Mamdani & The Commie Corridor

Plus: Pro-Mamdani swans, Americans want immigration enforcement but don’t want immigration enforcement & how far did we set Iran back?

New Yorkers have spoken: Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old Democratic Socialist full of spit and vinegar (and some ideas that probably won’t make it out of the whiteboarding stage), is very likely to be the new mayor. Andrew Cuomo called Mamdani to concede last night.

Here’s how it broke down:

• Mamdani dominated “The Commie Corridor” (as Michael Lange puckishly puts it) with about 75% of the vote in the most left-leaning neighborhoods.

• Cuomo won 36.4% of the vote, taking the Upper West and East Sides.

• Brad Lander came in 3rd with 11.3%.

• Adrienne Adams won the entire district between Cadman Plaza and Adams Street (home field advantage!) with 4.1% of the total vote.

How did we get here? Andrew Cuomo is not just a flawed candidate with baggage. That baggage was strangling him, and he did nothing to release its grip. He thought the only strategy was not to communicate, except for an outdated approach of ads and flyers, which would have been effective if it were 1988. The problem is that when the other guy surged, it was too late to catch up and lay out the case against Mamdani. He just thought resting on his experience and name recognition would get him through the finish line, meanwhile, Mamdani was firing up his 50,000 unpaid volunteers.

I don’t think that New Yorkers are going to wake up six months from now with explicit buyer’s remorse. But I do think they will progressively (or moderately) get weirded out when they realize Mamdani speaks in different accents based on who he’s talking to. Does this make him cool and culturally adept, or does it make him Hilaria Baldwin?

Welcome to the Gist List—an election-analyzing news roundup, interesting things you should know, and my thoughts leading up to today’s podcast episode.

Here’s what’s on my mind:

🦢 Anti-swan-poaching vigilantes.

💥 Rubio pushes back on rumors about Iran attack.

📊 Americans want nice things but don’t like how we go about getting them.

🏭 Why we can’t fill factory jobs, are overrun by AI resumes & lack good content for Bruce Springsteen songs.

💸 Why your DoorDash order might affect your credit score.

🎱 ”BIG BALLS,” a 19-year-old DOGE worker has resigned.

The Gist List

Baby Swans Are the New Stars in Brooklyn. But Fame Comes With a Cost (Gothamist)

A family of swans living in Prospect Park have become somewhat of a local obsession sparking debates over urban wildlife and animal safety. Technically speaking, these swans are actually an invasive and aggressive species (which describes the other 8.25 million people who live in New York City), and critics think that they are ill-suited to city life. Biggie, the dad swan, has the street cred of fatally injuring another swan, though he’ll never say so thanks to the rules of swan-snitches-get-gracefully-applied-stitches. Biggie also has some muscle, like the Swan Squad, which formed a couple of years ago to protect the birds from poaching and other predators. The Swan Squad is waging a campaign to stop negligent park goers from feeding them bread or taking one of them home to be a pretty terrible pet. Swan Squad members have classic Mamdani characteristics, but also believe in aggressive policing in the name of protecting swan youth. You could say it’s their cygnet-ure issue. But if you do, people won’t like you.

Rubio Mounts Pushback Against Report on Iranian Nuclear Damage (NYT)

President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are playing defense over the Iran nuclear facility bombings and the murmurings that we may not have completely neutralized the threat. Trump claimed the facilities were "obliterated" and that Iran is no longer "even thinking" about nuclear enrichment—which, knowing him, could be an exaggeration. Rubio claimed we destroyed the conversion facility in Isfahan, setting the nuclear program back years and provided satellite imagery showing the targets are wiped out.

However, if you tuned in to yesterday’s interview with Yonah Jeremy Bob (you can watch it below), it’s possible we only set them back a few months. Or at least a few months back from wherever they were in the process (Yonah estimates two years), which completion could still have been a few years out.

Americans Have Mixed to Negative Views of Trump Administration Immigration Actions (Pew)

Pew’s most recent study on Americans’ sentiment towards immigration shows that while the majority of Americans support some kind of enforcement—31% saying there should be a deportation effort and 65% supporting some kind of conditional enforcement—we all can’t agree on how we should go about doing this. We want enforcement, but we don’t want to use state and local resources to do it. We want enforcement, but we think it costs too much. We want enforcement, but we don’t want ICE posting videos of them chasing people down in fields.

However, this is a common theme in many of these stories. We want to reduce the national debt, but we don’t want to cut the biggest social programs: Medicaid and Social Security. And what about Iran? Eight in 10 Americans oppose Iran obtaining nuclear weapons, but only 48% of Americans think we should conduct airstrikes on the nuclear facilities. Diplomacy is much more popular - if only the Iranians would follow our polling!

While there are plenty of generous readings of this information—after all, the Gist List did just create a slack channel as a repository for sad immigration stories where ICE got it wrong—it’s also fair to say that Americans want nice things, but they don’t want to see the steps that get us there.

Why Factories Are Having Trouble Filling Nearly 400,000 Open Jobs (NYT)

Despite the president’s fervor for reviving American manufacturing, 400,000 manufacturing jobs are currently unfilled as the Baby Boomers retire, leaving no one to pick up the slack. There are a lot of boilerplate reasons as to why this is—Americans want high-status jobs associated with college degrees, etc.—but there’s also a big skills gap in the current labor market. Many factory owners are finding they can’t just hire people out of high school because so much of the machinery requires extra training, and although Trump’s pro-manufacturing rhetoric is being undercut by federal spending cuts and his attempt to eliminate the Job Corps.

On the other side of the collar divide, white-collar jobs on LinkedIn are being inundated by AI bots, overwhelming HR reps with up to 1,200 applications for a single role.

BNPL Loans Will Now Count Toward Americans' Credit Scores (Sherwood)

FICO will start counting BNPL—or, as those of us in the know would say, Buy Now, Pay Later—loans towards your credit score this fall. These are the companies like Klarna and Afterpay that allow you to split your DoorDash order into four payments of $5 instead of one payment of $20.

Surely, once this news hits the airwaves, we’re going to see some objections. Remember my Spiel on the Jan. 8 show? This was when the Biden administration decided to end the inclusion of medical debt in credit scores, basing its decision on a study by the CFPB that found medical debt could be underestimating scores by 10-20 points. This was presented as an unalloyed good for the world, but I argued that medical debt, in fact, does determine creditworthiness. I imagine to those opposing people’s Klarna purchases of a bunch of crap from Shein are going to say that it is such a small purchase, that it really shouldn’t mean anything and that this will be a tax on the poor. While the poorest Americans will be hit the hardest on this, it’s also impossible not to see the link between needing to use Afterpay to get groceries or pay your rent and your ability to use credit responsibly. According to Sherwood, 23% of people who have a <600 score have used BNPL once in the last 30 days, and 13% have used it more than once.

‘Big Balls’ No Longer Works for the US Government (Wired)

We are gathered here today—not in person, not in mourning attire, but in the digital ether of bemused group chats and incredulous Slack threads—to mark the passing of a most curious thing: the federal career of one Edward “Big Balls” Coristine. Apparently when you are a 19-year old with access to government databases and own a company called Tesla.Sexy LLC—which, depending on your politics, is either a parody of capitalism or a startup name from Silicon Valley that got rejected for being too on-the-nose—you don’t just go by Ed.

Coristine, a former Neuralink staffer and controversial technologist known by the online alias BIG BALLS, has resigned from DOGE. This is probably for the best, as he appeared to be associated with a Telegram handle that solicited a DDoS attack.

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Yesterday on The Show: Tehran Target Acquired... Damaged... Destroyed... Debated

Jerusalem Post military correspondent Yonah Jeremy Bob, co-author of "Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination—and Secret Diplomacy—to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East." Bob explains how Israel coordinated hundreds of strikes and infiltrations across Iran, what the U.S. MOP strike on Fordow actually accomplished, and why Netanyahu's longtime caution gave way to a high-stakes gamble. He also explores internal Israeli debates over assassinating Khamenei, the strategy behind targeting Iran's domestic enforcers, and why the Iranian nuclear threat is now both diminished and more unpredictable. Plus: Mamdani's cheerful radicalism, Cuomo's glower, and a reminder that aspirational politics can veer into Theranos territory.

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