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Pity the New York taxpayer, cried the city’s local press. Forced to pay for an NYPD security detail on our new First Lady’s gallivants to Syria and Lebanon, hardworking New Yorkers would be taken for a ride by the silver-tongued socialist in Gracie Mansion. Mayor Zohran Mamdani soon walked back the idea that the NYPD would be bound for the Middle East to accompany his wife on her trip to visit family, but the incident prompted again the easy refrain that socialists are grifters who spend other people’s money as they dream up utopias—as if Eric Adams, Mamdani’s predecessor, hadn’t taken the boys in blue on New Yorkers’ 1040s to Colombia, Uzbekistan, and Israel, among other exotic locations.

To be sure, the animating force behind Mamdani’s administration thus far has been to work against the received wisdom that socialism is not only fraudulent as an ideology but inconvenient and inefficient as governing methodology. Much has been made of his nuts-and-bolts approach—potholes filled, bus lanes built, toilets opened, trees planted—as a revival of the sewer socialism that ruled Milwaukee for much of the first half of the twentieth century. Less heralded than those Socialist Wisconsinites’ sanitation standards has been their financial acumen. As David I. Backer writes in “Tight Ship,” an issue dedicated to efficiency and incompetence alike, the sewer socialists relentlessly audited municipal government as they sought savings for their constituents. They also provisioned public housing, helping Milwaukeeans avoid the predations of the market; today, tenants are treated so poorly that we have reality television shows devoted to glorifying evictions, Michael Friedrich writes.

Graft and the government are not uniquely American problems, of course. Ricardo López Cordero reports from Mexico, where the military has taken over state function after state function (building infrastructure, running customs, greeting arrivees at the airport), all the while profiting immensely from the largest documented corruption scheme in the nation’s history.

Elsewhere in extractive regimes, Peer Schouten describes how, at the heart of Central Africa’s economy, a complex system of taxation revolves around a singular commodity: beer. Laleh Khalili writes on the cost of insuring oil as the war with Iran rages on, and Esfandyar Batmanghelidj gives a history of Iranian brickwork, a humble architectural vernacular that persists in large part due to the West’s onerous sanctions regime. The built environment in a warming world requires adequate cooling, as Tom Wilson documents in his exhibit on the mini-splits taking over New York City—like remora on a shark, or perhaps parakeets on the branch of a poplar in London. David Wingrave asks whether the roughly fifty-thousand-strong pandemonium of parakeets taking over the United Kingdom are avian friend or foe, while Ian Trueger tells of new British advances in swine genetics and the boom-bust “pork cycle” threatening bacon everywhere. The ham hock threatens one’s figure, as Chris Onstad explains in his treatise on human locomotion, but is extreme walking—nearly forty-four miles in a day at his peak—the answer? There has to be a more efficient way.

Published: November 2026

Pages: 136