The dust may have settled on Zohran Mamdani’s astounding, against-the-odds victory in the New York mayoral election. But a week on, the scale of his achievement looks no less impressive.
As Ed Pilkington outlines in this week’s big story, Mamdani swept away his establishment-backed heavyweight opponent Andrew Cuomo by mobilising an army of grassroots volunteers and donors, while also connecting deeply with the voters whose support he most needed on the issues that mattered most to them, namely affordability and economic justice.
It’s a ground-up approach to doing things that US Democrats – who also won governorships in Virginia and New Jersey on an encouraging night – can learn from as they reflect on a torrid year since Donald Trump swept to power.
Spotlight | The green monster of Cop30 Amid bombast, strife and competing interests, is the annual climate summit, which opened in Brazil this week, still the forum we need to save the planet? Fiona Harvey reports from the Amazonian city of Bélem
Spotlight | The extraordinary fall of the BBC’s top bosses A whirlwind that began with a report criticising the editing of a speech by Donald Trump is part of a wider political story, some say. Media editor Michael Savage charts the tale
Feature | Why not everyone is sad to see the end of USAID When Donald Trump set about dismantling USAID, many around the world were shocked. But on the ground in Sierra Leone, the latest betrayal was not unexpected. Mara Kardas-Nelson finds out why
Opinion | A president groped? Sadly it isn’t a shock After Claudia Sheinbaum was assaulted last week, her opponents claimed she staged it. From their own experiences, the women Mona Eltahawy met know she didn’t have to
Culture | Rosalía, the Catalan queen of pop With a towering new album about female saints in 13 languages, she’s pop’s boldest star – and one of its most controversial. She tells Laura Snapes why we need forgiveness instead of cancel culture
I’m starting to feel some pre-emptive nostalgia when I do a Google search. Yes, it’s true, search can sometimes take you to places you don’t want to go. But at least a ‘classical’ search engine like Google in the 2000s and 2010s took you outside itself, and perhaps implicitly prompted you to evaluate critically what you found there. by Donald MacKenzie
Slavery was accepted across most of the early modern world. No one wanted to be a slave, except when the alternative was being executed after a battle, or made a human sacrifice, but the institution was taken for granted until the growth of abolitionism in the later 18th century. Liverpool could hardly be an exception when the slave trade was so embedded in its economy. By John Kerrigan
We still live in the long shadow of Habsburg disintegration. In addition to the lingering legacy of 19th-century state formations, European and global politics are shaken by continuing reverberations in states that have disappeared from Europe since 1990: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the GDR and, above all, the Soviet Union. By Holly Case
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE:The 11.9.25 Issue features Parul Sehgal on Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of ‘Frankenstein’; Emily Baumgaertner Nunn on the trafficked girls of Los Angeles; Jesse Barron on the suicide of a teen who fell in love with an A.I. chatbot; J Wortham on the art exhibition using decommissioned Confederate monuments; and more.
The industry keeps echoing ideas from bleak satires and cyberpunk stories as if they were exciting possibilities, not grim warnings.By Casey Michael HenryCreditPhoto illustration by Michael Houtz
People who rack up most of their daily steps in walks lasting less than five minutes have a higher risk of cardiovascular disease than do those who amass their steps in big blocks.
His opponents tried to smear him for his youth, inexperience, and leftist politics. But New Yorkers didn’t want a hardened political insider to be mayor—they wanted Zohran Mamdani.
Dick Cheney’s Brand of Conservatism
For years before taking office, the former Vice-President appeared less dogmatic than he was.
The Dishy Operatics of Lily Allen’s Breakup Album
On “West End Girl,” all the gritty bits are there: messages with a husband’s mistress, the discovery of a cache of sex toys.
For some time now, El Fasher in Sudan has been a city beyond the reach of journalists. But the haunting satellite image on our cover this week, of smoke billowing from fires near El Fasher’s airport, told its own story as starkly as anything that could be reported from the ground.
Other satellite images showed clusters of burned-out vehicles, and what appeared to be pools of blood beside piles of bodies on the ground. A massacre was under way that could be seen from space.
The last major city in Darfur to fall to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) was already the scene of catastrophic levels of human suffering, but has “descended into an even darker hell”, senior UN officials warned last week. This key moment in the two-and-a-half-year-long civil war has unfolded in plain sight with minimal intervention from the international community, unless you count the United Arab Emirates, which has been arming the RSF paramilitaries.
Spotlight | The Andrew formerly known as a prince Stupidity and self-entitlement sank King Charles III’s disgraced younger brother – and the royal reckoning may not be over yet, writes Stephen Bates
Technology | What if the internet just … stopped working? Could everything suddenly go offline and if so, how? Aisha Down goes inside the fragile system holding the modern world together
Interview | Margaret Atwood puts the world to rights At 85, she’s a literary seer and saint – and queen of the Canadian resistance. So what does the writer make of our dystopian society? Lisa Allardice finds out
Opinion | World leaders: Cop30 could be your great legacy With the US backing away from the climate crisis, now is the moment when other nations must step up, says former British prime minister Gordon Brown
Culture | Back to black with Lynne Ramsay The Scottish film director burst on to the scene with Ratcatcher and terrified audiences with We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her latest film stars Hollywood darling Jennifer Lawrence, but it doesn’t flinch from the dark side of family life, finds Amy Raphael
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
Boomers Daily 