Six weeks into his tenure, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been confronted with controversies both grave and frivolous. He wisely stood by a top appointee who was facing down a media circus for tweets that were more than a half-decade old. He grappled with the fallout from several police-involved shootings and navigated how, as a democratic socialist who must partner with a much more conservative NYPD commissioner, he should respond.
"Closer to the nation's capital, however, people have been muttering "abolish ice." The denizens of the Acela Corridor aren't without their own misgivings about assertive immigration enforcement. But even the most hardened member of the Resistance-frozen solid-has to wonder why it takes two weeks after a moderate snowstorm for a Democratic-controlled city to plow a street or clear a sidewalk."
A source tipped us off to something strange: a campaign called KICLEI was flooding city councillor inboxes across Canada with slick, professional-sounding messages urging municipalities to abandon their climate commitments. It posed as environmental wisdom, but it was a Trojan Horse designed to undermine municipal climate policy. Before, we would have investigated one city and written one story. But we had access to something new: a search engine we'd built in-house covering 617 municipalities and 24,318 council meetings.