what looms overhead

There is utility in an entire summer spent coated in a slick veneer of pale sweat, sweat so irrepressible that moments without dripping are sweetly conspicuous for their deviation, sweat so abundant that your local laundromat gleefully introduces a punch-card system. Ten visits in one month, 11th dryer cycle is free. Sweat is a simple thing, an unthinking thing. Without protest, it succumbs to gravity or accedes to absorbency and yet, for all its wordlessness, it still offers proof of something. As the rings of a tree report the age of a living thing too quiet to speak for itself, the yellowed, concentric circles that formed in the crevasses of every light-shaded shirt I own present evidence of a June, July, and most of an August spent in regular movement and always-simmering anxiety. The sweat flowed, even under the oppressive hum of air conditioning, and once the floodwaters receded, a record remained.

In May, a calamitous and almost certainly unconstitutional redistricting process unexpectedly plunged countless New York politicians into desperate fights for political survival against one another, the cost of the Legislature's hubris to be paid in suddenly constructed campaigns and obscene media buys. One of those politicians was my former boss, Congressman Jerry Nadler, most famous for impeaching Trump twice and as close as you can get to the human embodiment of the Upper West Side. In a Congress with too few Democrats and even fewer genuine progressives, Nadler is the real deal: the first Member to stand up for trans rights on the House floor, a proud vote against both the Patriot Act and the Iraq War, almost certainly the loudest pro-abortion male voice in the House, and so on and so on.

Nadler was drawn into a district with several other candidates, two of whom ran credible campaigns: a young attorney named Suraj Patel and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who has represented Manhattan's East Side for as long as Nadler has represented the West. Nadler is Chair of the Judiciary Committee, Maloney Chair of the Oversight Committee, the kind of senior position one devotes an entire career towards reaching. As diminutive as their statures might be, in every other method of measurement Nadler and Maloney are two truly towering figures, each possessing both immense symbolic significance - avatars, in a sense, of the neighborhoods they have represented for a generation - and indisputably hard, tangible power. As soon as the primary was set, the national media swarmed, wielding phrases like "clash of political titans" and "marquee showdown" as they frothed with glee. Somehow, I found myself amidst it all.

I was offered the opportunity to co-manage Nadler's campaign very early on a mild mid-May morning, the sun still insecure in its position in the sky. I took the call along an easily flowing stream, the direction of my frantic pacing traveling with and then against and then again with the current, and accepted the job too quickly as if it too could be suddenly carried downstream. The conversation lasted no more than a minute. The stream, its grey foam churning, looked no different than it had sixty seconds prior. But of course, its composition, every second, was without precedent.

This was a summer of vastness, and it is difficult to affix measurement to vastness. How to describe this experience, this job, the many successes and failures? Is it by assembly districts won (all of them), the margin of Nadler's victory (a truly silly 31%), the number of times my remarkably patient co-manager called me naive (no comment), or how many Jerry Nadler for Congress t-shirts I accumulated (6) because they were dark enough to conceal the sweat and thick enough to mitigate the aroma? Probably a little of this, a little of that. The most illustrative way is likely by listing the lessons that I learned Dieselesque - fast and furiously - but this is a public forum and as I search for future employment, it cannot be wise to reveal how little I actually know. Instead, let's talk - briefly and a bit vaguely, for reasons you can surely understand - about the New York Times.

If there was one thing known with Pythian clarity about a race where nothing was truly known, it was that it would likely be decided by the single most influential arbiter in New York City politics: the New York Times endorsement. While the weight of the Times endorsement has surely faded nationally (dual endorsing two presidential candidates with very different policy platforms hardly lends credibility), no stamp of approval carries more influence in uptown Manhattan, a district composed of uber-educated, professorial, likely voters. Even a rousing speech from Barack Obama, his toothy grin flashing in front of Zabar's, would falter in parallel.

The Times interviewed candidates in late July in their midtown offices. It is difficult to trust the judgment of any institution that willfully places its headquarters across the street from the Port Authority and yet New Yorkers choose to do just that. Every day of this summer felt like the hottest day yet - not the hottest day of the summer thus far, the hottest day I had ever lived - and this one was no different. My collared shirt met the morning a perky periwinkle, by 11 it was already a ragged, defeated bluebonnet. I watched travelers emerge from Port Authority, their eyes devoid of spirit, and as I ran my hand against my back, sleeker than a waterslide, I felt the nauseous warmth of solidarity.

To work as a political aide is to grow intimate with powerlessness. You fool yourself into believing that you hold power - power to affect legislative change, power to influence the influential, power to change the words that are printed on broadsheets - and maybe once or twice a year, your delusions align with reality. But the rest of the time, you are flailing, cognizant of your smallness beneath much larger forces, and even more cognizant of your efforts to obscure that truth from yourself. And why wouldn't you hide from it? Your boss could die at any moment, abruptly decide to fuck off to the private sector, reveal their naked self on Craigslist, or, of course, fire you. 99% of the bills you work on don't become law, 99% of the opportunities you think you recognize are false summits, 99% of the relationships you thought you'd developed were merely transactional swipes. All of this is to say that before I left the Times offices, my back doing its best imitation of a porpoise, I thought I knew powerlessness, believed I had sounded and charted its depths. As is almost always the case, I was wrong.

It is strange now, within the plump comfort of retrospect, to check a calendar and realize that only seventeen days passed between meeting and endorsement. It felt like decades. There were so many other things we convinced ourselves we could control - debate performances, interview requests, the street corners volunteers canvassed from - that when one thing (the most important thing!) came about and resisted any wrangling, it felt almost like a personal failing. Every note that we received from the Times ed-board, every small request for additional context merited the convening of an urgent full-team conference call, interminable hours spent parsing every emailed word and monitoring editors' Twitter likes for possible clues (none ever came). One of my colleagues developed a strange form of insomnia, waking every morning precisely at 5 to refresh the webpage. Bets were made - $5 it's coming Thursday! - and then debts forgiven after missed deadlines in the interest of wagering yet again.

All of this is humiliating to admit, yes, but mitigated slightly by the universality of the experience. Not only am I certain that my counterparts on the other campaigns were becoming slowly, similarly unhinged, politicos unaffiliated with any campaign altogether were speculating on Twitter with the same depraved wildness, all of us spending our summers frolicking in murky uncertainty instead of plunging toes into sand. By the end, after every prediction had been proven wrong and then wrong again, the whole process began to assume a certain nihilistic hilarity, a strangely numbing purgatorial exercise in impotence. Maybe they'll endorse on Election Day. Maybe they won't ever endorse. Maybe the New York Times doesn't even exist.

The endorsement did come, eventually, and it was deeply controversial. The Times endorsed in three Congressional races and in each one, a white man earned their support. Nadler, the most progressive of the three, was deemed by the Twitterverse as the most acceptable (doubly so after reading the candidate interviews; Nadler did well while Patel's interview was laden with half-truths and Maloney's chances were sunk the second they invoked her history of anti-vaccine activism) but still, there was a tinge of guilt by association. Nevertheless, it was dizzying to watch as the Times traveled in a matter of moments from sacrosanct deliverer of credibility to establishment crony, deemed guilty of intellectual laziness or even worse, journalistic malpractice. The allegations of corruption that followed were as much an indictment of perceived malfeasance as they were a silent condemnation of the outsized power over New York political outcomes that a single publication - accountable to no one, really - holds.

All three endorsed candidates won on August 23rd. Nearly every post-race analysis attributed the width of the margins in two of those races (and the eked-out victory in the third) to, shockingly, the New York Times endorsement.

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I began writing this post a couple of days ago, not far from that flowing stream, a frog metronomically croaking somewhere in the periphery. That was about three weeks post-election and a day or so before the Biden Administration intervened to prevent a historic rail shutdown, when we seemed on the verge of a general strike that would devastate already sclerotic supply chains, place an unmeetable freight burden upon the strained trucking industry, send the prices of everything from fuel to grain hurtling skywards, and (according to the most employer-friendly and apocalyptic measures) cost an estimated $2 billion each day. Now, after high-level negotiations seem to have succeeded, the laborers that companies like Union Pacific exploit with impunity will stay on the job. Before the threat of the strike, rail workers were forbidden from taking time off in the event of sickness or a family emergency, like a funeral. Now, a deal tenuously struck, they are allowed to take some time off, although the leave will be unpaid. Powerlessness was on the mind then, it still is now.

In the grand scheme of things, waiting for the Times to make up its mind is about as superficial as it gets, no matter how high the stakes might've once felt. There are other problems that matter infinitely more, problems even larger than the violated autonomy of the thousands of workers who quite literally make the trains arrive on time, like the maddeningly cyclical epidemic of American gun violence, a world gradually overheating with each passing year, and of course, a Republican party intent on anti-democratic rule. The unifying line between all these things is not their evilness (nothing inherently immoral about the Times making me lose my mind, unfortunately) but rather the limbo-like state in which we are all idly waiting for the most basic of advancement. Our motionless shuffling is, by now, hardly indistinguishable from those bizarre Brits waiting a dozen hours in a queue to see the Queen lie in repose.

There are certainties in life. Despite our half-hearted jokes, we knew the Times endorsement would eventually come, just as we know - much more grimly - that there will soon be another mass shooting in a Wisconsin school or an Oregon church. We know that the number of climate refugees will set a new record this year, only to be broken next year. The rail workers will surely soon again find themselves with no recourse but to strike and Republican party leaders will undoubtedly cast aspersions on any election that does not deliver them power, again. But unlike waiting silently and sheepishly lest you offend the editorial board, there is no humor to this very serious form of powerlessness, no sardonic mirth attached to the inevitability of tragedy. Instead, if there is a single overarching emotion, it is that of hollow, dreaded familiarity, a queasiness that rises up the back of the throat as you stare down decades-old problems with viable solutions as far away as they were when I was born. I don't know the solution to this paralysis beyond unlikely structural political change or an infectious epidemic of courage suddenly sweeping the world. But I do know that this powerlessness is silently vicious, calcifying itself further with each repeating cycle until it becomes self-fulfilling. The longer it lingers, the heavier it becomes.

The sweat came every day this summer. What began as an inconvenience became a friend, a measurement of movement and confirmation of voters chased down. But then one day, after the race had been called and the media requests dried up, there was no more sweat. With temperatures dropping and post-election responsibilities evaporating, I took a still-dry shirt off at the end of one evening, and instead of tossing it into the hamper, I folded it and placed it back on a shelf. It was a strange sensation, that shift, as subtle and insignificant as it was. I had forgotten what it felt like for something to change.