflect the white-collar crime economy. The New York I loved was vanishing. It was destroyed not in a day by the 9/11 attacks, but over years by post-9/11 greed: the soaring costs of rent, public services, entertainment, and more.
The city was pricing its diverse residents out when not surveilling them on baseless grounds. The anonymity of the crowd was replaced by the ubiquity of the police. A corrupt mayor, Giuliani, asked for elections to be canceled so he could stay in power. Unsuccessful, he helped install a billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, as his replacement.
That was when I decided to leave. I took a souvenir: my Daily News co-worker, who I married after we quit.
* * *
Everyone who lived in New York City has a variation on the “why I left” tale. But my time there was unusually tumultuous: 2000-2003. I had one “normal” year and two years dominated by the worst attack on US soil in history. I worked at a tabloid that both documented sacrifice and normalized corruption. I captioned photos of firefighter funerals and I uploaded Iraq War propaganda.
I still explored the city. But now subway signs told me to report on strangers, to view New Yorkers not with curiosity but suspicion. I felt plutocrats grasping at my grief, gathering it like clay for the foundation of a new city — a worse city.
It was a far cry from the halcyon days of 2000. One of my main tasks at the Daily News was posting photos. We had three divisions: news, features, and sports. Everyone worked on all three, except for me, after I guilelessly inserted a photo of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill where baseball guy Paul O’Neill was supposed to be. “SARAH IS NOT ALLOWED ON SPORTS!” became the mantra of every night manager.
Despite my well-deserved ban, there was a sports story that caught my interest. Baseball player John Rocker made headlines in 2000 for insulting the 7 train and the people who rode it — and then New York City itself.
“The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners,” he said. “You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there.”
“But that’s the best thing about New York!” I exclaimed to my coworkers, and it remains true. I have never experienced the incredible diversity of languages and cultures and food in such a compact space, especially in Queens, my favorite borough. It’s why I thought I would never leave.
I had to, though. I could not afford to stay on my salary. I moved to one fallen imperial capital — Istanbul — and then another — St. Louis. I wondered if New York would buckle under its corrupt excess and join them as a fellow city of faded grandeur. I wondered if it would allow the dignity of ruins. I wanted proof I had not invented the New York in my mind.
When I returned in the 2010s, New York had transformed into bland rows of luxury stores and banks. When I returned in 2022 to do a book event at The Strand, it was a fledgling technocracy of QR codes and digital currency.
The city’s tangible quality, the literal feeling of New York, had been scrubbed clean, eliminated like newsprint. I hid in The Strand, an old store surrounded by old books, like it was a holy bunker.
I returned one last time in 2023 to see my daughter play violin at Carnegie Hall. Behind me were rows of seats named after the oligarchs I condemned in my books.
Maybe this is why the media doesn’t grasp the depth of corruption, I thought. The bad guys bought the whole town.
* * *
On Tuesday, I woke at 3 am to discover that Zohran Mamdani was mayor. His win was attributed to blue-collar, young, and immigrant voters. People who will be here for the future regardless of whether overlords have deemed them worthy of one. People who have no choice but to fight for that future with all they’ve got.
I turned on his victory speech. Mamdani immediately mentioned Eugene Debs, the socialist politician, and I laughed, thinking, Oh, he’s gonna get shit for that!
By chance, I had spent the afternoon eating Halloween candy and binge-watching Family Ties, because I’ve apparently decided to live up to the ideal of adulthood I had when I was six. The Family Tiesepisode was about how Alex P. Keaton, young Republican, learned to appreciate and defend the speeches of Eugene Debs, even though Debs was a socialist. I wondered if a show with this plot could air now. I wondered if Bari Weiss was burning Family Ties reels on the Paramount lot.
I closed my eyes, hoping the relief of a Cuomo-less political world would lull me to sleep, but was jolted by Mamdani’s shout-out to “Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.” I had never heard an American politician mention Uzbeks outside the confines of terrorism. It was a welcome change.
You may think I’m focusing on trivialities. Of course I am: he’s been the mayor-elect for twelve hours. I learned the hard way, through Obama and “The Squad” and every other charismatic sell-out, that actions matter more than words. Election Day is but a day. The structural stranglehold of the mafia state can undo the will of the people. When Mamdani is in office, I will judge him by his deeds.
What right do you have to judge, Missouri yokel? the political cult may scoff. For one, New York is an international city. I would like to see if Mamdani makes good on his promise to, for example, arrest war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit.
But mostly I want New Yorkers to get what’s theirs: affordable housing, accessible food, free transportation, and respect.
Respect for ordinary people is the main quality stripped away from New York in the decades I was gone. In those decades, New York uplifted a large number of extremely corrupt characters: Trump, Giuliani, Cuomo, Bloomberg, Bernard Kerik, Eric Adams, and Jeffrey Epstein, to name a few. They were given glory that they did not deserve.
They made headlines — or with teams of PR professionals replacing media, the headlines made them. But the regular people who have long made New York a dynamic place were denied opportunity. They were overwhelmed with the struggle for survival and sneered at by the politicians who are supposed to serve them.
Throughout his campaign, Mamdani treated New Yorkers with respect. His behavior was greeted with shock, and then appreciation. Whether it translates into policy remains to be seen, but it translated into votes — and, hopefully, into a cultural shift that goes far beyond one politician.
* * *
Dick Cheney, whose shadow loomed over the New York I inhabited, died the morning Mamdani was elected. It felt like an omen of transformation, as did the annihilation of the Cuomo dynasty. A new chapter to end the dark prologue of the 21st century.
But I cannot let myself believe it. It’s too early. I’m packing my longing away with my Nokia and my notebook and my 9/11 keychain and my extinct video store card from the now expensive Astoria, home to wealthy professionals like Mamdani.
Much as my old job turned into unpaid labor, my $900 Astoria apartment now rents for around $3000. To my shock, this is considered cheap in some New York circles. Mamdani was criticized for living in a $2300 a month Astoria apartment allegedly meant for poor people. I cannot fathom how any poor person could afford a $2300 apartment. In this way, I am content to be an outsider to New York.
But I am not an outsider to the corruption crisis: no American is. I know what it’s like to dream and what it’s like to be betrayed.
Look into the crowd at the Mamdani rallies and you see glimmers of the old New York, a skyline of light shining in their eyes. You see that gleam and don’t know if it will turn to triumph or tears, and that’s the trick.
I want Mamdani to be the man they believe he is. I want New Yorkers to be the people they dream of being. I can picture a better world even if I am uncertain. I pack that vision away with my mementos too — not because I don’t believe in its promise, but because I want to keep it safe.
What is New York’s past, if not possibility?
* * *
Thank you for reading! I don’t paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family, so I appreciate and need your support!
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The leaves are falling without changing, like Congress.
They’re green like dollars instead of the standard gold. They don’t get the glorious dignity of a good-looking death. These are two-day delivery leaves, plucked from the branch by the invisible hand, shot down in the amazon prime of life.
I’m old enough to remember seasons. The way colorful leaves crunched under my feet: the satisfying sound of the reliable march of time. Autumn leaves scattered like crumpled drafts of a chapter near completion. They were absorbed into the soil, and in a few months’ time, earth’s story would begin anew.
Green leaves on the ground are empty pages. They did not get the chance to dazzle and die. They were shut down, like Congress.
I look at the leaves and resent the stolen season: resent it like my generation’s stolen social security and stolen retirement and litany of impending thefts. Stolen country, stolen time. The taking tree.
I look at the leaves and wonder what could have been. I don’t wonder that about Congress. The answer is nothing. When you decide to be nothing, to do nothing, to change nothing, you become nothing. You take everything and you are nothing.
Congress takes bribes, they take vacations, they take offense — they take everything but the heat. They save that for us, so it can scramble our seasons and kill our trees. The heat makes leaves fall too early and ignites fear for our children’s future: This is as much as you will see, this is as far as you will go.
Geriatric millionaires say these are dark days: yes, it’s because we’ve spent fifty years in your shadow. A tyrant rules America while Congress feigns helplessness, practiced in the art, having closed its eyes at every off-ramp on the highway to oblivion.
Congress refused the exits. The American people paid the toll.
* * *
Congress is shut down; Congress was already shut down. Congress shut down in 2016 after spending decades running on dying batteries until the invisible hand yanked them out for good. The mafia state was made plain; civics drowned in corrupt institutionalism. We were told to keep pretending representative government was real.
My mother told me that when she was three, she would sit in front of a blank TV for hours, unaware that someone had to turn it on for the shows to start. That was Congress’s ideal public: a nation of toddlers hooked to useless screens with no agency of their own.
The American public is older now. They’re at that preteen age where they start asking questions. They’re at a preteen age in a country ruled by acolytes of Jeffrey Epstein —the age when you become aware that you are prey.
Europeans like to say American is young country, and we were until the 21st century, when we each turned one thousand years old.
A government shutdown was always the goal. The premature ending, the stripping for parts, the theft without pretense of duty. The open abandonment of the public good. The apathy at abandonment and the avarice in apathy. The slaying of seasons, the torture of time, the collapse of chronology: when promises turn to premises and premises to pixelated dust. There is honor in real dust: this is not that.
When you are ruled by a technocratic death cult, the concept of leverage changes. A general strike does not pose the same threat to the powerful when their goal is to destroythe national economy. A protest does not have the same impact when officials are devoid of shame. A spectacle does not hold the same power when AI lies are generated with a whisper to a soul-stripping robot. A vote is an illusion when elections lack integrity. Calling your representative is a grim farce when your representative serves transnational oligarchy — and sells it American sovereignty.
The shutdown is a vice grip. Maybe it will end, maybe it is the end game. In 2013 and 2019, I feared it was. But Congress came back, with renewed opportunities to staunch the bleeding, which no officials tried to take.
The powerful want the American people to be shut down, trapped in this time, divorced from the cycles of life. A shutdown precludes possibility and shatters the political imagination. It never lets you move on but moves everything around you with bulldozer ferocity. They want you to watch and wait until that is all you do — until you are again the passive toddler before a dead screen.
I buried a fallen green leaf in the backyard. Not to feed the soil, but as a rite of ceremony. We need new rites when the rites of spring and summer and winter and fall are stolen. We need new rites, we need new rights. In a digital dystopia, commemoration feels like war: a strike against the extinction racket.
I’m a backyard soldier, one thousand years old, laying the stolen future to rest. In Greek, “eulogy” means “good words.” I’ve got nothing left to say, but I said it anyway, and that’s something — that’s something.
* * *
Thank you for reading! I don’t paywall in times of peril. But if you’d like to keep this newsletter going, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. That ensures every article remains open to everyone. This newsletter is the main source of income for my family, so I appreciate and need your support!
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
