Will Mamdani Be Able to Freeze the Rent?

In order to “freeze the rent” in New York City, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will need approval from the city’s Rent Guidelines Board. It’s an independent body that, by law, weighs factors like inflation, vacancy rates, and taxes to decide on rent increases for stabilized units.

Adam Lehodey spoke with some members of the board to understand the thinking that goes behind their decision.

“When the RGB voted for a zero percent one-year increase under Mayor Bill de Blasio,” Lehodey writes, “the state had ‘generous allowances for improving apartments and building structures,’ a second RGB member told me.” But that changed in 2019, when Albany reduced owners’ ability to factor maintenance and renovation costs into rents. It also axed exceptions for high-rent tenants, which had encouraged owners to improve their units.

Read more from Lehodey’s conversations with the board members.

On Wednesday, protesters jeered as Jewish New Yorkers attended a synagogue event focused on moving to Israel. “We need to make them scared,” one apparently told the assembled crowd. But more alarming was Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s statement on the matter, which rejected the demonstrators’ language but also said that those inside the synagogue were promoting “activities in violation of international law.”

Is it now considered illegal for New Yorkers to contemplate moving to Israel—a commandment for religious Jews? Charles Lehman argues that the answer, along with Mamdani’s strange invocation of “international law,” matters for residents of all religious stripes.

Should American students be taught to sympathize with terrorists? Of course not.

But in K–12 schools across the U.S., they are, thanks to instructional materials provided by the Middle East Children’s Alliance, a California-based nonprofit.

MECA’s Teach Palestine lesson plans promote anti-American narratives and whitewash Hamas terrorism. And they reach as many as 160,000 teachers. “Parents everywhere should be made aware that nonprofits like MECA are far from a benign force in education,” Nicole Neily writes. “Indeed, they are actively working to unravel America’s social fabric and misleading children.”

Public confidence in legacy media has fallen to record lows, with just 28 percent of Americans saying they trust TV, radio, or newspapers to report stories fairly. And the number is even lower among Republicans—just 8 percent or so.

But the hunger for real reporting is still there. Engagement with fact-based stories remains high. Readers are craving voices they can trust.

This phenomenon has given rise to a wave of independent journalists—writers like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss—who are doing the hard work and reaching audiences directly. “The new public sphere looks less like the New York Times, then,” Brian C. Anderson writes, “and more like a conversation or argument among countless independent or quasi-independent interpreters—some rigorous, some reckless or, worse, conspiratorial, but all accountable directly to their audiences.”

Read his take on the industry’s transformation and his advice for aspiring journalists.

In Radical Dreamers, political scientist Joseph Viteritti writes about school-choice proponents on the right and, believe it or not, on the left.

“The movement for educational pluralism has not always been so polarized,” Ray Domanico explains. The “progressives in the school-choice alliance were motivated by the civil rights movement’s failure to move beyond racial integration in schools,” he writes, “to actual improvement in minority and low-income students’ educational outcomes.”

Read more about some of the movement’s left-leaning leaders, and Domanico’s review of the book, here.

“If I had told you 25 years ago that in less than a quarter century progressives won’t be able to tell you what a woman is, and will support surgical & chemical mutilation of children, I’d have been called a liar.

But I would have been exactly right.”

Photo credit: Anadolu / Contributor / Anadolu via Getty Images