• Three novellas
• Five short story collections

The Origins

DOES ANYONE STILL believe that human intelligence can solve all problems? The Extropians do. The '90s version of "Isn't the future great?" is sorting itself into a minor movement revolving around the term extropy. Extropy is the opposite of dissipative entropy. Extropians preach "boundless expansion" - there are no limits to social and technological progress, and "self-transformation" - there are no limits to what a person can do by taking hold of his or her own destiny. Author Ayn Rand is mentioned a lot.

It has been said that the Enlightenment expired as the victim of its own excesses. It gave way to Romanticism, and to latter day reactions against the rule of instrumental reason and the attempt to rationally control nature, such as can be found in some postmodernist writings, the New Age movement, deep environmentalism, and in some parts of the anti-globalization movement. However, the Enlightenment’s legacy, including a belief in the power of human rationality and science, is still an important shaper of modern culture.

Yet it was in France in the late 1960s that accelerationist ideas were first developed in a sustained way. Shaken by the failure of the leftwing revolt of 1968, and by the seemingly unending postwar economic boom in the west, some French Marxists decided that a new response to capitalism was needed. In 1972, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus. It was a restless, sprawling, appealingly ambiguous book, which suggested that, rather than simply oppose capitalism, the left should acknowledge its ability to liberate as well as oppress people, and should seek to strengthen these anarchic tendencies, “to go still further … in the movement of the market … to ‘accelerate the process’”.

Effective Altruism, Longtermism, and Bay Area Rationalism

I refrained from signing because I think the letter is understating the seriousness of the situation and asking for too little to solve it.

Shut down all the large GPU clusters (the large computer farms where the most powerful AIs are refined). Shut down all the large training runs. Put a ceiling on how much computing power anyone is allowed to use in training an AI system, and move it downward over the coming years to compensate for more efficient training algorithms. No exceptions for governments and militaries. Make immediate multinational agreements to prevent the prohibited activities from moving elsewhere. Track all GPUs sold. If intelligence says that a country outside the agreement is building a GPU cluster, be less scared of a shooting conflict between nations than of the moratorium being violated; be willing to destroy a rogue datacenter by airstrike.

Effective Accelerationism

They are a group of writers, thinkers, readers, and Internet trolls alike who were once rationalists, or members of adjacent communities like the effective altruism movement, but grew disillusioned. To them, rationality culture’s technocratic focus on ameliorating the human condition through hyper-utilitarian goals — increasing the number of malaria nets in the developing world, say, or minimizing the existential risk posed by the development of unfriendly artificial intelligence — had come at the expense of taking seriously the less quantifiable elements of a well-lived human life.

"(i used to be annoyed at being the villain of the EAs until I met their heroes*, and now i'm lowkey proud of it
*there are a few EA heroes i think are really great, eg Holden

a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.

The ousting of Sam Altman

OpenAI leadership and employees were growing increasingly concerned about being painted in the press as “a bunch of effective altruists,” as one of them put it. Two days before Altman’s ouster, they were discussing these concerns on a Slack channel, which included Sutskever. One senior executive wrote that the company needed to “uplevel” its “independence”—meaning create more distance between itself and the EA movement.

Page pushed back. Why would it matter, he asked, if machines someday surpassed humans in intelligence, even consciousness? It would simply be the next stage of evolution.

New Releases for October 2023

• 1890: The longest home run in baseball history: 3,300 miles
  
• 1914: Casey Stengel, then an outfielder, is told to back up with a pitcher at the plate.
  
• 1918: A spring training prank that will quack you up
  
• 1918: Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Leon Cadore, under fire in World War I, gets an unexpected visitor
  
• 1918: Six weeks after the end of World War I, future Yankees co-owner Lee MacPhail joins an unauthorized attempt to kidnap the Kaiser
  
• 1921: Babe Ruth hits a pop-up
  
• 1929: Rogers Hornsby and the steak dinner
  
• 1937: After four straight losses, Yankee manager Joe McCarthy is in a sour mood. 'What, does he expect us to win every game?' outfielder Roy Johnson snarks. In fact, McCarthy does -- and tells the front office to trade Johnson immediately!
  
• 1945: Babe Ruth orders a drink
  
• 1945: The Curse of the Billy Goat
  
• 1952: The Browns fire manager Rogers Hornsby, and the players give the owner a trophy in gratitude
  
• 1955: Duke Snider talks too much during a card game, so Pee Wee Reese tapes his mouth closed
  
• 1960: Ted Williams signs an autograph
  
• 1962: Two Red Sox players go AWOL
  
• 1963: Whitey Ford leaves a note for Willie Mays
  
• 1964: The Minnesota Twins finally become the last major league team to integrate during spring training, but the team's owner and front office executives continue to stay at a whites-only hotel.
  
• 1966: Emmett Ashford, the first black umpire in major league history, is stopped at the gate: 'Who are you trying to kid? There are no Negro umpires in the major leagues.' Ashford replied: 'Well there will be if you let me in the ball park.'
  
• 1971: Ted Williams signs another autograph
  
• 1971: Yankees President Michael Burke talks about baseball... and war
  
• 1975: Whitey Ford, now retired, collapses in the clubhouse tunnel from heart trouble after pitching batting practice. He's found by pitcher George "Doc" Medich... who just happens to be a medical student in the off season, and saves his life.
  
• 1976: Carlton Fisk pulls a fast one on Charlie Spikes
  
• 1976: Steve Yeager is nearly killed by a broken bat
  
• 1977: Mickey Rivers and the $10,000 bonus
  
• 1978: Reggie Jackson baits an opposing pitcher into grooving a 3-0 pitch by pretending to be annoyed about getting the 'take' sign.
  
• 1979: Billy Martin gives a pitcher $100 after plunking a batter
  
• 1989: During the 1989 World Series earthquake, infielder Mike Gallego runs back into the clubhouse... for his glove.
  
• 1990: Baserunner takes out his third base coach
  
• 1991: Joe DiMaggio considers a Seinfeld cameo
  
• 2017: Adrian Beltre is told to stand in the on-deck circle, so he drags the on-deck circle to where he wants to stand... and is ejected
  

• Alfredo Aceves
  
• Jonathan Albaladejo
  
• Mike Aldrete
  
• Doyle Alexander
  
• Greg Allen
  
• John Anderson
  
• Dean Anna
  
• Willians Astudillo
  
• Steve "Bye Bye" Balboni
  
• Floyd "Bill" Bevens
  
• Jimmy Bonner
  
• Jesse Burkett
  
• George Burns and George Burns (and George Burns)
  
• Sammy Byrd
  
• Greg Cadaret
  
• Bob Cerv
  
• Spud Chandler
  
• Ken Clay
  
• Jim Coates
  
• Joe Collins
  
• Wilbur Cooper
  
• Birdie Cree
  
• Jim Creighton
  
• Bubba Crosby
  
• Murry Dickson
  
• Mama DiMaggio
  
• Pat Dobson
  
• Al Downing
  
• Brian Doyle
  
• Slow Joe Doyle
  
• Howard Ehmke
  
• John Ellis
  
• Clyde Engle
  
• Nick Etten
  
• Chick Fewster
  
• Ed Figueroa
  
• Ray Fisher
  
• Dave Fultz
  
• Mike Gallego
  
• Jake Gibbs
  
• Pebbly Jack Glasscock
  
• Don Gullett
  
• Bump Hadley
  
• Truck Hannah
  
• Myril Hoag
  
• Rex Hudler
  
• Charles Hudson
  
• Kei Igawa
  
• Jackie Jensen
  
• Nick Johnson
  
• Roy Johnson
  
• Sad Sam Jones
  
• Bill Knickerbocker
  
• Mark Koenig
  
• Johnny Kucks
  
• Ryan LaMarre
  
• Tim Leary
  
• Ricky Ledee
  
• Hector Lopez
  
• Ed Lucas
  
• Duke Maas
  
• John Malangone
  
• Cliff Mapes
  
• Lindy McDaniel
  
• Jack McDowell
  
• Bobby Meacham
  
• George "Doc" Medich
  
• Bob Meusel
  
• Rupert Mills
  
• Paul Mirabella
  
• Juan Miranda
  
• Tony Mullane
  
• Johnny Murphy
  
• Vinny Nittoli
  
• Eduardo Nunez
  
• Joe Page
  
• Dave Pavlas
  
• Andy Phillips
  
• Bob Porterfield
  
• Jack Quinn
  
• Cody Ransom
  
• Vic Raschi
  
• Dennis Rasmussen
  
• Darrell Rasner
  
• Rick Rhoden
  
• Rickie Ricardo
  
• Dave Righetti
  
• Marius Russo
  
• Vic Saier
  
• Wally Schang
  
• Pi Schwert
  
• Everett Scott
  
• Bob Shawkey
  
• Aaron Small
  
• Charlie Spikes
  
• Andy Stankiewicz
  
• Fred "Chicken" Stanley
  
• Mike Stanley
  
• Tanyon Sturtze
  
• Don Sutton
  
• Tom Sturdivant
  
• Tony Tarasco
  
• Brien Taylor
  
• Myles Thomas
  
• Marv Throneberry
  
• Joe Torre
  
• Aaron Ward
  
• Jack Warhop
  
• Bill White
  
• Bob Wickman
  
• Walt "No Neck" Williams
  
• Mike Witt
  
• Dooley Womack
  
• Chase Wright
  
• Shibe Park
  
• Wrigley Field (Los Angeles)
  
• The 1921 New York Yankees
  

• 1912: Ty Cobb vs. a disabled fan
  
• 1932: Umpire George Moriarty vs. the Chicago White Sox
  
• 1932: Carl Reynolds vs. Bill Dickey
  
• 1960: Billy Martin vs. Jim Brewer
  
• 1965: Juan Marichal vs. Johnny Roseboro
  
• 1967: Bob Gibson vs. the Cincinnati Reds
  
• 1972: Bert Campaneris vs. Lerrin LaGrow
  
• 1974: Lenny Randle vs. Milt Wilcox
  
• 1977: Lenny Randle vs. his manager, Frank Lucchesi
  
• 1993: Robin Ventura vs. Nolan Ryan
  
• 1996: Albert Belle vs. Fernando Vina
  

• 1932: "Pitch and duck": Mark Koenig's advice on how to pitch to Babe Ruth.
  
• 1935: A line drive hits third baseman Odell Hale in the forehead and ricochets into the glove of shortstop Bill Knickerbocker, who throws it to second and then on to first for a game-ending triple play. Sportswriter Al Schacht: "The most astonishing thing was that the ball wasn't damaged in the slightest."
  
• 1941: Nick Etten's response to a teammate's complaining about his fielding at first base: "Son, they pay ol' Nick to hit. You can't hit, so you catch all those balls, and I'll knock in the runs for both of us."
  
• 1942: "He'd hit you in the ass, just for the sheer pleasure of it": Red Sox shortstop Johnny Pesky on Yankee pitcher Spud Chandler.
  
• 1947: Brooklyn's Al Gionfriddo catches Joe DiMaggio's long drive in the World Series. Joe, who rarely showed emotion, kicks the dirt in frustration. Years later, a man introduces himself to DiMaggio as Gionfriddo's cousin. DiMaggio's reply: "Is that little son of a bitch still alive?"
  
• 1950: Phillies pitcher Russ Meyer was shelled and pulled from the game by pitching coach Maje McDonnell. Meyer angrily shoved the ball at McDonnell and snarled, "Stick it up your ass!" McDonnell replied: "The way you've been pitching, it'll be safer there."
  
• 1966: Asked how he plans to replace the retiring Sandy Koufax, Dodgers GM Buzzie Bavasi replies: "We are in the market for a Jewish lefthander who has arthritis and has pitched four no-hitters."
  
• 1972: "Billy Martin is the only guy I know who can hear someone giving him the finger." -- Mickey Mantle
  
• 1972: In the days before arbitration, players had no recourse when a team low-balled their salary. After going 14-14 with a 2.72 ERA while making the league minimum, pitcher Dick Woodson asked for a raise. Instead he was again offered the league minimum. Twins owner Calvin Griffith: "You can either sign the contract or go and carry a lunch bucket."
  
• 1986: 43-year-old Tommy John after giving up two hits to the son of his dentist, Dr. John McGwire: "When your dentist's kid starts hitting you, it's time to retire." The "dentist's kid" was 22-year-old rookie Mark McGwire.
  

• September 28, 1911: Highlanders and Browns play one of the sloppiest games in history. The two teams combine for 30 runs, 24 hits, 20 walks, 12 errors, three wild pitches, and a hit by pitch. The Highlanders steal an A.L. record 15 bases, including six in one inning!
  
• May 1, 1920: Braves and Dodgers play to a 26-inning tie
  
• 1933 All-Star Game: 38-year-old Babe Ruth steals the show
  
• 1943 All-Star Game: Joe McCarthy benches his Yankees to prove a point
  
• August 8, 1976: The Chicago White Sox wear shorts
  
• April 15, 1978: Graig Nettles and Thurman Munson have a one-day strike
  
• October 13, 1978: Rawlings drops Graig Nettles from his glove endorsement deal. That night, he makes three astonishing defensive plays in the World Series... then signs a new glove deal with Louisville Slugger.
  
• May 31, 1979: Detroit pitcher Pat Underwood makes his MLB debut against Toronto pitcher Tom Underwood, his big brother
  
• August 23, 1982: 43-year-old Gaylord Perry is caught with a doctored baseball for the first and only time in his career.
  
• July 24, 1983: The Pine Tar Bat Game
  

• Sammy "Babe Ruth's Legs" Byrd
  
• Darren "Dutch" Daulton
  
• Murry Dickson and why he was derisively nicknamed "Thomas Edison Jr."
  
• Scott "Snakeface" Downs
  
• Eugene "Bubbles" Hargrave
  
• Bob "The White Rat" Kuzava and Dorrel "Whitey" Herzog
  
• Harry "Cookie" Lavagetto and Victor "Cookie" Devincenzi
  
• Phil "Wolfie" Maton
  
• John "Dots" Miller
  
• The nickname that wasn't: Cannonball Titcomb
  
• The nicknames you didn't know were nicknames
  

• The curiously antiquated history of the dropped third strike rule
  
• 1903: John Anderson steals second... with the bases loaded
  
• 1909: Neal Ball ends the top of the inning with an unassisted triple play, leads off the bottom of the inning with an inside-the-park homerun
  
• 1935: Pop-up hits a bird in flight
  
• 1957: Baserunner deliberately fields a grounder to break up a double play. What's the call?
  
• 1959: Two balls in play
  
• 1985: Carlton Fisk tags out two runners at the plate
  
• 1987: The Hidden Potato Trick
  
• 1988: Gary Carter is called out on the "hidden ball trick"... on his birthday!
  
• 1993: Mike Stanley flies out to end the game, but an umpire called time prior to the pitch. On the "do-over," Stanley singles, the rally continues, and the Yankees win.
  
• 2023: Batted ball hits umpire
  

• 1957: Mickey Mantle tells the story of Billy Martin getting traded.
  
• 1973: George Steinbrenner tells a friend about a trade the team is about to make, the friend tells a reporter, and the reporter calls Steinbrenner to confirm the deal, which Steinbrenner does... but the trade hadn't been made yet, and the other team backs out
  
• 1976: Vida Blue, a Yankee for three days before traded is vetoed
  
• 1979: Topps issues a baseball card for a trade that never happened
  
• 1980: New York Mets outfielder Claudell Washington signs a five-year, $3.5 million deal with the Atlanta Braves. In response, Phillies owner Ruly Carpenter announces free agency has ruined baseball and he must sell his team
  
• 1998: Pitcher traded for catfish
  

• The All-22 Team
  
• The All-Born In France Team
  
• The All-Christmas Team
  
• The All-Dick Team
  
• The All-Double Number Yankee Team
  
• The All-Guys Named Nolan Team
  
• The All-Guys Named Will Smith Team
  
• The All-Guys Nicknamed Babe Team
  
• The All-I Team
  
• The All-Initials Team
  
• The All-Lunar Team
  
• The All-Physician Team
  
• The All-Politician Team
  
• The All-Presidential Last Name Team
  
• The All-Q Team
  
• The All-Same Name Team
  
• The All-St. Patrick's Day Team
  
• The All-Should Have Changed Your Name Team
  
• The All-Talk Like A Pirate Team
  
• The All-U Team
  
• The All-Wrong Team Team
  
• The Girardi Era Yankees
  
• The Torre Era Yankees
  
• Twelve Yankees (plus three more) Who Were "One And Done"
  

• Babe Ruth's big bat
  
• Babe Ruth gets shot by a jealous ex
  
• Babe Ruth saves a kid from knife-wielding ballplayers
  
• Babe Ruth threatens to throw Miller Huggins off a moving train
  
• Cliff Mapes is ejected from a game he's not playing in
  
• Four players banned for life in the National League's first gambling scandal... in 1877
  
• How the Yankees won the 1984 National League pennant
  
• Johnny Mostil cuts his own throat
  
• Kansas City A's owner Charlie Finley threatens a 'Peculiar' move
  
• Negro Leagues second baseman William Bedford struck by lightning during pre-game warm-ups.
  
• Orange baseballs
  
• A Sandy Koufax game-worn jersey has an unpleasant surprise
  
• Steve Carlton wouldn't talk to reporters for 20 years... then gives a disastrous interview
  
• Triple Crown winner Ted Williams loses the 1947 MVP race to Joe DiMaggio by a single point, because one voter left him off his ballot. In his autobiography, Williams identified the writer as the Boston Globe's Melville Webb, who had died eight years earlier. Williams was wrong: Webb hadn't even voted that year! But Webb has gone down in history as the Boston writer who didn't vote for Ted Williams.
  
• Why you're allowed to keep foul balls
  
• Yankee broadcaster is fired after twice mispronouncing sponsor Ivory Soap as "Ovary" Soap
  
• Yankee pitcher Bob Shawkey's wife refuses to sign an affidavit that will keep him from getting drafted. "I want him to go to war, the sooner the better!"
  
• Zack Short becomes the first player with his last name as his position
  

1. Tom Cruise pays Katie Holmes $33,000 a month in child support for their daughter Suri.
2. Britney Spears used to pay Kevin Federline $20,000 a month for their two sons, but a source told US Weekly that number was upped to $35,000 in 2018.
3. Kanye West pays Kim Kardashian $200,000 a month for their four children.
4. Kevin Costner has to pay $129,000 a month in child support for his three children.
5. Halle Berry pays $16,000 a month in child support for her daughter.
6. Kelly Clarkson has to pay $45,000 a month in child support for her two children.
7. Marc Anthony pays $26,000 a month in child support for his two kids with Dayanara Torres.
8. Stevie Wonder pays $25,000 a month in child support for his two children.
9. Jesse Williams used to pay $40,000 a month in child support for his two children, but People reported that amount was temporarily lowered to $6,413 a month in late 2022.
10. Armie Hammer reportedly pays $1,500 in child support for his two children.
11. Tyrese pays $10,000 a month in child support for his daughter.
12. In 2020, Dennis Quaid reportedly paid $13,500 a month for his two daughters, but he requested to have that number raised because his income was much higher.
13. In 2017, Jodie Sweetin was ordered to pay $2,800 a month in child support for her daughter.
14. In 2020, Jeremy Renner reportedly paid $30,000 a month in child support for his daughter.
15. In 1991, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump was ordered to pay $650,000 annually in child support for his three children: Ivanka, Donald Jr., and Eric Trump. That's about $54,000 a month.
16. 50 Cent paid $6,700 a month in child support for his son until he turned 18.
17. In 1996, Val Kilmer was ordered to pay $27,500 a month in child support for his two kids.
18. Rob Kardashian initially paid $20,000 a month for his daughter with Blac Chyna but now pays nothing.
19. In 2009, Today reported that Russell Simmons had to pay $40,000 a month in child support for his two children.
20. In 2009, People reported that Johnny Knoxville had to pay $6,000 a month for his daughter.
21. In 2018, E! reported that Charlie Sheen had to pay $55,000 a month to Brooke Mueller and $20,000 a month to Denise Richards. In 2021, People reported his payment to Denise went down to $0.

The stunning failure of the Democratic Party on election night was nowhere more apparent than at Il Bacco, an Italian restaurant on the boulevard where Queens bleeds into Nassau County. That was where a soon-to-be-infamous 34-year-old political neophyte walked out to a cheering throng of Republicans and declared victory in one of America’s most important House contests. “Only in this country can the kid who came from the basement in Jackson Heights … ,” George Santos began, before he was momentarily overwhelmed. “To everybody watching, I want you to know that the American dream is worth fighting for. It’s worth defending, and that’s why I jumped into this race.”
In another era — two or four years ago, perhaps — the Santos saga, with its absurd cascade of lies, would have been an amusing sideshow for many Democratic politicians, who would have been able to mock the chaos and move on, comfortably sure that Santos, who fabricated much of his personal and financial biography, would only further hobble a neutered Republican minority. But the new congressman, now under investigation by local and federal authorities, was instead a crucial cog in Kevin McCarthy’s House majority, having flipped the redrawn Third Congressional District in New York, an area that had been represented by Democrats for decades, by eight points.
These days, New York is known as the deep-blue state where Democrats lost four seats on the way to losing the House of Representatives and effectively halting President Biden’s domestic agenda for the next two years. Kathy Hochul, who served as Andrew Cuomo’s lieutenant governor before accusations of sexual harassment and assault forced him from office in 2021, won the narrowest race for governor in 28 years, beating Lee Zeldin, a Trump-supporting congressman from Long Island, by less than six points. While forecasts for a national red wave didn’t materialize — Democratic candidates for governor and the Senate were largely triumphant in tossup races across the country, and Chuck Schumer of Brooklyn remained the Senate majority leader — Democrats stumbled in territory on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley that Biden won handily just two years earlier.
These disappointments have cast into sharp relief both the divisions within the party and the peculiar void of the state’s Democratic organization itself. Few New Yorkers cared, until late 2022, that the statewide Democratic apparatus operated, for the most part, as a hollowed-out appendage of the governor, a second campaign account that did little, if any, work in terms of messaging and turnout. New Hampshire, a state with roughly half the population of Queens, has a Democratic Party with 16 full-time paid staff members. New York’s has four, according to the state chairman, Jay Jacobs. One helps maintain social media accounts that update only sparingly. Most state committee members have no idea where the party keeps its headquarters, or if it even has one. (It does, at 50 Broadway in Manhattan.)
National parties function as enormous umbrella organizations, determining the presidential primary calendar and the process for allocating delegates at the national conventions. The drudgery of running elections is left to the local and state parties, as well as individual campaigns and independent political action committees.
Elsewhere in the country, state Democratic parties are much more robust than they are in New York. In Wisconsin, under the leadership of 42-year-old Ben Wikler, the party offered crucial organizing muscle in Gov. Tony Evers’s re-election win, staving off a Republican statewide sweep. The Nevada Democratic Party, despite infighting among moderates and progressives, aided Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s re-election, investing strongly in rural voter engagement. And in California, the party chair position is publicly contested among multiple candidates, with delegates voting as Democrats traverse the state and make their case in the media.
As for New York, observers across the ideological spectrum agree that the state is entering an unprecedented era, with warring political factions and a glaring power vacuum. Hochul recently became the first governor in New York history to have the State Legislature, controlled by Democrats, vote down her nominee to the state’s highest court. Progressives spearheaded opposition to the judge, Hector LaSalle, arguing that he was too conservative.
In challenging Hochul from the right, Zeldin was savagely effective — “Vote like your life depends on it,” he exhorted, echoing Richard Nixon, in the final days of the campaign — in seizing on suburban anxieties around rising crime that Republicans in other states weren’t able to successfully exploit. While Manhattan and the combined might of upper-income white and middle-class Black voters thwarted Zeldin in the five boroughs, he made notable inroads with working-class Asian Americans, potentially heralding a political realignment for the city’s fastest growing demographic. Hochul’s campaign was assailed for its relative listlessness and failure to counter Republican attacks on crime. “That is an issue that had to be dealt with early on, not 10 days before the election,” Nancy Pelosi chided the governor. (Hochul’s staff did not make her available for an interview.)
Within the confines of New York, Democrats remain historically dominant, retaining veto-proof majorities in both the State Senate and State Assembly. All the statewide elected officials are Democrats, as is the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams. But this is a recent shift: Republicans controlled the State Senate almost continuously from the mid-1960s until 2019. George Pataki, a moderate Republican, led the state for 12 years, and Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg ran New York City from 1994 through 2013.
Heading into 2022, Democrats were confident that after decades of Republican rule in the State Legislature, they could entirely control the state’s redistricting process, engineering favorable House maps for the fall. After a quasi-independent commission deadlocked — critics argued that it was designed to fail when Cuomo helped create it a decade ago — Democratic state legislators redrew lines that strongly favored their party. Republicans sued in court, claiming that the Democrats’ maps violated an anti-gerrymandering clause in the State Constitution. To the shock of many political insiders, the Republicans won their court battle, and an outside special master was appointed by an upstate Republican judge to quickly draw new lines. House primaries were shoved from June to August.
With the special master prioritizing competitiveness, not incumbency advantage, Democrats found themselves thrown together in some of the same districts. Representative Jerry Nadler was pitted in a nasty primary against his longtime colleague Carolyn Maloney in Manhattan. (Nadler would prevail.) North of the city, Sean Patrick Maloney, the chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a pugilistic centrist, decided to run in a new district spanning Rockland and Westchester that included far more turf that had been represented by Mondaire Jones, a neighboring progressive.
“Sean Patrick Maloney did not even give me a heads up before he went on Twitter to make that announcement,” Jones fumed at the time. “And I think that tells you everything you need to know about Sean Patrick Maloney.” Ritchie Torres, a Bronx congressman, accused Maloney of “thinly veiled racism” against Jones, who is Black. Maloney held his ground, and Jones was forced to move to a new district in New York City, where he would lose in an August primary. Maloney fended off a primary challenge from Alessandra Biaggi, a state senator who ran far to his left. Then, despite a titanic war chest, he fell to Mike Lawler, a Republican state legislator, by less than a point. Jones tweeted one word: “Yikes.”
And now the Democratic civil war rages. Jacobs, who is also the chairman of the Nassau County Democratic Party and is on his second tour leading the statewide organization, has come in for a drubbing. A week after the election, more than 1,000 Democrats signed a letter calling for Jacobs’s ouster. They included state legislators, City Council members, county leaders and members of New York’s 400-odd Democratic State Committee. Most of them belonged to the state’s progressive wing, which has grown only further emboldened since the fall. On Jan. 3, a number of them gathered outside City Hall to reiterate their demands: Jacobs must go.
“The party has to change, and it can’t change until we change the leadership,” George Albro, a co-chair of the New York Progressive Action Network, a left-wing organization formed from the remnants of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 campaign, said in an interview. “From top to bottom, the Democratic Party in New York is a disaster.”
Until Cuomo’s downfall, Jacobs was known as a close ally of the imperious governor. His first tenure as party chairman came under Cuomo’s predecessor, David Paterson, but his second began in 2019, a year after Cuomo won a commanding re-election. That election cycle was notable because Cuomo overcame a primary challenge from the actress Cynthia Nixon, who targeted him from the ascendant left. Though Nixon lost, six insurgent progressives defeated members of the Independent Democratic Conference, a breakaway group of centrist Democrats who had spent the last half decade in an unusual — and incredibly infuriating to progressives — power-sharing arrangement with State Senate Republicans. The I.D.C. had existed with Cuomo’s blessing, joining with Republicans to foil liberal priorities in the State Legislature, like tuition assistance for undocumented immigrants, tougher tenant protections and criminal-justice reforms. For Cuomo, a triangulating centrist determined to avoid having to sign or veto progressive bills while harboring dreams of the national stage, the arrangement worked just fine. (In 2018, I took a break from writing to run for State Senate myself, losing in a Brooklyn Democratic primary.)
Since the state party, historically, has been a creature of the governor or the most powerful Democrat in the state, Jacobs is safe as long as Hochul tolerates him. And Hochul, some Democrats say, owes Jacobs for the work he did behind closed doors to ensure that the new governor had a comfortable primary win after Cuomo resigned and immediately began to plot a comeback. Jacobs’s fear was that a divided field could pave the way for a Cuomo revival, and he worked to rapidly hustle up institutional and financial support for Hochul that helped to deter another challenger, Attorney General Letitia James, from running against her.
In 2021, after a democratic socialist, India Walton, defeated the longtime mayor of Buffalo and a former chairman of the state party, Byron Brown, in a contentious primary, Jacobs refused to endorse Walton. “Let’s take a scenario, very different, where David Duke — You remember him? The grand wizard of the KKK? He moves to New York, he becomes a Democrat and he runs for mayor in the city of Rochester, which has a low primary turnout, and he wins the Democratic line. I have to endorse David Duke? I don’t think so,” Jacobs said in a television interview, before clarifying that Walton “isn’t in the same category, but it just leads you to that question, Is it a must? It’s not a must. It’s something you choose to do.”
Outraged progressives called for Jacobs’s resignation. He refused to go, and Hochul, who is from the Buffalo area and remains close to Brown, did not force Jacobs out. Brown, with tacit approval from the governor and Jacobs, then won the mayoralty with a write-in campaign that November, drawing support from Republicans to crush Walton.
A year later, Jacobs explored ways of undercutting the established vehicle for left-wing organizing in the state, the Working Families Party, a hybrid of party activists and labor unions that had endorsed Jumaane Williams over Hochul in the primary. He cut a check to a more moderate Democrat trying to primary Jamaal Bowman, a Westchester County congressman and a member of the Squad, the prominent group of far-left members of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. After Republicans swept Democrats out of power in the New York suburbs last fall, Jacobs quickly blamed the left. “New York did underperform, but so did California,” Jacobs told the politics publication City & State in November. “What do those two states have in common? Well, governmentally, we’re among the two most progressive states in the country.”
A 67-year-old political lifer, Jacobs has an unrelated day job overseeing a string of popular and lucrative summer camps in upstate New York, in Pennsylvania and on Long Island, where he lives. Democratic business is often run out of a TLC Family of Camps office in Glen Cove, a small town on Nassau County’s Gold Coast. Politicos and journalists who want to reach Jacobs know to email his Camp TLC address; Jacobs cc’d his chief of staff at that summer-camp address to help arrange a telephone interview that lasted an hour, despite Jacobs’s initial hesitancy about going on the record.
“People believe that the state party runs all the campaigns, determines the messaging, does the opposition research for every candidate and, you know, when a candidate anywhere loses, it’s the fault of the state party, and all of that is just not an accurate view of the function of the state party and what we actually do,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs described the party as a “housekeeping organization” and a “coordinating entity” that works among labor unions, campaigns and other interest groups. He cited the maintenance of a voter file that campaigns use to target the electorate as among its most important work, as well as establishing campaign offices at election time. Fund-raising, too, is a big part of the work, and it’s there where Jacobs has been especially useful. A multimillionaire and prolific donor, Jacobs has given more than $1 million to various Democratic candidates and causes over the last two decades. It can be argued that it’s this wealth, in part, that has allowed him to continuously lead the Nassau County party since 2001. Few staunch Democrats are both better wired and more willing to cut checks than Jacobs.
“How I run my businesses and my charitable donations and the rest would indicate, as well as my personal beliefs, would indicate that I’m really, personally, quite progressive, more so than most people would think,” Jacobs said. Rather, he argued, his message is direct: “Slow down. You’re going too fast. What you’re doing is going to lose us votes in the suburbs and rural areas.”
In an unusual move for a party leader, Jacobs last year backed the rivals of several incumbent Democrats. His motivation, he told me, was “the behavior of some of these folks that are speaking on behalf of what I’d refer to as the far left. They practice the politics of personal destruction. They won’t argue the merits of what I say, but they’ll condemn me — and others, by the way, not just me — in really vitriolic terms, personal and the rest. Some of the reasons why I personally gave to some of the primaries — it was just a handful of people — it’s because of what they said about me. Personally.”
Last August, Jacobs donated $2,900 — the maximum allowable amount — to a county legislator trying to unseat Bowman. The congressman won by 38 points anyway.
“I don’t know Jay Jacobs,” Bowman told me. “I’ve never talked to him on the phone. I’ve never met him in my life. Even though I was a newcomer in 2020, I was still duly elected, and I’m a member of the party now. One would’ve thought that the leader of the party would have reached out to have a cup of coffee or have a conversation.”
Should Jacobs resign? “The short answer is yes,” Bowman answered. “But the more, I think, comprehensive nuanced answer or question is, What the hell are we even doing? You know, the whole thing about the corporate agenda, which I think Jay Jacobs and maybe even Governor Hochul and maybe others are missing is, when you talk about younger voters, millennials or Gen Z, they are not aligned with corporate interests over labor and working-class people.”
But Jacobs has plenty of defenders, including county leaders across the state, who believe he’s an upgrade over his somnolent or domineering predecessors and has a realistic view of what it takes to win beyond the liberal confines of New York City. “It’s hard for me to understand this rancor from certain individuals, by the way, who never seem to be satisfied,” says Jeremy Zellner, the chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party. “Only in New York could Jay win every single statewide election and hold the supermajorities in both the Assembly and Senate and be chastised.”
Gregory Meeks, the Queens congressman and chairman of the county organization there, echoes Jacobs’s critique: The progressive and socialist left has cost Democrats in general elections by forcing them to defend positions he believes are alienating. “Extremes cannot be the dominant part of a party, because it isolates everyone else,” Meeks says. “What’s not good for all of us is talking about defunding the police.”
Because Hochul inherited Jacobs, his critics have hoped she would ditch him for someone who might take a more active role in the sort of tasks that party chairs in other states care far more about: recruiting candidates, shaping the party’s message, funding voter-outreach campaigns that begin many months ahead of a general election and even hiring a full-time communications director and research staff. Among some Hochul allies, there has been quiet frustration directed at one of her top advisers, Adam Sullivan, who speaks frequently with Jacobs on Hochul’s behalf. Sullivan holds great sway in Hochul’s world because he managed her successful campaign for Congress more than a decade ago. Despite his low profile and the fact that his consulting firm, ACS Campaign Consulting, is based in Colorado, where he lives, Sullivan was one of a select few aides Hochul thanked in her victory speech. Sullivan himself disputes that there’s any behind-the-scenes friction. “The governor is completely committed to building a strong, robust party,” Sullivan says. “Everyone in her orbit is on the same page.” What isn’t clear is whether that page, and the vision for the future of the state party, includes Jacobs.
Even Jacobs’s detractors acknowledge that dumping him and hunting for a replacement is only the beginning of a political project that will take many years. (Floated successors include Adriano Espaillat, a congressman who has built a strong operation among Dominican Americans in Upper Manhattan; Grace Meng, a Queens congresswoman and Democratic National Committee vice chairwoman who is the first Asian American elected to the House from New York; and Jessica Ramos, a progressive Queens state senator.)
All the ongoing chaos hasn’t escaped the notice of national Democrats. “When I go to D.N.C. meetings,” says a high-ranking New York Democratic official, who requested anonymity to avoid antagonizing colleagues, “there is a sense that New York doesn’t have a state party at all.”
Through the first half of the 20th century, Tammany Hall, with origins as an Irish Catholic society in the late 1700s, was the embodiment of the local Democratic Party, using patronage to secure power and dominating state and city politics alike. Nothing equivalent rose to take its place. “I don’t think anybody in their right mind would compare the state party right now to the machine that existed 50, 60, 70 years ago,” says Paterson, the former governor who later served as state party chairman during Cuomo’s tenure.
New York never had a Harry Reid figure, a singularly powerful Democrat who took an obsessive interest in party building. The two Cuomos, Mario and his son Andrew, governed the state for a combined nearly 23 years, and each treated the party organization as little more than a tool for self-promotion. A liberal icon to the rest of America for his soaring speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Mario Cuomo was assailed at home for barely lifting a finger to aid Democrats desperately trying to retake the State Senate. In 1990, The Times reported that Cuomo was hoarding more than $5 million for his own campaign while spending none for the State Senate Democrats, who were outspent 4 to 1 by Republicans. In 1994, the state party spent almost $2 million to aid Cuomo’s failed re-election effort while offering less than $30,000 apiece for the candidates for attorney general and state comptroller. By the end of the year, the party was moribund and completely broke, running up a million-dollar debt.
The only Democratic governor in modern times to care about the future of the state party and down-ballot candidates was Eliot Spitzer, who won a landslide victory in 2006 and would resign, a little more than a year later, in a prostitution scandal. Spitzer was a proud liberal who wanted to break the Republican hold on the State Senate. The party, too, was trying to modernize in anticipation of Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for president. For a brief period, under the leadership of Denny Farrell, an influential state assemblyman from Manhattan, talented operatives were hired, and Spitzer’s aides tried to implement a strategy for boosting legislative candidates.
“The party itself had really dissipated,” recalls Spitzer, now a real estate developer. His team helped recruit and fund an upstate Democratic candidate who won a pivotal special election for a State Senate seat in early 2008. “It was partly fund-raising, partly finding the right candidates, partly putting the right energy into it.”
The rise of Andrew Cuomo, who had a near-dictatorial hold on political affairs for nearly the entirety of the 2010s, put an end to nascent party-building plans. Cuomo treated Democratic politics as an extension of Cuomo politics, hoovering up resources and kneecapping Democrats he viewed as a threat. He was content to let Republicans keep the State Senate and rarely campaigned for House candidates. Donald Trump’s election, coupled with Sanders’s 2016 bid, would radicalize a new generation of Democrats. Soon, a democratic socialist candidate was winning a State Senate seat, and Working Families Party-supported insurgents were driving out the conservative Democrats who had chosen to align themselves with the Republican Party.
By 2018, Ocasio-Cortez had felled one of the most powerful party bosses in New York, a sign that the left could win its battles against the establishment. “We need Democrats who are not running from their own shadow,” says Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York director of the Working Families Party.
The widening fissures are both ideological and geographical. Manhattan and Brooklyn Democrats saved Hochul in November, but so did Westchester County, which once upon a time was a Republican stronghold. Democrats there gave Hochul a 20-point margin over Zeldin after Biden flew in to campaign for her. Westchester has continued to mirror national trends, as affluent suburbs grow Democratic, but Republicans have remained remarkably resilient on Long Island. Home to lavish estates, as well as growing Orthodox Jewish communities and a rising Asian American electorate newly alienated by Democrats, along with a working- and middle-class vote forever skeptical of big-city liberalism, the eastern suburb backed Zeldin by double digits. In recent years, the Hudson Valley has grown bluer, with city residents scooping up comparatively cheaper real estate during the pandemic, yet Zeldin carried Rockland, Dutchess, Putnam and Orange Counties, where Trump-era enthusiasm for Democrats gave way to backlash over rising crime south of the former Tappan Zee Bridge (renamed for Mario Cuomo by his son).
Jacobs can credibly argue that the progressivism or outright socialism that wins in Brooklyn or Queens can’t be easily sold in Nassau County. But Bowman and his cohort can ask why he neglects the younger voters moving left — or, for that matter, why he fails to build out an organization that can be credibly called a political party, the kind that is more than one man and a few aides conducting political business from a summer-camp office. In a 10-page report issued in January, Jacobs pinned Democratic losses on historically high Republican turnout, a contention backed by data. But shouldn’t a state party’s task be, in part, to turn out its own voters? Had enough Democrats been motivated to vote, George Santos would never have been sworn in as a congressman.
“What we saw is a party that did not know what role they should play,” Nnaemeka says, “and therefore played no role.”
Ross Barkan writes frequently on New York and national politics. He is the author of two novels and a nonfiction account of Covid’s impact on New York City. This is his first article for the magazine.

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