Michael Powell

There is, for me, an out-of-time quality to the recent string of crazy, wonderful Knicks playoff games. I find myself lying awake night after night reviewing jump shots made, fouls committed, and shots blocked, always anxious for what lies ahead. Half a century ago, this routine had a certain age-appropriate insanity to it. Now, though, I’m on the distinctly long side of middle age, yet here I am, fitfully trying to sleep and clearing my calendar for each game night as if for a devotional event.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his wife, Rama Duwaji, played host this past week to another young married couple, who came to Gracie Mansion to break their Ramadan fast. A photograph taken of the dinner was softly lit and sweet, smiles all around.
The mayor posted the photo on social media the next day, along with a tribute to his guest, Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student and anti-Israel activist who is fighting a deportation order.

In the months before the election of the young democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor, panic seized members of New York’s elite business community. Real-estate moguls, hedge-fund princes, and a well-known supermarket-chain magnate forecast disaster. Several of them vowed to move to Texas or Florida, or at least Hoboken, if Mamdani was elected. So far, however, the city hasn’t seen an exodus of its richest residents, and their alarm has lapsed into glum acceptance.

Today’s White House meeting between New York’s mayor-elect, Zohran Mamdani, and President Donald Trump suggests that maybe, just maybe, the U.S. government won’t go to war with its largest city. The event was much anticipated as blood sport, a showdown between a young communist and an old despot, to use their favored insults for each other.
Instead, the two men put on such a show of good manners that at times I had to laugh out loud at the stagecraft.

The longest-ever government shutdown has ended with a negotiated whimper rather than a glorious Resistance victory, and many Democrats are furious at their leaders. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut argued on Bluesky that the Senate’s vote to end the suspension leaves President Donald Trump stronger, not weaker. Representative Ro Khanna of California wrote on X that leaders must pay. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, he argued, “is no longer effective and should be replaced.

Zohran Mamdani is a left-wing daydream of a New York City mayoral candidate. He’s young—33—and proudly socialist. His campaign ads call to mind a mashup of TikTok clips and hip-hop videos. The graphics look like something from the zany 1960s Batman TV series. He is a character in these ads, walking into the picture at odd angles on street corners and shawarma stands, and popping up to chat with taxi drivers.

Professional baseball has a pitching crisis, as its starters throw harder and faster—and get injured more often. In search of what’s gone wrong with a pillar of this beautiful game, I drove along Lake Hartwell, in South Carolina, and pulled into a dirt driveway, where a baseball wizard by the name of Leo Mazzone greeted me. From 1990 to 2005, he oversaw the Atlanta Braves’ pitching staff, one of the greatest in history.

What a glorious time to be an ethically challenged politician. President Donald Trump began yesterday by pardoning Illinois’s eminently corrupt former Governor Rod R. Blagojevich, who’d tried to auction off a U.S. Senate seat. Last night, Trump extended his mercies to the indicted New York Mayor Eric Adams. The message is twofold and rather elemental: Prosecutors are not to be trusted. And bowing to Trump will yield rewards even for newly minted loyalists.

Listening to Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention last night was like stumbling upon a man from another time. His evocation of the importance, the centrality even, of searching for humanity in our fellow Americans, particularly those on the far side of our partisan divide, was moving because it felt so foreign.
“Mutual respect has to be part of our message,” he said.

On top of the stairs of Chicago’s elevated Green Line yesterday, I had a fine view of the 13-acre Union Park. I squinted, looking for the promised cauldron of Democratic National Convention protesters, the tens of thousands of pro-Palestinian “Crashing the Party” masses ready to rumble at what was billed by the Democratic Socialists of America on social media as the “event of the season.”
I spotted a clump of protesters around a soundstage.

Updated at 11:15 ET on April 22, 2024
Yesterday just before midnight, word goes out, tent to tent, student protester to student protester—a viral warning: Intruders have entered the “liberated zone,” that swath of manicured grass where hundreds of students and their supporters at what they fancy as the People’s University for Palestine sit around tents and conduct workshops about demilitarizing education and and fighting settler colonialism and genocide.

Photographs by Chase BarnesThree years ago, President E. Gordon Gee of West Virginia University had a terrific idea—a career capper. As he neared retirement, he would embrace the “academic transformation” of public higher education and streamline his university.For too long, as Gee told anyone who would listen, public universities had tried to be everything to everyone and keep up with elite private colleges.