shutdown

When I Loved New York

by
Sarah Kendzior

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.

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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 CHUD out 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 Ties episode 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.

 
     

Read Sarah Kendzior’s powerful take on “The Shutdown”

by
Sarah Kendzior

By Sarah Kendzior | Oct 27 2024

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 destroy the 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.

 
     

The Bulwark Podcast, with guest Heather Cox Richardson: An Unelected Tech Bro Has Taken Over America

by

We are seeing in real time what it looks like to turn a democracy over to an oligarch, namely the unstable guy from South Africa who thinks he’s going to be emperor of the universe. It’s also very authoritarian to threaten members of congress with a job loss if they vote to provide hurricane relief or to rebuild part of the interstate highway system. Plus, the need for a pro-democracy media ecosystem, the difference between liberal and left, and the William McKinley era was terrible. Heather Cox Richardson joins Tim Miller.

CPAC strangles GOP

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 6, 2023

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) met in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, sparking speculation over the 2024 Republican presidential field. Hard-right figures like Donald Trump and his loyalists Mike Lindell, the MyPillow entrepreneur, and Kari Lake, who lost the 2022 race for Arizona governor, attended, along with House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) and right-wing media figure Steve Bannon, but many of those testing the 2024 presidential waters gave it a miss.

CPAC started in 1974, and since then it has been a telltale for the direction the Republican Party is going. This year was no exception.

CPAC was smaller this year than in the past, and it showcased the Republican extremism that is far outside the mainstream of normal American politics. “Feels like MAGA country!” Donald Trump, Jr., told the crowd.

The headliner was former president Trump, twice impeached, deeply involved in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and embroiled in a range of criminal investigations. In his speech, Trump embraced his leadership of those hardening around a violent mentality based in grievance that echoes that of fascist movements.

“In 2016, I declared: I am your voice,” he said. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

He claimed that he and his followers are “engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from the people who hate it and want to absolutely destroy it…. We are going to finish what we started. We started something that was a miracle. We’re going to complete the mission, we’re going to see this battle through to ultimate victory. We’re going to make America great again.” After listing all the “villains and scoundrels” he and his followers would “demolish,” “drive out,” “cast out,” “throw off,” “beat,” “rout,” and “evict,” he continued: “We have no choice. This is the final battle.”

Other Republican hopefuls are waiting in the wings. Trump has, in fact, never won the popular vote, and his leadership has brought historic losses for the party, but his control over his voting base makes him the front-runner for the Republican nomination.

Other candidates seem to be hoping that criminal indictments will knock Trump out of the race and open space for them without making them take a stand against Trump and thus alienate his followers. It seems likely that if such an indictment were forthcoming, they would blame Democrats for Trump’s downfall and hope to ride to office with his voting bloc behind them, without having to embrace that voting blocs’ ideology.

That hope seems delusional, considering the increasing emphasis of the Trump Republicans and their imitators on violence. The Republicans are hitting on a constant refrain that crime is on the upswing in the U.S. Since crime does not, in fact, seem to be rising, it seems worth noting that an emphasis on crime justifies the use of state power to combat that crime and normalizes the idea of violence against “criminals,” a category the Republican Party is defining more and more broadly. This will be an extremely difficult genie to stuff back into a bottle, especially as leading Republican figures are increasingly talking in martial terms and referring to the U.S. Civil War.

That emphasis on violence corresponds with something else on display at this year’s CPAC: how completely the Republican Party now depends on a false narrative constructed out of lies.

CPAC fact checkers had their work cut out for them. Linda Qiu of the New York Times found Trump repeated a number of things previously identified as incorrect as well as adding some new ones. Politifact fact checked other speakers and found they, too, continued to develop the idea of a country run by those who hate it and are eager to undermine it. Various speakers said the Department of Justice is calling parents worried about their kids’ educations “terrorists” (false), fentanyl will kill you if any of it touches your skin, thus putting us all at deadly risk (false), cartels have “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexico border (false), and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky has said he wants America’s “sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine” (again, false).

Right-wing media amplifies this narrative. Depositions in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit against the Fox News Corporation made it very clear that both Fox News executives and hosts work closely with Republican operatives to spread a Republican narrative, even when it is based on lies—in that case, in the lie that Trump won the election, which they privately agreed was ridiculous. So, when House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) gave to FNC personality Tucker Carlson exclusive access to 44,000 hours of video from the footage from the Capitol on January 6, 2021, he indicated the Republicans will continue to try to garner support with a false narrative.

Carlson’s coverage of the videos started tonight, with him depicting the rioters as “sightseers” and claiming that other media outlets have lied about the violence on January 6. In reality, Carlson simply didn’t show the many hours of violent footage: more than 1,000 people have been arrested on charges relating to their actions surrounding January 6, more than half have pleaded guilty, and around one third of those charged were charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding police officers.

McCarthy’s desperation to maintain the party’s narrative shows in his unilateral decision to give Carlson exclusive access to that video. A wide range of media outlets are clamoring for equal access to the footage while congressional Democrats are demanding to know on what authority McCarthy gave Carlson that access. The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol had arranged to transfer the films to the National Archives, but when the Republicans rewrote the rules in January, they instead transferred the video to the House Administration Committee.

McCarthy did not consult the committee when he gave access to the films to Carlson. Nor did he consult House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-CA), who has noted that releasing the films without consultation with the Capitol Police is a security risk. Instead, McCarthy apparently coordinated with Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight. Loudermilk led a tour of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021.

Representative Norma J. Torres (D-CA), ranking member of the Oversight Subcommittee, told Justin Papp of Roll Call that McCarthy “totally went around, not just the subcommittee, but the entire committee…. I hope Ethics will have something to say about this. I think it needs to be investigated on all different levels.” In contrast, House Administration Committee chair Bryan Steil (R-WI) appeared unconcerned with the end run around the responsible committee, saying that “the key is that we’re balancing the transparency that’s needed for the American people with the security interests of the House.”

Republicans are planning to take this disinformation campaign across the nation. Despite their insistence that they want to slash government spending, Republican leaders are in fact urging their colleagues to engage in “field hearings” that will take their “message” straight to voters at a time when they are not managing to accomplish much of anything at all in Washington. Jordan’s Judiciary Committee has requested a travel budget of $262,000, more than 30 times what it spent on travel last year and 3 times what it spent before the pandemic, and it is not just the Judiciary Committee that is hitting the road.

As Annie Karni and Catie Edmondson of the New York Times noted today, this also means that they speak at the plants of Republican donors, thus giving them free advertising. Congressional Democrats say they received almost no notice of these trips.

News broke today that an Israeli tech firm has uncovered a vast network of as many as hundreds of thousands of fake Twitter accounts designed to promote Trump and his vision, creating the illusion that he is more popular than he is. The analysts at the firm, Cyabra, believe the system was created within the U.S. “One account will say, ‘Biden is trying to take our guns; Trump was the best,’ and another will say, ‘Jan. 6 was a lie and Trump was innocent,’” said the engineer who discovered the network, Jules Gross. “Those voices are not people. For the sake of democracy I want people to know this is happening.”

Republicans have advanced an increasingly false political vision—what theorists call a “virtual political reality”—since the 1980s, and now their base has hardened into true believers who claim to be willing to fight for their vision. But in the years since Trump took office, previously uninterested Americans have seen what it means when those who believe in that vision take power.

Those who believe in equality before the law are standing up for that principle. Tonight, for example, social media is flooded with video clips refuting Carlson’s narrative point by point, suggesting that McCarthy’s decision to help him shore up the Republican narrative might only have strengthened its opponents.