We need as many people there as possible to carry our message - no more of our tax dollars for endless wars. Can we count you in? Sign up here:
https://www.codepink.org/novdc26
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The Trump administration is escalating its attack on Cuba, cutting off the island’s access to oil in a deliberate attempt to induce famine and mass suffering. This is collective punishment, plain and simple.
In response, we’re releasing a public Call to Conscience, already signed by influential public figures, elected officials, artists, and organizations—including 22 members of the New York City Council, Kal Penn, Mark Ruffalo, Susan Sarandon, Alice Walker, 50501, Movement for Black Lives, The People’s Forum, IFCO Pastors for Peace, ANSWER Coalition, and many others—demanding an end to this brutal policy.
The letter is open for everyone to sign. Add your name today. Cutting off energy to an island nation is not policy—it is a tactic of starvation.
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VIDEO:
What Cubans Really Think About Trump
By Jeff Seal, May 28, 2026
Mr. Seal is a comedian and a visual journalist.
End Texas Torture of Revolutionary Elder Xinachtli
Organization Support Letter
Letter to demand the immediate medical treatment and release of Chicano political prisoner Xinachtli (Alvaro Hernandez #00255735)
To the Texas Department of Criminal Justice,
We, the undersigned organizations, write to urge immediate action to protect the life, health, and human rights of Xinachtli (legal name Alvaro Hernandez). Xinachtli is 73-year-old Chicano community organizer from Texas who has spent 23 years in solitary confinement and 30 years incarcerated as part of a 50-year sentence. His health is now in a critical and life-threatening state and requires prompt and comprehensive medical intervention.
Since his conviction in 1997, Xinachtli has spent decades in conditions that have caused significant physical and psychological harm. As an elder in worsening health, these conditions have effectively become a de facto death sentence.
Xinachtli’s current medical condition is severe. His physical, mental, and overall well-being have declined rapidly in recent weeks. He now requires both a wheelchair and a walker, has experienced multiple falls, and is suffering from rapid weight loss. He is currently housed in the McConnell Unit infirmary, where he is receiving only palliative measures and is being denied a medical diagnosis, access to his medical records, and adequate diagnostic testing or treatment.
A virtual clinical visit with licensed medical doctor Dr. Dona Kim Murphey underscores the severity of his condition. In her report of the visit, she wrote: "Given the history of recent neck/back trauma and recurrent urinary tract infections with numbness, weakness, and bowel and bladder incontinence, I am concerned about nerve root or spinal cord injury and/or abscesses that can lead to permanent sensorimotor dysfunction."
Despite his age and visible disabilities, he remains in solitary confinement under the Security Threat Group designation as a 73-year-old. During his time in the infirmary, prison staff threw away all of his belongings and “lost” his commissary card, leaving him completely without basic necessities. He is experiencing hunger, and the lack of consistent nutrition is worsening his medical condition. McConnell Unit staff have also consistently given him incorrect forms, including forms for medical records and medical visitation, creating further barriers to care and communication.
A family visit on November 29 confirmed the seriousness of his condition. Xinachtli, who was once able to walk on his own, can no longer stand without assistance. He struggled to breathe, has lost more than 30 pounds, relied heavily on his wheelchair, and was in severe pain throughout the visit.
In light of these conditions, we, the undersigned organizations, demand that TDCJ take immediate action to save Xinachtli’s life and comply with its legal and ethical obligations.
We urge the immediate implementation of the following actions:
Immediate re-instatement of his access to commissary to buy hygiene, food, and other critical items. Immediate transfer to the TDCJ hospital in Galveston for a full medical evaluation and treatment, including complete access to his medical records and full transparency regarding all procedures. Transfer to a geriatric and medical unit that is fully accessible under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Xinachtli requests placement at the Richard P LeBlanc Unit in Beaumont, Texas. Approval of Medical Recommended Intensive Supervision, the release program for individuals with serious medical conditions and disabilities, in recognition of the severity and progression of his current health issues. Failure to act will result in the continued and foreseeable deterioration of Xinachtli’s health, amounting to state-sanctioned death. We urge TDCJ to take swift and decisive action to meet these requests and to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard his life and well-being.
We stand united in calling for immediate and decisive action. Xinachtli’s life depends on it.
Signed, Xinachtli Freedom Campaign and supporting organizations
Endorsing Organizations:
Al-Awda Houston; All African People’s Revolutionary Party; Anakbayan Houston; Anti-Imperialist Solidarity; Artists for Black Lives' Equality; Black Alliance for Peace - Solidarity Network; Columbia University Students for a Democratic Society; Community Liberation Programs; Community Powered ATX; Contra Gentrificación; Diaspora Pa’lante Collective; Down South; DSA Emerge; Entre nos kc; Fighting Racism Workshops; Frontera Water Protectors; GC Harm Reductionists; JERICHO MOVEMENT; Jericho Movement Providence; Montrose Anarchist Collective; NYC Jericho Movement; OC Focus; Palestine Solidarity TX; Partisan Defense Committee; Partido Nacional de la Raza Unida; PDX Anti-Repression; Red Star Texas; Root Cause; San Francisco Solidarity Collective; Shine White Support Team; Sunrise Columbia; UC San Diego Faculty for Justice in Palestine; Viva Palestina, EPTX; Water Justice and Technology Studio; Workshops4Gaza.
Sign the endorsement letter for your organization here:
https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/MiR1f+iLiRBJC7gSTyfhyxJoLIDhThxRafPatxdbMWI/
IMPORTANT LINKS TO MATERIALS FOR XINACHTLI FREEDOM CAMPAIGN:
PHONE BLAST: Your community can sign up for a 15-minute-long call shift here: bit.ly/xphoneblast
FUNDRAISER: Here is the link to Jericho's fundraiser for Xinachtli: http://givebutter.com/jerichomovement
CASE HISTORY: Learn more about Xinachtli and his case through our website: https://freealvaro.net
CONTACT INFO:
Follow us on Instagram: @freexinachtlinow
Email us:
xinachtlifreedomcampaign@protonmail.com
COALITION FOLDER:
https://drive.proton.me/urls/SP3KTC1RK4#KARGiPQVYIvR
In the folder you will find: Two pictures of Xinachtli from 2024; The latest updated graphics for the phone blast; The original TRO emergency motion filing; Maria Salazar's declaration; Dr. Murphy's report from her Dec. 9 medical visit; Letter from Amnesty International declaring Xinachtli's situation a human rights violation; Free Xinachtli zine (which gives background on him and his case); and The most recent press release detailing who Xinachtli is as well as his medical situation.
Write to:
Alvaro Hernandez CID #00255735
TDCJ-W.G. McConnell Unit
PO Box 660400
Dallas, TX 75266-0400
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 ‘Freedom Zone’ launches important human rights event October 30 Global Festival in Support of Russian Political Prisoners _________________________________________________________ THE LOCATIONS: Berlin, Munich, Warsaw, New York, Minnesota, Budva, Melbourne, Helsinki, Haifa, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Vilnius, São Paulo, Florianópolis, Batumi, Tbilisi, Belgrade, Riga, Paris, Yerevan, Milan, Vienna, London, Madrid THE AUDIENCE: Anyone concerned about political prisoners in Russia
Lectures, auctions, letter evenings, film screenings and other events will take place in more than 20 countries, including the US, Brazil and Australia, demonstrating worldwide solidarity with the prisoners of the Russian regime. Speakers in different cities will include such well-known opponents of the Putin regime as Daria Serenko, Mikhail Lobanov, Sasha and Nadezhda Skochilenko, Ivan Philippov, Alexey Ponomaryov and other prominent Russian exiles. Funds raised will go towards supporting political prisoners, covering the costs of legal representation, visits from loved ones and other needs. It is also possible to join the international campaign by making an online donation. This global festival will be a tangible expression of opposition to lawlessness in Russia and support for its victims. Let’s show that we stand shoulder to shoulder with those who have been unjustly convicted! ______________________________________________ ‘Freedom Zone’ was founded by Kseniia Kagarlitskaia, daughter of political prisoner Boris Kagarlitsky. Since 2024, the organisation has been holding charity events (festivals) abroad to raise funds for political prisoners in Russia, raising awareness of the unlawful persecution and inhumane prison conditions faced by people in the Russian Federation, as well as campaigning for the release of political prisoners. Website: https://freedom-zone.com/festival Contact: Kseniia Kagarlitskaiazona.svobody@gmail.com +38268347993 Telegram @pruesha ___________________________________________________________________ Donation link: https://buymeacoffee.com/zonasvobodk Russia Confirms Jailing of Antiwar Leader Boris Kagarlitsky In a secret trial on June 5, 2024, the Russian Supreme Court’s Military Chamber confirmed a sentence of five years in a penal colony for left-wing sociologist and online journalist Boris Kagarlitsky. His crime? “Justifying terrorism” — a sham charge used to silence opponents of Putin’s war on Ukraine. The court disregarded a plea for freedom sent by thirty-seven international luminaries. Kagarlitsky, a leading Marxist thinker in Russia’s post-Soviet period, recently addressed socialists who won’t criticize Putin: “To my Western colleagues, who…call for an understanding of Putin and his regime, I would like to ask a very simple question. [Would] you want to live in a country where there is no free press or independent courts? In a country where the police have the right to break into your house without a warrant? …In a country which…broadcasts appeals on TV to destroy Paris, London, Warsaw, with a nuclear strike?” Thousands of antiwar critics have been forced to flee Russia or are behind bars, swept up in Putin’s vicious crackdown on dissidents. Opposition to the war is consistently highest among the poorest workers. Recently, RusNews journalists Roman Ivanov and Maria Ponomarenko were sentenced to seven, and six years respectively, for reporting the military’s brutal assault on Ukraine. A massive global solidarity campaign that garnered support from thousands was launched at Kagarlitsky’s arrest. Now, it has been revived. This internationalism will bolster the repressed Russian left and Ukrainian resistance to Putin’s imperialism. To sign the online petition at freeboris.info —Freedom Socialist Party, August 2024 https://socialism.com/fs-article/russia-jails-prominent-antiwar-leader-boris-kagarlitsky/#:~:text=In%20a%20secret%20trial%20on,of%20Putin's%20war%20on%20Ukraine. Petition in Support of Boris KagarlitskyWe, the undersigned, were deeply shocked to learn that on February 13 the leading Russian socialist intellectual and antiwar activist Dr. Boris Kagarlitsky (65) was sentenced to five years in prison. Dr. Kagarlitsky was arrested on the absurd charge of 'justifying terrorism' in July last year. After a global campaign reflecting his worldwide reputation as a writer and critic of capitalism and imperialism, his trial ended on December 12 with a guilty verdict and a fine of 609,000 roubles. The prosecution then appealed against the fine as 'unjust due to its excessive leniency' and claimed falsely that Dr. Kagarlitsky was unable to pay the fine and had failed to cooperate with the court. In fact, he had paid the fine in full and provided the court with everything it requested. On February 13 a military court of appeal sent him to prison for five years and banned him from running a website for two years after his release. The reversal of the original court decision is a deliberate insult to the many thousands of activists, academics, and artists around the world who respect Dr. Kagarlitsky and took part in the global campaign for his release. The section of Russian law used against Dr. Kagarlitsky effectively prohibits free expression. The decision to replace the fine with imprisonment was made under a completely trumped-up pretext. Undoubtedly, the court's action represents an attempt to silence criticism in the Russian Federation of the government's war in Ukraine, which is turning the country into a prison. The sham trial of Dr. Kagarlitsky is the latest in a wave of brutal repression against the left-wing movements in Russia. Organizations that have consistently criticized imperialism, Western and otherwise, are now under direct attack, many of them banned. Dozens of activists are already serving long terms simply because they disagree with the policies of the Russian government and have the courage to speak up. Many of them are tortured and subjected to life-threatening conditions in Russian penal colonies, deprived of basic medical care. Left-wing politicians are forced to flee Russia, facing criminal charges. International trade unions such as IndustriALL and the International Transport Federation are banned and any contact with them will result in long prison sentences. There is a clear reason for this crackdown on the Russian left. The heavy toll of the war gives rise to growing discontent among the mass of working people. The poor pay for this massacre with their lives and wellbeing, and opposition to war is consistently highest among the poorest. The left has the message and resolve to expose the connection between imperialist war and human suffering. Dr. Kagarlitsky has responded to the court's outrageous decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country,” he said. Russia is nearing a period of radical change and upheaval, and freedom for Dr. Kagarlitsky and other activists is a condition for these changes to take a progressive course. We demand that Boris Kagarlitsky and all other antiwar prisoners be released immediately and unconditionally. We also call on the auth *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* *..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........*..........* |
Self-portrait by Kevin Cooper
Funds for Kevin Cooper
Kevin was transferred out of San Quentin and is now at a healthcare facility in Stockton. He has received some long overdue healthcare. The art program is very different from the one at San Quentin but we are hopeful that Kevin can get back to painting soon.
For 41 years, an innocent man has been on death row in California.
Kevin Cooper was wrongfully convicted of the brutal 1983 murders of the Ryen family and houseguest. The case has a long history of police and prosecutorial misconduct, evidence tampering, and numerous constitutional violations including many incidences of the prosecution withholding evidence of innocence from the defense. You can learn more here .
In December 2018 Gov. Brown ordered limited DNA testing and in February 2019, Gov. Newsom ordered additional DNA testing. Meanwhile, Kevin remains on Death Row at San Quentin Prison.
The funds raised will be used to help Kevin purchase art supplies for his paintings . Additionally, being in prison is expensive, and this money would help Kevin pay for stamps, books, paper, toiletries, supplies, supplementary food, printing materials to educate the public about his case and/or video calls.
Please help ease the daily struggle of an innocent man on death row!
An immediate act of solidarity we can all do right now is to write to Kevin and assure him of our continuing support in his fight for justice. Here’s his address:
Kevin Cooper #C65304
Cell 107, Unit E1C
California Health Care Facility, Stockton (CHCF)
P.O. Box 213040
Stockton, CA 95213
www.freekevincooper.org
Call California Governor Newsom:
1-(916) 445-2841
Press 1 for English or 2 for Spanish,
press 6 to speak with a representative and
wait for someone to answer
(Monday-Friday, 9:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. PST—12:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M. EST)
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Dr. Alter Still Needs Our Help!
Please sign the petition today!
https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
What you can do to support:
—Donate to help Tom Alter and his family with living and legal expenses: https://gofund.me/27c72f26d
—Sign and share this petition demanding Tom Alter be given his job back: https://www.change.org/p/texas-state-university-give-tom-alter-his-job-back
—Write to and call the President and Provost at Texas State University demanding that Tom Alter be given his job back:
President Kelly Damphousse: president@txstate.edu
President’s Office Phone: 512-245-2121
Provost Pranesh Aswath: xrk25@txstate.edu
Provost Office Phone: 512-245-2205
For more information about the reason for the firing of Dr. Tom Alter, read:
"Fired for Advocating Socialism: Professor Tom Alter Speaks Out"
Ashley Smith Interviews Dr. Tom Alter
—CounterPunch, September 24, 2025
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Mumia Abu-Jamal is Innocent!
FREE HIM NOW!
Write to Mumia at:
Smart Communications/PADOC
Mumia Abu-Jamal #AM-8335
SCI Mahanoy
P.O. Box 33028
St. Petersburg, FL 33733
Join the Fight for Mumia's Life
Since September, Mumia Abu-Jamal's health has been declining at a concerning rate. He has lost weight, is anemic, has high blood pressure and an extreme flair up of his psoriasis, and his hair has fallen out. In April 2021 Mumia underwent open heart surgery. Since then, he has been denied cardiac rehabilitation care including a healthy diet and exercise.
He still needs more complicated treatment from a retinal specialist for his right eye if his eyesight is to be saved:
Donate to Mumia Abu-Jamal's Emergency Legal and Medical
Defense Fund
Mumia has instructed PrisonRadio to set up this fund. Gifts donated here are designated for the Mumia Abu-Jamal Medical and Legal Defense Fund. If you are writing a check or making a donation in another way, note this in the memo line.
Send to:
Mumia Medical and Legal Fund c/o Prison Radio
P.O. Box 411074, San Francisco, CA 94103
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Resources for Resisting Federal Repression
https://www.nlg.org/federalrepressionresources/
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
Emergency Hotlines
If you are contacted by federal law enforcement, you should exercise all of your rights. It is always advisable to speak to an attorney before responding to federal authorities.
State and Local Hotlines
If you have been contacted by the FBI or other federal law enforcement, in one of the following areas, you may be able to get help or information from one of these local NLG hotlines for:
Portland, Oregon: (833) 680-1312
San Francisco, California: (415) 285-1041 or fbi_hotline@nlgsf.org
Seattle, Washington: (206) 658-7963
National Hotline
If you are located in an area with no hotline, you can call the following number:
National NLG Federal Defense Hotline: (212) 679-2811
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Articles
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1) Fed Up With Politics and Struggle, Young Voters Rose Up
Young people powered Democratic candidates, joining global demands for generational change from a cohort weary of older people sitting on jobs and devouring resources.
By Sabrina Tavernise and Ruth Igielnik, Nov. 6, 2026
Alienated by an older generation of politicians who felt out of touch and irrelevant to their lives, young voters revolted on Tuesday, powering the rout of President Trump’s Republican Party.
In swings of monumental proportion, young men aged 18 to 29 veered toward Democratic candidates by nearly 40 percentage points since 2024, according to preliminary results from Times Voter Trends. Young women, who were already inclined to support Democrats, swung by 27 points. In the Texas Senate race, men aged 18 to 44 swung nearly 50 points toward the Democrat, James Talarico.
“He is my age,” said Tristan Waumsley, 35, of Richmond, Texas, who voted straight Democratic at the state level for the first time in his life. “He sounded like I could have talked to him myself. He’s somebody normal, like me.”
Republicans have run Texas for years and not produced any real change in his life. With Mr. Talarico, he said, “maybe we can bring society forward, instead of regressing.”
The youth movement swept in or bolstered politicians who looked more like them: Abdul El-Sayed, the senator-elect of Michigan; Rob Sand, the governor-elect of Iowa; Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia; Nithya Raman, the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles; and Sam Forstag, an incoming congressman from Montana. The next clerk of the Superior Court in Maricopa County, Ariz., the Democrat Sebastian Matta, is a 19-year-old Arizona State University sophomore. Another 19-year-old, Daniel Darris-O’Connor, unseated an eight-term Republican incumbent in the Massachusetts House.
The voters swept out the stodgy and rejected wealthy middle-aged men like Rick Jackson, who ran for governor of Georgia, and Ken Paxton, who lost to Mr. Talarico in Texas.
And while the Democratic winners seem to be speaking their language, many voters under 45 — younger millennials and Gen Z-ers — were quick to say their support was not an ideological conversion, but granted temporarily to jump-start real change on the issues such as the cost of living, U.S. relations with Israel and the war in Iran.
Though it felt unfamiliar to vote for Democrats, Mr. Waumsley said he was happy about his choice. But he emphasized that he was voting for the people, not the party, and that he would be watching them closely to make sure they followed through.
“I really want to move on from what we currently have,” he said, “because what we have isn’t doing it.”
The discontent is global, fostering youth movements from Bangladesh and India to Serbia and France. Government resources have gone to Baby Boom retirees with free health care and subsidized retirements, while education has been stretched, health insurance costs have soared and job security has been hampered by older generations that will not get out of the way. Artificial intelligence and climate change have injected real dread into those coming of voting age.
That is scrambling the political lines that have given shape to American politics since the end of World War II.
“The traditional left-right paradigm has been broken,” said Brandon Kenig, 41, a Kansan who came of age in the College Republicans and worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
For young people, that paradigm “applied to their parents and grandparents during a time of relative economic stability,” he said. But normal politics no longer apply, and young people are “seeking out candidates who acknowledge what is happening and do not try to sugar coat.”
Mr. Kenig organized 20 former Republican congressional aides from Kansas to publicly support Adam Hamilton, the Kansas Democrat who beat a Republican senator on Tuesday.
Voters under 30, more so than any other age group, are not tethered to a political party. More than half of Gen Z voters identify as independents, according to Gallup, far greater than the one-third of baby boomers who do not identify with a political party.
Jacob Brillhart, 27, and his wife have not voted in the last several elections.
“You get the same thing, no matter who you vote for, two wings of the same bird,” said Mr. Brillhart, who lives in Akron, Ohio, and works in heating and air conditioning.
But, he said, after this deeply ugly campaign for governor in Ohio, they want to start voting regularly. He said, “We’ll never vote Republican after seeing what the party has done.”
Karrar Al-Sadkhan, 19, a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, said he and his friends had never identified as Democrats. But he was inspired by Mr. El-Sayed, whose message was that “it’s really more of a class war, not blue or red.”
On Tuesday, he cast a ballot for him in the first vote of his life.
The top issue for young voters was the economy, which informed a feeling that they could not launch themselves into the world as fully fledged adults, with houses and families. Chase Sardeson, 23, an electrician’s apprentice in Raleigh, N.C., grew up in a conservative household. But he said he became interested in liberal politics while he was working at a car dealership and learned that one of his colleagues, a Hispanic immigrant, was working three jobs to support his family.
Today, Mr. Sardeson and his girlfriend together pay $1,800 a month in rent for a two-bedroom townhouse. When he did the math for the day he could no longer be on his parents’ health insurance, he said his heart sank.
He said he was helping construct a dental office building that, once it opens, will provide services “that I will not be able to afford.”
“I look at boomers and older Gen X, and I see people who had the chance to benefit from a great America at the top of the world,” Mr. Sardeson said. “I look at myself, and I see a shadow.”
He voted for one of those baby boomers, Roy Cooper, a Democrat, in the U.S. Senate race, but he would have preferred a candidate with a more forceful economic message, such as Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York.
“I feel seen and heard by Mamdani and El-Sayed — even Talarico,” he said.
Izzi Eames, 24, an assistant manager of a coffee shop in Portsmouth, N.H., grew up in a religious and conservative household, influences she has moved away from since high school. Liberal politics is now part of her identity; she said she was “an emotional wreck” after the 2024 election. On Tuesday, she voted straight Democratic and said she wanted the winners “to focus more on small issues.”
“Mamdani does that well,” she said.
Israel, perhaps more than any other subject, is bringing the generational divide into relief. In interviews, young people said they felt the issue was another reason they looked at the political class as one giant blob.
“Older people on both sides say, ‘We’re going to visit Israel first when we are elected, it’s alliance with Israel no matter what,’” said Zaid Sibaai, 23, a recent college graduate working as a property manager in his hometown, Wichita, Kan. “It’s weird.”
Mr. Sibaai, whose father immigrated from Syria, said he and his friends voted for Mr. Trump in 2024 because he bucked the political establishment and called Middle Eastern wars a mistake. Nine months into a war in Iran, Mr. Sibaai said he was done with Mr. Trump and his party. He voted for Mr. Hamilton.
The issue is dividing American Jews too. That pains Rabbi Daniel G. Zemel, 74, who retired last year from Temple Micah, a progressive congregation in Washington. He said many younger Jews, including his own children, have a different kind of connection to Israel than their parents do and are blunt about their opposition to the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza.
“There’s a distancing,” he said, and “the American Jewish establishment is too removed to get that.”
At half Rabbi Zemel’s age, Benjamin Altshuler, 36, a Reform rabbi living in West Bloomfield, Mich., said he struggled with the Senate race in his state, particularly around the issue of Israel.
“There were some aspects of El-Sayed’s candidacy that were not in line with my views, but I found many more favorable aspects compared with Mike Rogers,” he said, referring to Mr. El-Sayed’s Republican opponent.
Rabbi Altshuler said he watched old videos of Mr. El-Sayed to dig deeper on his views on Israel and decided to support him.
“I had to discuss it with my family and debate it with my community,” he said. “Ultimately the decision was mine. My desire for democratic values had to win out over this particular moment of geopolitics.”
The demographic breakdown of younger voters sets them apart. Half of voters under 30 are not white, a much bigger share than that of any other age group. In the past, Democrats have assumed that more diversity would help them, particularly with Hispanic voters, and it hasn’t.
This year, Obed Alvidrez, 26, who grew up in a Republican-leaning household in Texas, said he was inspired by the Democratic candidates who did not take his vote for granted.
“Talarico and El-Sayed are clear that they’re not going into the office to represent their party. They’re doing it for the people living in their state,” said Mr. Alvidrez, who is studying marketing and working full time. “That really helped them get support from Republicans and independents.”
“People are just tired,” added Mr. Alvidrez. But, he said, “we did our part.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. Jeff Adelson contributed reporting.
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2) The Most Dangerous Way to Misread the Midterm Results
By M. Gessen, Opinion Columnist, Nov. 6, 2026
Photo Illustration by Philotheus Nisch for The New York Times
The air in this country has been easier to breathe since Tuesday’s election results started coming in. With majorities in both chambers of Congress, Democrats can now place limits on the Trump administration’s destructive powers. It would be foolhardy, however, to conclude that the Trump era is therefore necessarily coming to an end.
In midterm elections, voters express their dissatisfaction with the present. In presidential elections, on the other hand, people vote their hopes and fears for the future. The experience of other countries shows that autocratic leaders are peculiarly difficult to unseat, and not just because they have a tendency to undermine the voting process itself. The more instability voters live with — the higher the gas prices, the more tenuous their access to health care, the more palpable the threat of war — the stronger the autocrats’ appeal, even when it was their policies that caused the instability.
I have just returned from Israel, where an unpopular autocrat’s party won the largest number of votes even though the worst security failure in the nation’s history took place on his watch, even though he has dragged his country into one forever war and started several others, even though he is under investigation for corruption. How did this happen?
Fact is, it happens all the time. Viktor Orban, who led Hungary for a total of 20 years, enriched his family and his cronies while his country grew poorer than its European neighbors and many of its citizens lost access to decent health care and education. As successive elections approached, his party’s popularity seemed to falter. And yet, he kept winning — in 2014, 2018, 2022.
Even Vladimir Putin fits this pattern. These days criticizing him can be deadly, but back when Russians could still express their opinions, they consistently gave Putin poor marks for several aspects of his job performance. They said he had not improved their economic well-being or done a good job ending the very long war in Chechnya, and they held him responsible for the self-dealing and corruption among the Kremlin elite. And yet, even when they had a semblance of choice, most Russians voted for him.
This is a pattern, not a coincidence. Many people — generally speaking, majorities — vote for ineffective, corrupt, warmongering autocrats not in spite of the hardships and dangers that their governments impose but because of them.
Autocrats rise to power in times of fear and dislocation. They get elected on promises of stability and security. Most of the time, they also promise a return to a glorious imaginary past, when the world felt safe and you didn’t feel poor. They never deliver. Instead of stability, they bring chaos, confusion and often war.
Rather than expose the autocrat as a liar, however, the instability affirms the worldview that brought him to power in the first place. The world, it seems, really is terrifying. Life really is hard and getting harder. We really are on the verge of catastrophe. Just weeks before the Israeli election, an apparent terrorist came within seconds of crashing an airplane full of Israelis — another catastrophic security failure on Netanyahu’s watch. Two days ahead of the vote, he shared an artificial-intelligence-generated image of a nuclear strike on Tel Aviv, warning that “the State of Israel is in real and tangible existential danger.” You’d think the airplane incident and the danger warning would work against the sitting prime minister, one who has instigated two wars with Iran, but Netanyahu’s message is I alone stand between you and annihilation. A critical number of people appear to believe this.
I don’t know if every language in the world has this expression, but English, Russian and Hungarian have an identical idiom: “Don’t change horses midstream.” The Hebrew equivalent is “Don’t change horses while climbing a hill.” The harder life gets, the more this message resonates. And the autocrat continues feeding the people the same old promise: We just need to cross the waters and climb the hill, and then we will reach stability. Hunker down and vote for me again.
The classic mistake the opposition to such leaders makes is to affirm the terrifying worldview but argue for a more measured, reasonable solution. This is what much of the anti-Netanyahu opposition did, what the Hungarian opposition used to do. Democratic politicians in the United States do it too, when they agree with Trump that immigration is a gigantic security problem — and merely offer less extreme solutions. Or when they agree with Republicans that “wokeness,” of all things, is an urgent problem America needs to address. But if the autocrat is essentially right in his analysis, what is the argument for voting for someone else?
By now, we know what does work. We saw it in Hungary. We saw it in New York when Zohran Mamdani came out of nowhere to wipe the floor with the sitting mayor and the former governor. We saw it in midterm campaigns across the country, but perhaps nowhere more clearly than in Texas, in James Talarico’s winning campaign for the Senate and Gina Hinojosa’s for the governorship. What works is opposing the autocratic worldview itself. It’s asserting that while life really is hard and the world really can be scary, we need not live in fear and isolation. Rather than conjuring an imaginary past, it’s promising an achievable future. Rather than setting people against one another, it’s helping them to find common ground. Rather than asking voters to hunker down and trust the leader to guide us toward stability that will never arrive, it’s inviting them to create a better world right now, together.
Thank you for tying together political philosophy, history, and the current situation throughout the world with such clarity. Hannah Arendt laid out how authoritarians pave the path to totalitarian rule decades ago, and yet the masses still fall prey to the same machinations. It is that hard for humans to overcome their innate responses to stressful events or circumstances. We all need to collaborate to swing the narrative toward hope and vision.
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3) Not Even Tech’s Safest Jobs Look So Safe Anymore
As Microsoft pours billions into artificial intelligence, the company has offered buyouts to about 60,000 employees. The work force was already on edge.
By Emmy Martin, Reporting from San Francisco, Nov. 6, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/06/technology/microsoft-buyouts.html
Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, Wash. For years, the company countered big pay packages from Silicon Valley rivals with strong benefits and a reputation for stability. David Ryder/Reuters
As Microsoft pours billions into artificial intelligence, the company has offered buyouts to about 60,000 employees. The work force was already on edge.
Within an hour of Microsoft’s announcement of buyouts last week, employees rushed to an internal site to see whether they had been offered one. So many people were checking at once that employees speculated on the company’s internal social network that the site had buckled under the traffic.
The offer, extended to about 60,000 employees, or more than a quarter of Microsoft’s work force, was the largest in the company’s history. It was also the company’s second buyout this year, and another shock to a work force grappling with big changes brought on by artificial intelligence.
For years, Microsoft occupied a distinct position among the tech industry’s biggest companies. While its pay packages often lagged behind Silicon Valley rivals like Google and Meta, employees said, the company countered with strong benefits and a reputation for stability. As recently as September, Forbes ranked Microsoft the world’s best employer for the third straight year.
But the tech industry’s A.I. race is upending many workplaces, Microsoft included. The buyout offer, said six Microsoft employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity, landed on workers strained by mounting expectations to use A.I., stagnant pay and a growing sense that their jobs were no longer secure.
Though Microsoft is doing better financially than most of its peers, it is clearly shifting its spending priorities. Two days after the buyouts were announced, the Redmond, Wash., company reported a 32 percent jump in quarterly profit, to $36.6 billion, on revenue of $92.3 billion. Its capital spending, largely on data centers, rose 30 percent to $45.2 billion, and the company said it expected to spend roughly $170 billion this year.
The fear among many workers now is what comes next, and some have begun organizing. Before the buyout offer, a group of current and former employees circulated an open letter among colleagues accusing the company of pursuing A.I. with a “speed-at-all-costs” ethos. It called on Microsoft to involve employees in decisions about how A.I. is built and used, and to stop tying A.I. use to rewards or reprimands.
Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief people officer, said the buyouts were meant to give employees who might be ready for something new “choice and agency.” She said the buyouts were not related to how A.I. was changing work. (A Microsoft spokeswoman said “maintenance timing,” rather than a traffic surge, had briefly delayed the release of some buyout offers on the internal site.)
Ms. Coleman also did not rule out future layoffs.
Employees offered a buyout have until Dec. 9 to decide, and those who accept will leave on Dec. 31. They will receive a minimum of eight weeks of base pay, and the size of the payment varies by job level and tenure.
The offer followed a string of cuts that had already shaken employees. Microsoft laid off 10,000 workers in 2023, and more than 15,000 in 2025. This spring, about 8,600 U.S. employees were offered a retirement-age buyout, and about 30 percent accepted it. This summer, the company cut about 4,800 more jobs. Microsoft’s head count in June was 223,000, down 5,000 from a year earlier.
This time, Microsoft said it expected less than 5 percent of the 60,000 employees offered a buyout to take it.
Some employees have already signed the offer, including one who has been at Microsoft for nearly a decade. She was her family’s main earner and worried about the job market, she said. But years of pressure to use unreliable A.I. tools, the constant threat of layoffs and what she saw as a widening gap between the company’s stated values and its actions made staying feel worse. Colleagues urged her to stay, she said, because they would have to absorb her work.
Others are staying, at least for now, some by choice and some because they feel they have none. A senior software engineer who has worked at Microsoft for more than five years said he wanted to stay to try to improve the company. He said a recent squeeze on pay, the push to use A.I. and now the buyouts had left far more of his colleagues feeling expendable.
Several employees said that merit raises this year had been unusually small, in some cases less than 1 percent, and that managers had described rewards budgets as tight. At a company town hall last month, a question about how executives balanced spending more than $100 billion a year on A.I. against flat rewards for the workers carrying out that strategy drew more than 80 reactions, roughly twice as many as most other questions seen by The New York Times.
Ms. Coleman said Microsoft was trying to stay competitive on pay while it remained “a company that has to think about our operating expense and our capital expense.”
The tension had begun to show up in pay in other ways, too, employees said. Gretchen Thomas, 57, a design leader, left Microsoft in September after five years because the pressure grew steadily heavier, she said, including shifting priorities and faster deadlines.
“I just can’t believe how grim it’s gotten just in the last three years,” she said.
This year, Ms. Thomas’s raise and bonus were in line with those of her colleagues. But her manager had reduced her stock award, typically the most valuable part of a Microsoft employee’s pay, because, according to a memo seen by The Times, she did “not consistently” show speed, urgency and willingness to experiment, including with A.I.
Ms. Coleman declined to discuss individual pay decisions, but said the company encouraged employees to experiment and use its tools. “Of course some of that includes A.I.,” she said.
For those who stay, employees said, the bigger worry is the work left behind. All of the employees said that they did not expect departing colleagues to be replaced, and that the remaining staff would absorb their work. Ms. Coleman said Microsoft had thousands of jobs open but acknowledged the company needed to make “some shifts in the work force.”
(The Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
The day after the buyout announcement, a group of teams in one of Microsoft’s software organizations gathered at a Dave & Buster’s for an event to raise morale that had been planned for a month.
Before the food came out, a five-year engineer who was at the event recalled, a manager stood on a chair, acknowledged that all the attendees were refreshing their email and weighing the buyout offer, and urged them to set it aside and celebrate the work they had done.
At his table, the engineer said, no one talked about anything else.
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4) Tech Stocks Had a Terrible Day. What’s Coming Could Be Worse.
By Jared Bernstein and Ryan Cummings, Nov. 6, 2026
Mr. Bernstein was the chair of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2023 to 2025. Mr. Cummings served the council as an economist from 2021 to 2023.
Illustration by The New York Times; source photographs by xiaokebetter and Jun Zhang via Getty Images
We’ve been here before. As with so many other transformational inventions — railroads, electricity, the internet — outsize enthusiasm for artificial intelligence is supporting a level of spending that’s gotten ahead of plausible profit expectations, a defining characteristic of a financial bubble. Now that the stocks of some A.I. builders and suppliers are wavering, we think it’s important to ask the next critical question. What happens to the American economy if this bubble bursts?
The damage could run deep.
It was just over a year ago when we argued that the enormous sums being poured into A.I. hearkens to the go-go internet era of the 1990s and the housing boom of the 2000s, both of which turned out to be financial bubbles whose bursting spilled over into the broader economy, leading to job and income losses that affected most Americans. Now, we’re already starting to see signs that this latest boom may be fading: The tech-heavy Nasdaq index fell by more than 5 percent Thursday and is down nearly 10 percent since Oct. 1. Growing investor nervousness led the prominent A.I. lab OpenAI to dial back its latest funding-round target by $10 billion.
What happens if the A.I. boom goes bust? There’s a consensus building among investors, academics and market analysts that any downturn would be relatively mild, similar to what happened in the early 2000s, after the dot-com bubble burst. The inflation-adjusted value of the overall economy, or real gross domestic product, shrank less than half a percent. And while unemployment rose, it was considerably lower than it was at the peak of the financial crisis.
Unfortunately, this consensus looks too optimistic. First, the A.I. bubble is by all measures substantially larger than the dot-com bubble; the stock market has increased by more than it did between 1996 and 2000 and is currently worth 240 percent of G.D.P., versus 160 percent at the peak of the dot-com bubble.
This difference in magnitude means that if the stock market fell as much as it did over the course of the dot-com bust, the amount of lost wealth could translate into a reduction in real consumer spending that would be twice as large. That reduction would show up as a lower demand for goods and services, which could in turn reduce business investment, hiring and overall growth.
Our current economy is also more fragile than it was back in 2000. Hiring has been sluggish and real wages are falling, the latter due to elevated war-induced inflation. The Federal Reserve has been gradually raising interest rates, leading to higher borrowing costs and potentially dialing back economic activity.
Additionally, today’s fiscal conditions and outlook are much worse. In 2001, the federal government ran a budget surplus of 1.2 percent of G.D.P.; today it is running an historically large deficit of 6.2 percent of G.D.P. That could limit Congress’s willingness to inject even more borrowed money into the economy to offset any downturn.
To get a rough read on the magnitude of the damage triggered by what the A.I. bubble burst might do to the economy, we ran the same economic model that the Federal Reserve uses to simulate the workings of the macroeconomy. The results confirmed our concerns. Mapping a dot-com style sell-off onto today’s markets would lead real G.D.P. to fall by more than three times as much as it did during the 2001 recession: 1.4 percent versus 0.4 percent. The unemployment rate would steadily climb from its current rate of 4.2 percent to above 7 percent.
Back when we first expressed our concerns about the stability of the A.I. investment boom, we noted that the companies building the A.I. models and the infrastructure to support them were mostly spending their own cash, meaning a bust would hurt them, but not their lenders. That’s no longer the case: $445 billion worth of A.I.-related debt, or 1.4 percent of G.D.P., was issued in the first eight months of 2026. If we throw in the opaque off-balance-sheet debt deals companies are relying on to pay for this build-out, we estimate that total A.I.-infrastructure debt is roughly 7 percent of G.D.P., approaching levels of subprime mortgage lending that helped trigger the financial crisis.
Households and the banking system are both less exposed and less leveraged now than they were before the financial crisis. That said, debt-triggered recessions can be particularly intractable, as the credit system can take considerable time to recover, as borrowers regain solvency and lenders regain confidence. Should such debt financing continue to inflate the bubble, this risk factor will grow.
One of our biggest concerns this time is whether our leadership can effectively respond to a crisis. The consistently weak economic stewardship of the current administration is evident in persistently elevated inflation, interest rates and uncertainty. The extent to which officials are bogged down in their war of choice in Iran does not inspire confidence regarding their willingness and ability to respond effectively to a bubble-induced downturn, should it occur. We hope that the newly elected Congress will have a mitigating effect.
We’ve been careful to approach these thorny questions with humility. Trying to identify a bubble is hard enough. Predicting what happens if it pops requires even more speculation. But if current investment jitters deepen, what happens next could hit the economy harder than the last time we were here.
It's good to pump the brakes now before AI borrowing and speculation causes a crash. AI regulation is 99% more likely under a democratic congress.The big tech co.s will survive, the AI froth will burn off. Then we'll see what the actual value of AI is, in reality not fantasy. Any jobs created by building data centres are minuscule compared to the jobs lost to AI - so a pause in the AI mania is a good thing for workers, for the economy, for everyone but the rampant speculators.
Regulation of the development of that technology's capability is certainly more likely by a Democratically-controlled Congress but I don't see how that Congress can regulate the grossly over-leveraged financing of that technology without taking unprecedented steps to intervene (interfere?) using statist measures to exert a degree of control over what are essentially private business enterprises (albeit with public shareholders) both on the borrowing and the lending sides. What exactly are you referring to "pumping the brakes" on and how would that actually be done?
What happens if the bubble bursts? We move to "too big to fail/national security", the "titans" of tech and business slink off with their billions, politicians babble, regular citizens lose jobs, pensions, etc, nobody goes to jail/is held accountable, and the financial sector starts planning the next stock market rise/bubble.
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5) After Governor Abbott’s Defeat, Houston’s Mayor Changes Course on ICE
Mayor John Whitmire has instructed Houston police to stop notifying immigration agents when they encounter someone without legal status during routine street stops.
By J. David Goodman, Reporting from Houston, Nov. 6, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/06/us/houston-mayor-john-whitmire-immigration-ice-cooperation.html
James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa at a campaign rally in Austin, Texas, a day before the midterm election. Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
The stunning wave of Republican defeats is already having an effect in Texas.
Mayor John Whitmire of Houston said he was directing city police officers on Friday to limit their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during traffic stops, bucking a policy imposed on Texas’s largest city by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Under an executive order from the mayor, Houston police officers will no longer alert ICE agents when they encounter an unauthorized migrant during routine traffic stops or in connection with other low level infractions.
Instead, officers will only alert ICE in cases where a person has been arrested and is being brought to, or has already arrived at, a county jail.
“If they’re charged with a new crime, we’ll let ICE know as we get them to the jailhouse,” Mr. Whitmire said in an interview with The New York Times. “We just are not going to deal with the nonviolent contacts.”
The change in how Houston officers interact with immigration agents was a direct result of Tuesday’s election, Mr. Whitmire said. Mr. Abbott lost his bid for re-election to what would have been a record fourth term as governor.
“The governor was requiring us to contact ICE,” Mr. Whitmire said. “It created a lot of anxiety” among Houston residents.
He added that the shift was “certainly consistent with the new leadership in Austin,” referring to the slate of Democrats elected to every major statewide position in Texas on Tuesday.
“We won’t have new leadership until January,” Mr. Whitmire said. “But I’m willing to make a responsible decision that in the next two months we’re going to go to a more effective policy.”
A spokesman for Mr. Abbott’s office declined to comment.
The change comes as prosecutors in Harris County are pursuing a criminal case against an ICE agent who struck a Mexican construction worker in October with a vehicle in Houston, injuring him. A grand jury indicted the agent, Mario Alberto Morales, late last month.
The county’s prosecutors were also investigating the fatal shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo who was killed during an encounter in July with ICE agents in Houston.
The Houston police chief, J. Noe Diaz, said he supported the mayor’s order. For his officers, he said, “it’s about treating the people that they come in contact with with dignity and not diminishing their vulnerability because they’re immigrants in our community.”
The mayor’s order described its intent, declaring that “law enforcement resources are finite” and are best used by “investigating and deterring violent crime.” The decision was made to maintain “the trust and cooperation of all residents” of the city, the order said.
“The fact that a person is, or is suspected to be, subject to immigration enforcement shall not, by itself, be a basis to contact ICE,” according to the order, reviewed by The Times. “If a person is not otherwise going to jail on new charges or other warrants, Department personnel shall not contact ICE regarding that person.”
In April, Mr. Abbott’s office threatened to pull $110 million in public-safety funding to Houston, including money for its police department, unless the mayor promised to stop enforcing a city ordinance and took steps to repeal it.
The ordinance directed city officers to hold people wanted by ICE no longer than necessary to complete a traffic stop or other brief street encounter.
City Council members who spearheaded the passage of the ordinance said at the time that the directive from Mr. Abbott’s office violated the Constitution by requiring officers to detain people beyond the time necessary for a police stop.
Though the ordinance had not been Mr. Whitmire’s idea, he voted for it. But after Mr. Abbott threatened the funding, he urged the council to adopt new language to comply with the governor’s demands, saying the city needed the state funding for its police and fire departments. The council ultimately complied with the governor.
Mr. Abbott lost his race to Gina Hinojosa, a state representative who will be the first Latina governor. Mr. Whitmire said that he had not discussed his decision directly with Ms. Hinojosa but had spoken with other newly elected Democratic leaders.
As mayor, Mr. Whitmire, a moderate Democrat and former longtime member of the state senate, has argued in the past that confrontations with the Trump administration over immigration enforcement were “counterproductive.” He has also pointed to his relationships with top Republicans in the State Capitol as an asset for the city.
“I had a good relationship with Abbott and the lieutenant governor,” he said in the interview, referring to Dan Patrick, a conservative Republican who also lost on Tuesday. “But I have even better relationships with the Democrats.”
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6) Macklemore Says U.S. Arenas Won’t Book His ‘Free Palestine’ Tour
The singer was kicked off Ed Sheeran’s tour in September over his vocal support for Palestinians.
By Ben Sisario, Nov. 6, 2026
Macklemore at a concert in Dublin on Oct. 26, 2026. Zoe Rain/Handout, via Via Reuters
Macklemore, the indie rapper who was kicked off Ed Sheeran’s stadium tour in September over his public support of Palestinians, said on Friday that nine arenas in the United States refused to book him for a “Free Palestine” benefit tour he had planned.
In a social media post, Macklemore wrote that in mid-September, after being removed from Sheeran’s tour, his team contacted arenas in the United States and “received available dates at these arenas through the end of the year.”
“But once they found out these were my benefit shows for Palestine,” his statement continued, “those dates were suddenly off the table.”
Macklemore named nine venues: Madison Square Garden and Barclays Center in New York, and UBS Arena on Long Island; Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.; Intuit Dome, Kia Forum and Crypto.com Arena in and around Los Angeles; Chase Center Arena in San Francisco; and Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Macklemore’s hometown.
In a statement, a spokeswoman from Madison Square Garden said, “We have some of the busiest venues in the world with extremely limited availability and he’s not an arena-level act.”
A spokesman for Kia Forum said the venue had no comment. None of the other venues responded to requests for comment.
Macklemore, who had breakout success in the early 2010s with songs like “Thrift Shop” and “Can’t Hold Us,” was removed from Sheeran’s tour after he appeared at two shows at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., in early September.
There, he proclaimed “Free Palestine” and performed “Hind’s Hall,” his protest song against Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, which came in response to the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. In that song, Macklemore accuses Israel of genocide.
Macklemore said that owners of the venues where the Sheeran tour had been scheduled demanded he be removed. Robert Kraft, whose company owns the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium outside Boston, said that his venues do not allow “hate speech,” and that Macklemore’s statements at MetLife had crossed that line.
Macklemore’s removal renewed debate about the power of billionaires to control free speech, and the power of artists to resist it.
After Sheeran said he had played no part in the decision, every other musician associated with his tour, including opening acts and his backing band, dropped out in solidarity with Macklemore. Sheeran continued the tour, at first alone and then picking up other musicians.
In his statement on Friday, Macklemore added, “We live in a country that prides itself on freedom of speech. Yet we’ve reached a point where a handful of billionaires can decide which causes are acceptable, which voices are welcome and which human lives are worth defending.”
In late October, Macklemore played arena shows in London, Paris and Dublin as part of a benefit tour. When that tour was announced, representatives of Macklemore said they expected additional dates to be booked in the United States, but none were.
Though Macklemore has never been a stadium-level touring attraction, he has maintained a steady fan base for years. In October, he played a solo concert at Red Rocks Amphitheater, near Morrison, Colo.
In 2023, he went on a tour of arenas and theaters, including Climate Pledge Arena.
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7) Watching ‘NAZA’ Amid the Gazan Rubble
By Mohammed Sawwaf, Nov. 7, 2026
Mr. Sawwaf is a Palestinian documentary filmmaker in Gaza.
Tarini Sharma
I watched the film — a documentary by the Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor that has become the subject of international controversy and attention — on my laptop, sitting inside a building that is somehow still standing in southwest Gaza. To the left of the building is a bombed-out apartment block. In front, a camp for displaced people. Nearby there’s what’s left of a destroyed university, which is now being used as a shelter. Throughout the area, we can hear the sound of the “zannana,” the Israeli surveillance drone that never stops flying above us here in Gaza. We call it “zannana” in Arabic because of the constant sound it makes: zzzzzzz. It watches us. Sometimes it bombs us.
“NAZA” was filmed almost entirely on rooftops in Tel Aviv. Under the cover of night, anonymous Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers sit atop high rises and apartment buildings with Mr. Abraham. They describe how they systematically targeted us, how they dropped bombs on us from offices far from Gaza. The vantage point shook me. Throughout the film, there’s a feeling that they can see everything, while no one can see them.
In Gaza, this is our relationship with the Israeli aircraft that circle our skies. The missiles come from above, but the decision to launch them seems to come from a place we cannot reach. The rooftops where the directors shot these interviews go beyond a simple visual choice. It’s an image of power: The one above watches, while the one below is exposed.
I wanted to see “NAZA” both because of the international acclaim the film has received and also because of the space it gives people who have taken part in the machinery of killing. I’m also a journalist and a filmmaker. When I read about the film’s critical reception, I asked myself, Why are they being given this platform? Was our story so incomplete that we needed the perpetrators to tell us how we were killed?
I watched “NAZA” twice. The Guardian, which co-produced the film, was able to send me a link to watch it here in Gaza. By the time I finished it, I was no longer asking myself whether this film should have been made. For me, the answer is yes. It offered a window into a world I could not reach myself: I can reach the rubble, but the filmmakers who made “NAZA” can reach the person who determines which house can become rubble. I can film an injured child after a bombing. They can question the person who took part in the decision that led to it. The two accounts don’t cancel each other out; one completes the other.
Many of the film’s revelations we already know. We know that Israel is watching us. We know about the use of artificial intelligence in the war; we have read about Lavender, the A.I. system used to target us, and have gathered testimonies from people who were detained or targeted after passing in front of Israeli military cameras believed to use facial recognition.
Yet even knowing what I know, hearing members of elite intelligence units speak about how they surveilled us made me feel like I was suffocating. By their own admission, they track our every movement. Our phones. Our calls. Our messages. Where a person is. When he returns home. In one scene, one of the subjects recounts hacking into a girl’s phone to find out when her father would be home. This intimate information helped determine the moment of a strike. The girl, her family, became numbers in another calculation.
It’s why, as the film went on, I no longer watched “NAZA” as a journalist but as a person trying to survive. Interviewees told Mr. Abraham how the decision to make someone a target is based on probabilities and algorithms — that they’ve knowingly killed people who they knew weren’t taking part in the war solely from inconclusive information taken from their phones. During my work, I have wondered more than once: Should I leave my phone behind? Should I talk about a film idea on WhatsApp? Is it better not to discuss certain ideas with colleagues near our phones? Could an ordinary conversation be interpreted in another way? Then I second-guess myself. Maybe it is better not to hide anything, to keep my phone with me, and for everything I do, to make it clear that I am simply a journalist and a filmmaker.
It is a strange way to live: trying to imagine how you are seen by a person watching you, so that he or she does not decide that you are something else.
As the interviewees told the filmmakers about different strikes they had conducted, my mind returned to what I have survived in these long years. I thought about Nov. 17, 2023, when I was trapped under a building that had been bombed, unable to move. In the rubble alongside me lay the bodies of entire families. “NAZA” is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage.” Was I NAZA that day, or was I a target? Just nine days earlier, I had suffered a skull fracture while standing under a different building that had been bombed. Two of my children were injured. Were we NAZA that day, too?
The officers and soldiers describe there being rules to the game that only they knew, while we in Gaza guessed where death could find us. It made it feel as if Gaza is a video game. On the screen, the subjects told the filmmakers, they see targets and icons. When the mission is over, the player can get up from his chair. But the person inside the game cannot leave.
During the height of the war, we started to figure out the rules. Once, I was seeking shelter near Salah al-Din Road, a main highway that spans the length of the strip, when shells started falling and quadcopters started shooting near us. Amid the chaos, I saw a man trying to cross the highway crumple over and stop moving. People said he died there. We understood, watching him, that we couldn’t cross that road anymore.
From down below, we could infer many things from what we could see and hear. We could tell if an area had become a no-go zone from the number of quadcopters we saw in the sky, or from the sounds of shelling. We could see when an entire building was destroyed seemingly to kill one person, or an entire area bombed with a single target in mind. We could tell when a bombing was being used to force us to flee.
“NAZA” confirmed what we — the victims who have told the stories from inside the machinery of killing — had long suspected. In one of the most striking scenes in the movie, an interviewee spoke about the authorization for a strike to kill a huge number of civilians: up to 500 people, though he said he didn’t know how many the attack actually killed. (The Israel Defense Forces have denied approving a strike with that number of casualties.)
As I listened, I began to think: Do I know this place? I’ve witnessed so many strikes over the course of the past three years that I’ve lost count — sometimes dozens in a single day. But sometimes memories of a single moment of destruction remain vivid. I immediately thought of one of them.
Early in the war, there was a neighborhood in Shuja’iyya in eastern Gaza where some were saying hundreds of people — others said more than 500 — had been killed. I stumbled there soon after the attacks took place and saw an entire block in one neighborhood flattened, with dust and concrete mangled over bodies. I cannot say for certain that the incident the interviewee referred to took place there. But even the possibility that what I had seen might have been the result of what the man was speaking about on the screen was terrifying.
The Israeli officers in the film describe how the decisions to drop bombs were made; I remember what these places looked like afterward. The truth of the war in Gaza lives between these two realities. “NAZA” does not complete that story. It begins another: Now we must go to the other side of the algorithm that decides our deaths, to every NAZA, and give them back their names, their faces. Their lives. Every NAZA is a story. It’s our responsibility to tell that story, too.
Mohammed Sawwaf is a documentary filmmaker and producer. He is the founder of Alef Multimedia, an independent media company based in Gaza. Most recently, he was a producer of “American Doctor,” a film that follows three American physicians volunteering in Gaza during the height of the humanitarian crisis.
Source photographs by Interim Archives, FPG/Archive Photos and Abid Katib via Getty Images.
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8) White, Working-Class Voters Shifted Left in the Midterms. We Asked Them Why.
White voters without a college degree, a cornerstone of the Republican base in the Trump era, moved left this year. Some cited high prices, the war with Iran and more in their decisions.
By Bayliss Wagner, Nov. 7, 2026
Bayliss Wagner interviewed voters in Atlantic, Council Bluffs, Clarion, Harlan, Prairie City, Onawa and Sioux City, Iowa.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/07/us/politics/white-working-class-voters-midterms-democrats-trump.html
Kylee Wilson, at her house in Prairie City, Iowa, said she voted for Democrats after voting for President Trump three times. “Trump put a target on America’s back,” she said. Rachel Mummey for The New York Times
Kylee Wilson, a part-time bartender in the blue-collar town of Prairie City, Iowa, turned to the bar and broke the news to one of her regulars. After voting three times for President Trump, she pulled the lever for Democrats this year.
“Tim, don’t hate me for this,” she told the customer, Tim Charls, 64. But Mr. Trump had become “too brash,” too bellicose, too tied up in the war in Iran, she said, all while she and her family struggled with rising costs and health care cuts.
“Trump put a target on America’s back,” said Ms. Wilson, 29, who works in sales support at a heavy machinery company during the day. She said she was concerned about “the state of the country and the world.”
All across the country, millions of white, working-class voters such as Ms. Wilson shifted toward Democrats in the midterms, part of a lurch to the left across demographic groups that propelled the party to its biggest rout in a generation.
While a clear majority of white voters without a college degree favored Republican House candidates over Democrats (59 percent to 40 percent), the margin was 14 percentage points smaller than Mr. Trump’s was in the 2024 presidential election, according to Times Voter Trends data.
In many key Senate races, such as Iowa’s, the movement was even more pronounced. Even as other demographic groups shifted more drastically toward Democrats overall, the changing attitudes of white, working-class voters — who made up 39 percent of the electorate this year — were striking because they have been a cornerstone of Mr. Trump’s coalition for more than a decade.
Many of them vehemently oppose Democrats’ stances on issues such as abortion, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and immigration, said Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist. But in this election, “people were really focused more on what was happening to their standard of living,” he added.
Whether the Democratic gains with white, working-class voters will endure remains to be seen. But these voters’ frustrations with high costs, driven up by tariffs and the war in Iran, were a clear obstacle for the G.O.P. in the midterms.
Working-class voters “thought Trump would fix the economy,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist. “Two years later, they still feel like they’re falling behind.”
Democrats put inflation and corruption at the center of their midterm campaigns, arguing that the wealthy and powerful were helping themselves at the expense of everyone else. Mr. Trump, who rose to power stoking economic grievance, using anti-immigrant rhetoric, and vowing to keep the U.S. out of foreign wars, struggled this year to convince voters that he and his party had made their lives better with his agenda.
In North Carolina’s Senate race, Roy Cooper, the Democratic nominee, embarked on a “Make Stuff Cost Less” tour. In Ohio’s Senate contest, Sherrod Brown, also a Democrat, framed policy disputes as battles between workers and billionaires.
Here in Iowa, where nearly 60 percent of the electorate is white and working class, Josh Turek, the Democratic Senate nominee, often spoke about his own working-class upbringing and pinned high food and fuel prices on Mr. Trump’s tariffs and the war. He also ran as a centrist on social issues and immigration, saying politics should be less polarized.
That pitch resonated with voters such as Ms. Wilson, who voted for Mr. Turek and for Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee for governor. She said she felt both centrist Democrats, who each won on Tuesday, would provide counterweights to Mr. Trump’s “war words.”
“I just want everybody to get along,” Ms. Wilson said.
Kenneth Hessen, a retired truck driver who said he was furious about Medicaid spending cuts in Mr. Trump’s tax and spending bill, also broke with his usual voting practices.
“I’ve voted Republican since I was 18 years old,” Mr. Hessen, 69, said at a polling station in Council Bluffs on Tuesday. “This year, I voted for every Democrat. If there was one under a rock, I’d vote for them today.”
Others who flipped said they did so despite Mr. Trump, not because of him.
Kevin Chadwick, 69, had his first child before graduating from high school and eventually built his own towing and repair business in Harlan, Iowa. Mr. Chadwick still supports Mr. Trump — “I wish he could run another term,” he said — and sees the war in Iran as necessary to keep the country from “pushing us around.”
Yet he voted Democratic in the Senate race, saying he was concerned that the Republican Senate nominee, Representative Ashley Hinson, had become millions of dollars richer while in office. (Ms. Hinson has said the sale of her husband’s business drove her jump in net worth.) When it came to the governor’s race, Mr. Sand’s demeanor also played a major role in Mr. Chadwick’s choice, as did his plan to legalize marijuana.
“I just like him, you know?” Mr. Chadwick said. “I think he’s down to earth. He’s honest.”
Mr. Chadwick said he was celebrating the Democratic sweep in Iowa, Texas and beyond because it “proves that money can’t buy everything,” after Elon Musk and other wealthy donors gave historic amounts to Republicans.
Many white, working-class voters still support Mr. Trump and Republicans over Democrats, including some who believe the president is looking out more for wealthier Americans.
Dave Barickman, 77, a retired law enforcement officer who lives in Council Bluffs, Iowa, voted for Republicans again this year because he favors the party’s approach to border security, the economy and social issues.
Mr. Trump “has the wheels turning right” on the economy, Mr. Barickman said, though the president is “probably taking care of the rich people more than the others.”
In some cases, more aggressive Democratic efforts appeared to help them break through with white, working-class voters. American Bridge, a Democratic super PAC, turned research on the frustrations and priorities of working-class voters into a $50 million ad blitz across red-leaning states and districts.
Corey Davis, a supporter of Mr. Turek and a Democrat, said his union participated in a statewide door-knocking campaign run by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. for the first time in years. He said he personally drove two first-time voters from his union to the polls.
“This year, I was like, I’ve got to do more than I’ve ever done before, because I’m sick of getting disappointed,” Mr. Davis, a member of the Communications Workers of America who lives in Sioux City, said.
Mr. Trump blamed Republicans’ widespread midterm losses on the fact that he “wasn’t on the ticket.” Other Republicans have dismissed that notion.
At the bar in Prairie City, Mr. Charls told the bartender, Ms. Wilson, that he blamed backlash to Mr. Trump for Tuesday’s Republican wipeout.
“He’s a drama queen,” said Mr. Charls, who owns an electronics store and farms part time. “He always says, ‘Well, it’s somebody else’s fault.’ No, you lost. Like in 2020.”
Mr. Charls stuck with Republicans this election, as he has for years. He said he felt Democrats would worsen the country’s economic problems, which he attributed to inflation that began during the Biden administration, and he is worried that the party will “go woke” again when they retake power. And he predicted white, working-class voters won’t stay with Democrats for long.
If Democrats “act stupid the next two years,” Mr. Charls said, “They’ll flop the other way.”
Mr. Chadwick, the towing business owner who voted for Democrats, sounded unsure about what his vote would deliver.
“I hope it gets better,” he said. “But we hope that every election.”
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9) ‘East of Eden’ Came Just in Time
By Rhonda Garelick, Nov. 8, 2026
Ms. Garelick is the author of “Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History” and the forthcoming “Why Fashion Matters.”
Illustration by Olivia James/The New York Times; photograph by Kirsty Griffin/Netflix
It feels fitting right now to think about the power of anger in the face of injustice.
I think most men would be amazed by the amount of low-lying rage that simmers in the background of many women’s lives. I’m talking about the anger at avoiding street harassment, trying to comply with irrational beauty standards, the disproportionate burdens of family life, the loss of reproductive freedom, the struggle for equitable pay and, of course, the ever-present threat of attack. From childhood, girls are taught to wonder: Am I safe? But in the zeal to protect us from harm, we are rarely taught how to express the anger we might feel at having to be so damned careful all the time.
In the weeks leading up to the midterms, Netflix offered us Zoe Kazan’s “East of Eden,” a seven-part meditation on an extreme, unchecked expression of — specifically female — anger. It was bracing and, in a way, perhaps prescient.
“East of Eden,” based on John Steinbeck’s classic 1952 novel, prompts us to consider a still-shocking proposition: What if a woman sought revenge for her own oppression? What if she resorted to violence, with no concern for morality or law or consequences? How would we view her fury?
The show lands like a cultural gut punch. The pain it depicts (and induces) has purpose. It explores misogyny, sexual predation, child abuse, racism and a vengeful, manipulative narcissist so damaged in childhood that she loses all empathy. In other words, though set in the American West at the turn of the 20th century, “East of Eden” explores a litany of horrors that are all too recognizable in the era of Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, ICE and Dobbs.
Steinbeck’s novel is mostly about men. A retelling of the story of Cain and Abel, it traces one family’s fathers and sons across generations. For Ms. Kazan, this adaptation is also intergenerational, a response in part to her grandfather Elia Kazan’s 1955 film version of the book, starring James Dean. The elder Kazan also concentrated on the men in his version of the story. Granddaughter Zoe takes another tack, delving into the novel’s main female character, Cathy (later Kate) — an antiheroine with a dark soul.
Ms. Kazan’s modern interpretation includes something Steinbeck did not address directly: an explanation for Cathy’s anger. Deviating from the book slightly, Ms. Kazan inserts a clear childhood trauma: Cathy’s sexual molestation, in early childhood, by a teenage boy. This backstory allows us to see Cathy’s violence as revenge. A violation of this magnitude, Ms. Kazan suggests, could fuel a lifetime of fury. As a woman living under an administration unwilling to pursue justice for, or even listen to, the victims of Mr. Epstein’s massive sexual trafficking enterprise, I can fathom that kind of fury.
Steinbeck described Cathy as a “monster,” but wrote her character with a degree of nuanced psychology. Ms. Kazan goes further. Hers, she says, is a feminist take on Cathy. She recasts “East of Eden” as a kind of revenge fantasy about burning down the patriarchy, with Cathy holding the match (sometimes literally).
What could a woman’s rage look like if unleashed? The answer might be a sort of marauding colossus overturning anything in its way. A female Godzilla, disguised as a lovely young woman. It’s a pop culture fantasy that’s surfaced in multiple ways in recent years, visible in shows such as “Furious,” about a revenge-driven female serial killer, and “Big Little Lies,” and in the film “Promising Young Woman,” about a female vigilante avenging crimes against women.
“East of Eden” might figure among these, although it begins more conventionally. Its first scene presents us with Cathy (Florence Pugh) as a victim: She lies half dead on the ground, grotesquely battered, her face distorted and covered in blood. We may recoil, but not out of surprise — mangled (often dead) young female bodies are, alas, standard opening fare on television. Often, the bloodied female victim then recedes in importance as the narrative turns to finding and prosecuting her assailant. Even if the victim survives, her rage is rarely central to the plot.
But “East of Eden” inverts those expectations. The series is concerned more with crimes committed by Cathy than with those committed against her. It follows her ruthless, even depraved, quest for power, money and independence — everything she feels she has been denied.
Cathy is a stone-cold killer, devoid of compassion, kindness, romantic love or maternal feeling. After her father beats her and locks her in her room, she sets fire to her parents’ home, killing them both. Deprived of an education or career, she studies with prostitutes to master their trade and support herself. Feeling trapped by a pregnancy she never wanted, she attempts a self-abortion — in a grisly scene involving a heated knitting needle. When that fails, she abandons her twin infants upon birth without a second glance, impassively shooting her husband when he tries to stop her.
Why did I find these scenes almost unbearable? Harder to watch somehow than the usual violence on television? In part, because we almost never see a woman reject every presumed obligation of her sex. Forced to look at violence committed by a young woman, we feel the ire that motivates her more acutely. And we share some of it.
I do not know a single woman who has not encountered abuse or harassment. And while I consider myself comparatively lucky, I have been aggressed, stalked, dragged into park bushes on a sunny afternoon (I escaped), mugged at gunpoint; I’ve had my head bashed in a taxi door by a panhandler to whom I’d refused money on the street (“The bitch deserved it,” he told the police), and I’ve been deeply frightened countless other times. For me, this started at age 11, when a man partially disrobed and committed a lewd act in front of me and a school friend, in an otherwise empty subway car. We covered our eyes. We cried. Were we angry? No, we were frozen in fear. Anger builds slowly. Given how discouraged women are from expressing it, it tends to disappear into silence.
But that silence is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. It’s a constituent part of the greater social system, especially in politics. The entire political world seems to rest on the shoulders of women and girls, like so many invisible, gender-reversed Atlases. Just beneath the gleaming marble corridors of the highest government institutions — the Supreme Court, Congress, the White House — there lurks a constant, ever-renewing stream of scandals and painful stories involving women who’ve been abused, exploited, cheated, mistreated and often overlooked.
Sometimes popular culture holds a kind of fun-house mirror up to our political psyche. Ms. Kazan’s “East of Eden” was an id-like eruption of female anger arriving just weeks before a historic midterm election in which women voters and candidates were critical in turning the country blue.
There’s still plenty to feel angry about. Millions are denied their reproductive rights, and the menace symbolized by that knitting needle is back again, more than a century after the era depicted in “East of Eden.” That fact alone seems rage-inducing enough to summon a murderous revenge fantasy. Cathy is a monster, yes, but it might be useful here to recall that word’s roots: It comes from the Latin “monstrum,” meaning divine warning or portent.
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10) The American Brain Drain Claims Another Scientist
Kelly Holley-Bockelmann was one of the top astrophysicists in the country until President Trump’s policies affected every part of her work.
By Eli Saslow, Visuals by Hilary Swift, Published Nov. 7, 2026, Updated Nov. 8, 2026
Kelly Holley-Bockelmann had always oriented herself by looking up at the sky, but now it was tilted and unfamiliar. The Milky Way sank toward the horizon line, and darkness never arrived quite the way it had in Tennessee, fast and enveloping. Instead, there was hazy dusk and then stubborn twilight before the sun rose again over her extended-stay hotel thousands of miles from home.
She took a tram, then a train, then a bus until she arrived at a glass-walled building in the Netherlands. There was a Dutch flag near the entryway and a replica of a spaceship in the lobby. She rode the elevator to her new office, a small room with whitewashed walls, empty drawers and a handwritten note taped to the desk. “We are thrilled to welcome one of America’s great scientists,” it read.
A new colleague stopped at the doorway to check in on her. “I know it might not look all that impressive,” he said, gesturing around the office.
“It’s perfect,” Holley-Bockelmann said. “After these last few years, I’m just so grateful to be here.”
She had never expected to be starting over halfway across the world at age 55, just as she reached the pinnacle of a career that was often celebrated as uniquely American. She’d grown up in Montana, lying in the grass beneath the night sky and trying to feel the Earth spin. She dreamed of becoming an astronomer before she knew the word for it. Nobody in her house growing up had finished college. She’d never met a scientist. But she made herself into a theoretical astrophysicist, a leading expert on gravitational waves, a top adviser to NASA, and a chaired professor at Vanderbilt. She helped begin a new graduate program for astronomers and raised millions in federal money to recruit American scientists with backgrounds as unlikely as her own, only to watch that pipeline be dismantled piece by piece.
Her research funding was threatened after President Trump took office in 2025. Graduate students were squeezed out of the field. The space observatory that had become her life’s work was marked for elimination in the federal budget, twice. One by one, the scientists around her did the math and chose to leave, until she decided to move to Europe with a husband who had just become an American citizen and two teenagers who had spent their childhoods in Tennessee. She had devoted her career to studying the most violent events in the universe as galaxies merged and black holes collided, sending gravitational waves rippling through space for billions of years. Now the disturbance was closer to home, and she was still measuring the damage.
She left her office and walked down the hall to meet with a few co-workers at the Netherlands Institute for Space Research. She was the most established scientist in the room, but she fetched everyone coffee and sat back from the table, trying to disappear into the group despite her dyed pink hair and a vocabulary shaped by years in Tennessee.
“OK, y’all, where are we right now with LISA?” she said.
It was the question she’d been asking for more than a decade. LISA was a space observatory scheduled to launch in 2035: three spacecraft linked across millions of miles, using lasers to listen for gravitational waves. Scientists hoped it could detect signals from the universe’s earliest moments, beyond the reach of any telescope. In work for similar missions, American scientists had invented technology behind the camera sensors, lasers and satellites the country and its military came to depend on. The project was meant to be a collaboration between the United States and Europe, but the United States had fallen behind because of staffing and budget shortfalls at NASA. Trump had repeatedly tried to eliminate funding for the program, and Europe was making contingency plans to save the mission rather than cede a new frontier of physics and a generation of scientific advances to a similar project from China.
“I hate to say it, but right now America can’t be counted on as a full partner,” one scientist said. She glanced over at Holley-Bockelmann and winced. “Sorry,” she said. “The trust just isn’t there at the moment.”
“Please,” Holley-Bockelmann said. “I know it’s a mess. That’s why I’m here.”
“Maybe the system will recover,” another scientist offered.
Holley-Bockelmann shrugged. “I don’t recognize the place anymore,” she said. “Every lever I knew how to pull was just gone. I’m still trying to understand it.”
It had taken almost two decades at Vanderbilt for her to help build a program that was a national model for training astronomers, with more than 20 students who’d come from tech jobs in California, historically Black colleges or graduate programs around the world. They gathered in their Nashville lab for daily meetings named after Einstein’s equations and a weekly happy hour called ringdown, named for the final tremors of two black holes becoming one. The students sometimes referred to their program as its own solar system, and Holley-Bockelmann was the sun. She gave a TEDx talk in a dress adorned with purple gravitational waveforms and often described the sky as “almost holy, like a religious experience.”
Then came the day after Trump’s election in 2024, when she flew to Washington for a meeting as the chair of NASA’s Astrophysics Advisory Committee. She brought along one of her graduate students, a black-hole researcher named Kamara Culbreath who dreamed of working for NASA. Holley-Bockelmann was leading the group through a review of Trump’s campaign promises to cut federal funding and roll back diversity programs when Culbreath pulled her aside during a break. He showed her a text message on his phone from an unknown number, one that had been sent anonymously to dozens of other Black students at Vanderbilt and other universities.
“Good afternoon, you have been selected to pick cotton at the nearest plantation,” it read. “Masters will pat you down before entry. Make sure you pack some sturdy shoes.”
Holley-Bockelmann walked away from the meeting and forwarded the message to Vanderbilt’s administration and then the police.
“Where do I go to report a racial attack?” she wrote. “Do we have a protocol for crisis response?”
Trump was sworn into office a few months later, and it seemed to Holley-Bockelmann that crisis response was her new job. The federal government froze active grant payments, which many of her students depended on for living expenses. She wrote to the National Science Foundation for advice, but her emails bounced back. A few of her international students stopped coming into work for fear of immigration enforcement, and Culbreath moved out of state to finish his research remotely. Another early-career researcher had a panic attack, booked an overnight flight and then called Vanderbilt the next morning to say he’d permanently returned home to Santo Domingo.
Every few days, Holley-Bockelmann opened another all-caps email from colleagues about “an EXTINCTION level scientific event.” The administration threatened to cut funding for NASA’s science programs by as much as 47 percent. It took over the National Science Foundation’s headquarters in Alexandria, Va., on one day’s notice and gave the building to another department. Holley-Bockelmann scrambled to comply with Trump’s executive orders against diversity programs, changing the name of one Vanderbilt program from “Inclusive Training” to “Interdisciplinary Training,” and scrubbing grant applications of flagged terms like “gender,” “barriers,” “race” and “historically.”
She made several trips to lobby in Washington and organized media campaigns with other scientists, but the footholds she once used for support were disappearing. NASA’s advisory committee on astrophysics was disbanded. Vanderbilt’s chancellor, one of the country’s leading advocates of “institutional neutrality,” largely avoided criticizing the administration, even as cuts reached his own campus. It was increasingly left to Holley-Bockelmann to email her students with a running log of the program’s deterioration.
“I’m flip-flopping between rage and despair, with a side of determination.”
“We haven’t been shut down (yet).”
“Anxiety, depression, stress, fatigue …”
“Please take care of yourselves and others.”
“I’m spending the morning deploying mental health crisis teams.”
She arranged free counseling sessions for students and reserved space in their building for yoga, crochet, puzzles and therapeutic art. For the first time in her life, she didn’t have energy for science. Instead, she found herself gravitating to diamond art, sticking hundreds of dots onto a piece of paper and following a mindless pattern until her brain went numb.
Several months into Trump’s term, a colleague asked Holley-Bockelmann to speak at a conference for young astronomers. There was no money to pay for the flight, so she agreed to appear onscreen. She had won national mentorship awards as one of the best recruiters in American astronomy, but now some of the top astronomy programs were cutting graduate slots and the federal government was eliminating tens of thousands of scientific jobs. She worried that she was becoming a huckster, luring students into six years of training for heartbreak and dead ends. She opened her presentation by showing a photograph of herself, head down, her hands on her temples.
“How can we stay afloat?” the caption read. “How can I lead our community when I’m so enraged? How can I continue to do the work that I love?”
Marcel Levi followed what was happening in the United States and called his team together at the Dutch Research Council in the winter of 2025. He had friends at the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who were losing their funding, their labs, their jobs.
“It’s a tragedy for them, but a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us,” Levi said.
He’d gone to medical school in the Netherlands in the 1980s and then watched many of his classmates move across the Atlantic. No country at that time spent more than the United States on research and development, and Levi found it difficult to do serious work anywhere else. He flew to Atlanta and Washington several times every year to study cardiovascular disease and blood clots in labs that were better than his own.
But Europe and Asia had begun to catch up. A few months after Trump’s election, Levi saw a poll of 1,600 U.S.-based scientists published in the journal Nature in which 75 percent of respondents said they were considering leaving the country. As president of the Dutch Research Council, Levi proposed setting aside €50 million to recruit some of them. The Netherlands named the program the Tulip Fund, after a flower the Dutch had imported from the Ottoman Empire four centuries earlier and then made their own.
“The roles have been partially reversed,” Levi said when the program began in July 2025. “Some of the brain drain is now moving the other way.”
More than a dozen other countries landed on a similar idea, starting programs to poach American scientists. There was APART-USA (Austria), Safe Place for Science (France) and Canada Leads. The European Union set aside $560 million. South Korea promised a fast track to citizenship.
The Tulip Fund offered Dutch institutions up to €1 million per recruited scientist, paid out over five years. The first selections included 29 Americans from places like Yale, Stanford and the National Cancer Institute. They specialized in everything from Alzheimer’s to artificial intelligence, and soon there was a job posting circulating on the American Astronomical Society’s website.
Gravitational wave specialist. Forty-two days vacation. Supporting the LISA mission as part of an “inclusive work force” that valued “collaboration” and “diversity.”
“We are looking for you!” the posting read.
Holley-Bockelmann saw it in Tennessee and showed the ad to her husband, Andreas Bockelmann. The position would require a pay cut. Andreas would need to quit his job as an automotive engineer. They had a house they loved and two teenagers who didn’t want to move. Their daughter was starring on her basketball team. Their son had special needs and thrived on routine.
As they weighed the possibility, Andreas became a citizen decades after arriving from Germany with a green card. He stood with dozens of immigrants early in Trump’s term, listened to “The Star-Spangled Banner” and recited the Oath of Allegiance. An official handed out American flags and played a video message from Trump. “Today you receive one of the most precious gifts ever granted by human hands,” Trump said, as Andreas looked at his family and wondered about the country they were inheriting.
Trump’s tariffs had upended his automotive work. Their children were both adopted from Asia, and lately Andreas had heard reports of state troopers pulling over people based on how they looked. His wife was happiest when she was immersed in science, and she hadn’t run a simulation in weeks.
He told his wife he was ready to move late last year, but she spent weeks going back and forth. “It feels like giving up,” she said. She hated the thought of abandoning her students and leaving the hardest problem of her career unsolved.
“I’m going to have survivor’s guilt,” Holley-Bockelmann said. “Is it worth rearranging our whole lives?”
“It makes more sense than staying here,” Andreas said.
Two months into her new job, Holley-Bockelmann crowded around a computer screen with a few other scientists to watch a simulation of the LISA launch. The mission wasn’t scheduled until 2035, but one of her colleagues had spent the weekend making a digital re-creation. He clicked a button and they watched three spacecraft lift out of French Guiana, escaping Earth’s gravity and flying past the moon. The spacecraft settled into formation about 31 million miles from Earth and exchanged laser beams across the darkness as a ticker of theoretical discoveries accumulated onscreen.
The simulation picked up the steady hum of tens of thousands of burned-out stars, each about the size of Earth but so dense that every spoonful of matter weighed several tons. The lasers registered signals from black holes colliding billions of years in the past, and small black holes falling into giant ones, tracing a hundred thousand loops before they vanished. The simulation reached back to the first million years after the Big Bang, behind the wall of hot fog that had blocked every telescope ever built.
“God, can you imagine?” Holley-Bockelmann said. “I want to know how the first black holes were formed.”
“The first stars, the first galaxies,” said Nora Lützgendorf, the lead project scientist for LISA. “And then we can look forward to all the real discoveries — the stuff we don’t even know how to anticipate or predict yet.”
“How am I going to wait another 10 years?” Holley-Bockelmann said.
Lützgendorf, a 41-year-old German scientist, knew what it meant to wait. She’d spent seven years in the United States working on the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest telescope ever sent into space. NASA had hoped to launch it in 2007, but the mission endured years of manufacturing delays, budget fights, testing failures and finally Covid. It lifted off on Christmas Day in 2021, and Lützgendorf waited another six months for the first images. One revealed hundreds of new stars emerging behind towering cliffs of rust-colored gas in the Carina Nebula, 7,600 light-years from Earth. Lützgendorf tried to call over a colleague to look, and the words caught in her throat.
“I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I’d spent 10 years imagining these amazing discoveries, and then they were so much better than I thought.”
“Like we could finally see,” Holley-Bockelmann said.
“Yes, exactly,” Lützgendorf said. “I had a little telescope as a kid, and it was like that magical first moment when I got the moon into focus.”
“The glow. The sharp edges,” Holley-Bockelmann said, because she also remembered the feeling of being transported into the sky. Her parents were busy looking straight ahead at the problems of the next day, the next bill, the next job that kept them moving from town to town across Wyoming and then Montana. Meanwhile, she was studying constellations, reading Carl Sagan and writing letters in high school to European observatories to ask for obscure coordinates of black holes.
Each new fact opened into something larger: that the Earth was part of a Milky Way galaxy of a few hundred billion stars; that beyond the Milky Way there were as many as two trillion more galaxies in the observable universe; that most of the atoms in her body were forged inside stars that had died billions of years before the sun came to life. She tried to understand the vastness of space-time by imagining the history of the universe laid out across a 100-yard field. The Earth was born at the 67-yard line. Complex multicellular life formed after 96 yards. Apes began to walk upright in the final two inches. And all of human civilization — the end of the ice age, the birth of agriculture, every war and every empire — had come in the last three thousandths of an inch.
And then she became an astronomer, and what astonished her wasn’t just the universe but the scientists around her, humans pressed against the goal line who had somehow learned to map most of the field.
“LISA will finally give us the whole sky,” Holley-Bockelmann said.
“There are so many secrets hiding out there,” Lützgendorf said. “But 10 years is a long time to wait. People get bored, distracted. That’s where some of our work comes in.”
Germany was building the spacecraft. France and Italy were developing telescopes in case the United States failed to deliver. Lützgendorf and Holley-Bockelmann were building a scientific community in the Netherlands that would be ready for the data. America’s participation was still uncertain, but Holley-Bockelmann had already decided where she would be in 2035. She hit a button on her computer and started to play the simulation again.
Late afternoon in the Netherlands was morning in Nashville, and her graduate students would be waiting. She was still advising more than a dozen of them, so every evening she went back to her hotel and logged in for a second shift. Her family would join her in a few weeks. For now, there was her suitcase in the corner and a single box of crackers in the kitchenette. She filled a wine glass with orange juice, opened her laptop and waved as the first face came onto the screen.
“How’s your crazy new life?” Riddhi Patel, 24, asked.
“Is it awful of me to admit that it’s amazing?” Holley-Bockelmann said. “It’s sunny. There’s science happening, and I’m finally getting to do some of it again. What’s new with you?”
“Mostly trying not to stress out,” Patel said. She was finishing a master’s through a partnership between Vanderbilt and Fisk University, the historically Black college in Nashville. For two decades, the program had placed 85 percent of its students into Ph.D. programs. But now funding was precarious and Ph.D. slots were disappearing. No astronomy student had bridged from Fisk to Vanderbilt in two years.
“I’m getting ready to apply to like 20 places, but maybe that’s pointless,” Patel said.
“What’s unfair is it’s not about you,” Holley-Bockelmann said. “It’s the whole situation. Sometimes, I wish I’d stayed to fight, but I just couldn’t anymore. I’m sorry.”
They workshopped one of Patel’s papers, and then Holley-Bockelmann refilled her orange juice and clicked over to her next meeting. One by one, the students she had helped recruit into astronomy appeared on her screen.
“Maybe I’m just meant to be a math teacher,” one said.
“Is there even a job market anymore?” another asked.
She listened to their questions and anxieties until dark and carried them with her into the next day as she drove west with a colleague toward the beach. The astronomical calendar called for a partial solar eclipse, an event that had inspired awe and terror across human history. Maybe a celestial dragon was eating the sun. Maybe a corrupt emperor had angered the gods. People played drums or shot fiery arrows into the sky to reignite the sun as generations of early scientists began tracking the pattern, calculating the numbers and finally solving the mystery. Now Holley-Bockelmann stepped onto the sand with thousands of other people, put on her cardboard eclipse glasses and looked up over the North Sea.
She watched the moon march across the sun, leaving just a sliver of orange in the sky. The temperature dropped. Light drained from the water. The crowd went silent. She waited as the Earth kept turning and the moon continued its course until light flooded back across the beach.
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11) Who Is Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli Tasked With Forming a Government?
Mr. Eisenkot, a career general and the leading rival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, will now have up to six weeks to form a coalition.
By Aaron Boxerman, Johnatan Reiss and David M. Halbfinger, Reporting from Jerusalem, Nov. 8, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/11/08/world/middleeast/israel-eisenkot-netanyahu-what-to-know.html
Gadi Eisenkot, the leader of the Yashar party, spoke after meeting with President Isaac Herzog of Israel at his office in Jerusalem on Sunday. Credit...Ilia Yefimovich/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The clock started ticking on Sunday for Gadi Eisenkot, the leading rival of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, to form a new government.
After days of consultations, Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog , presided over a ceremony that officially gave Mr. Eisenkot the mandate to forge a coalition after an inconclusive national election last month. “This is the time to reach out a hand, to do everything for the unity of our people,” Mr. Herzog said.
Mr. Eisenkot vowed to form a government “for all Israelis” and, in a nod to Israel’s fractured electoral landscape, said that it would take “creative and unconventional political steps.”
A soft-spoken former general, Mr. Eisenkot leads Yashar, a center-right party that campaigned on a promise of keeping Israel secure while pivoting away from policies that prompted international anger and led to Israel’s isolation on the world stage.
Mr. Eisenkot, 66, has up to six weeks to build a coalition before the president passes the opportunity to another candidate, most likely Mr. Netanyahu. Here’s what to know about the career general-turned-politician.
What is his background?
Mr. Eisenkot, a married father of five, was born in Tiberias, in the north, to Moroccan immigrants and was raised in Eilat, a working-class city in southern Israel.
He is relatively new to politics, having spent his career in the military, and has served only part of a single term as a lawmaker and eight months as a minister.
Mr. Eisenkot started out in the infantry and rose through the ranks to take command of Israel’s military operations in the West Bank in 2003, at the height of the Second Intifada. By 2015, he was serving as Israel’s top general — the military’s chief of staff — and held that role until early 2019, under Mr. Netanyahu.
He entered politics in 2022, and, after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, served in Mr. Netanyahu’s war cabinet for part of the Gaza war. He lasted eight months, resigning in June 2024 over Mr. Netanyahu’s push for a “total victory” instead of a deal with Hamas to release the hostages.
Last year, Mr. Eisenkot formed a new party — Yashar, meaning “straight” or “honest” in Hebrew — which aimed to attract centrists and center-right voters worried about where Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition was leading Israel.
Mr. Eisenkot’s personal story also spoke to voters. One of his sons and two of his nephews were killed in the war in Gaza. He has said he hoped to be “worthy of the enormous price paid” by his son, “so that there could be a better reality here for our children.”
What would his policies look like?
Mr. Eisenkot has vowed to steer Israel toward what he considers normalcy after four turbulent years under Mr. Netanyahu’s hard-right government.
His platform in the election zeroed in on Mr. Netanyahu’s vulnerabilities, including by endorsing calls to investigate the security and intelligence failures that preceded the Oct. 7 attack. It also focused on Mr. Netanyahu’s contentious effort to weaken the Israeli judiciary.
Mr. Eisenkot has expressed support for a more restrained expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and promised to curb settler violence there, which he has called “Jewish terrorism.”
An Eisenkot-led government would not be a complete break with its predecessor. Like Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Eisenkot has rejected the prospect of Palestinian statehood — at least in the near term.
And his stance toward the threats posed by Iran and its ally Hezbollah in Lebanon places his foreign policy not too far off that of his former boss. It was Mr. Eisenkot who in 2008 articulated the “Dahiya doctrine,” which called for creating deterrence by responding to Hezbollah attacks with devastation.
What happens now?
Israel’s pivotal election on Oct. 27 left all sides short of an outright 61-seat majority in Parliament. Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition won 53 seats; Mr. Eisenkot and his Zionist allies secured 48; and two Arab parties took a record 19.
Now, Mr. Eisenkot and his allies have no easy path to power.
They could join forces with the two Arab-led parties, but some right-wing Jewish parties in his bloc have said they would not enter a government that relied on their support. Mr. Eisenkot has also stipulated conditions that the Arab parties have yet to meet, such as publicly labeling Hamas as a terrorist organization.
Or, he could look to partner with members of Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition to form a unity government. One possibility would be to woo ultra-Orthodox parties, though some of his allies campaigned against the interests of the ultra-Orthodox factions.
Last week, Mr. Eisenkot said he would work to establish a “national emergency government” to eject Mr. Netanyahu as soon as possible. That could mean a minority government reliant on the Arab parties’ support to prevent a no-confidence vote against it.
On Sunday, at the ceremony with Mr. Herzog, he noted that Israel’s political situation demands “compromises” — even if it meant breaking prior campaign promises.
“No one will be able to keep all of their commitments,” Mr. Eisenkot said, adding that he believed his political partners understood “the gravity of the hour.”
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